ewhac@well.UUCP (05/28/87)
[ Looking for suggestions for the middle button... ]
I picked up Perfect Sound today, and went home with thoughts of
digitizing all sorts of neat sounds I have.
It didn't work out that way. I plugged the Perfect Sound digitizer
on the back of my Amiga, and found that the RCA plugs missed my ASDG rack by
about 1/8 of an inch. Clearly not enough room for the sound cables.
Neither the cage nor the digitizer could be convinced to give a little extra
room. So I couldn't do all those things I wanted.
Granted, I could buy an extension cable, and plug the Amiga in one
end, and Perfect Sound into the other.
Just thought I'd warn all you ASDG owners about this in case you're
considering Perfect Sound: There's an extension cable in your future.
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And Now For Something Completely Different.
My Amiga is misbehaving is a most unusual and previously unwitnessed
manner. When I start up WorkBench, and attempt to perform an operation with
an icon (dragging or double clicking), the machine may or may not perform it
right away.
If I drag an icon (on a freshly started WorkBench), the icon will
track the mouse for a while, then stick. The mouse still moves. After an
indeterminate time, the icon will jump to the place where let the selection
button up (i.e. the place where I dragged it). If I double-click on an
icon, the window/application may or may not open immediately. If it doesn't
open immediately, I have to keep clicking to "wake the machine up."
During all this time, the mouse is still active, and drives still
click if I take the disks out. If, during the limbo period, I click the
mouse button that will perform some graphic operation (e.g. right button to
render a menu, left button to activate/inactivate a window, etc), or in any
way try to get the WorkBench to perform another operation while I'm waiting
for the icon to move/activate, the mouse locks up, and it's reboot time.
I'm pretty certain that one of my 8520's is bad. It used to be that
I couldn't turn on the printer without locking out the keyboard. On
someone's advice, I swapped the 8520's, and things seemed to be normal
again. However, I always wondered if I wasn't trading one kind of strange
behavior for another. Could this be the consequence?
Help! I don't trust my Amiga to function reliably anymore, and
hesitate to do any real work on it (as though what I've been doing was
real to begin with :-) ). Is it tech bench time for my friend?
Thanks in advance.
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Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape ihnp4!ptsfa -\
\_ -_ Recumbent Bikes: The _O_n_l_y dual ---> !{well,unicom}!ewhac
O----^o way to annoy Scott Turner :-). hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack")
"Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctorhatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (05/29/87)
In article <3162@well.UUCP> ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Eels Bwhak' Schwab) writes: > [ Looking for suggestions for the middle button... ] My current favorite is to translate simultaneous RIGHT/LEFT mouse clicks into a MIDDLE (IECODE_MBUTTON) click. I've been interested in using both clicks to widen the mouse input bandwidth, and the MIDDLE message is already supported by AmigaKitty (I thought that CATS folks would like that better than "AmigaDog" :-). The only software that I've seen so far that uses simultaneous right/left clicks is Brataccas. Although it is rather awkward to use, with a steep learning curve and sluggish/touchy reactivity, it is still amazing how many game actions are controlled sheerly by the mouse. It only took me a little while to learn the simultaneous clicks, the rest of the learning curve was adapting to the game's brain-damaged timing sensitivities. This leaves me with the theory that they had a very good idea, and implemented it badly. Consider the possibilities: 1) RIGHT click 2) RIGHT double-click 3) LEFT click 4) LEFT double-click 5) MIDDLE click (simultaneous right & left click) 6) MIDDLE double-click Right now only half the possibilities are commonly used (1-3). While that is desirable for many applications where a simple interface is very important, there are many others that could benefit from higher mouse bandwidth. I don't give a fig about idealism about how many buttons a mouse *should* have, by the way...I am simply talking about making use of what we already have, rather than ignoring the possibilities. > If I drag an icon (on a freshly started WorkBench), the icon will >track the mouse for a while, then stick. The mouse still moves... I often have this problem when I haven't washed my screen in a long time; the icons tend to get gummed up with grime and stick to the screen. A little Windex, and maybe some spray Teflon applied to the underside of the icon, usually fixes it right up. :-) But seriously, hope your poor Amy feels better soon! Doug Merritt ucbvax!ingres!hatcher
cmcmanis@pepper.UUCP (05/29/87)
In article <8705290547.AA04010@ingres.Berkeley.EDU> (Doug Merritt) writes: > >My current favorite is to translate simultaneous RIGHT/LEFT mouse clicks >into a MIDDLE (IECODE_MBUTTON) click. I've been interested in using both >clicks to widen the mouse input bandwidth, and the MIDDLE message is already >supported by AmigaDOS... > Doug Merritt ucbvax!ingres!hatcher Back when the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was inventing all this neat stuff that Apple was going to 'borrow' they did a lot of research on pointing devices. The results of that research is detailed in several papers however the stuff that made it to the Xerox product line is most interesting. They determined that a two button mouse was optimal with its three states 'left', 'right', and 'chord'. On the 8010 (sometimes referred to as the Dandelion) pressing both buttons would pop up a menu. The left and right buttons were usually used for making and 'extending' a selection on the screen. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.