barnett@grymoire.steinmetz (Bruce Barnett) (03/05/88)
User interfaces tend to start religious wars. Especially when we have people on the net whom have only used one interface proficiently. I am not saying that what you do is WRONG, but merely what *I* like. It is very hard to visualize a sophisicated user interface from these articles. So bear with me. In article <346@esquire.UUCP> sbb@esquire.UUCP (Stephen B. Baumgarten) writes: |I don't know. Having used 1, 2, and 3 buttons, I find I like 1 button |most of all First of all - did you have a DECENT 3-button window system, and did you learn how to use it effectively? Saying a one-button system is better that all three button systems is silly, because a flexible window system can allow you to emulate a one-button system. And if you want to take a pair of pliers to your three button mouse to perform a button-ectomy - fine! :-) But three button systems, with a flexible window system, have - to me - several advantages. For instance - I like the ability to move, resize, hide, expose, open or close a window by grabbing the window anywhere along the edge and hitting the proper combination of keys and buttons. Don't some window systems do a window resize by grabbing a special (fixed) part of the frame? And moving a window is another spot on the frame? And of course that part of the frame must be exposed. Maybe you like this. Hokay. But I would be frustrated because if I want to move and resize a window, I can't do both using any corner that's exposed. I have to expose the proper spot move the mouse to that corner ( say lower right). perform the resize ( assume the upper left corner stays fixed). move the mouse to another corner perform the move put the window back to the proper top-to-bottom position.. Given a flexible window system what I would like to do to make the same window larger - but leave the (say) lower right corner fixed, is to : Move mouse to upper left corner and press the proper buttons. move the mouse to the proper position and let go of the buttons. I would think that pull-down menus would also slow me down. Why move the mouse up to the top when all of my choices could be known by leaving the mouse in the same spot and pressing the button that gives you the pop-up menus? And I would bind the other buttons on the mouse to act as accelerators, so I wouldn't have to use the pop-up menus except for rare occassions. |On the other hand, what do multi-button, popup menu people think about |the new tear-off menus in Hypercard (I like them)? What are tear-off menus? -- Bruce G. Barnett <barnett@ge-crd.ARPA> <barnett@steinmetz.UUCP>
ashore@hpsadla.HP (Alex Shore) (03/09/88)
In response to your comment in favor of pop-up menus, I use a pop-up menu system on a HP electronic design system. Perhaps it is the fault of the system, but if you pop-up a menu, you might as well have gone to the top of the screen. This is because the menu picks will run you off the screen if you start in the lower third or right fifth of the screen. The system isn't smart enough to scroll the menus up or to the left to allow you to access the selections that are off screen. I would rather have had a pull-down, tied-to-the-top menu system rather than have to start over when I see the pick I want is off- screen. (In this case, the particularly troublesome menu is dynamic, hence you don't know from one session to the next where items are going to be, so you can't learn it.) - Alex Shore HP Signal Analysis Division Rohnert Park, CA Note: These comments are not made as a company representative.
dwb@Apple.COM (David W. Berry) (03/12/88)
In article <2290017@hpsadla.HP> ashore@hpsadla.HP (Alex Shore) writes: >I would rather have had a pull-down, tied-to-the-top menu system >rather than have to start over when I see the pick I want is off- >screen. (In this case, the particularly troublesome menu is >dynamic, hence you don't know from one session to the next where >items are going to be, so you can't learn it.) Well, this is just plain bad design to start with. All three of X (I presume, I haven't seen the problem or played with X much) SunView (the same goes) and NeWS will pop menus up "near" the cursor but will move them so that they fit on the screen. Although that brings up one more advantage of pull-down menus, presuming they're short enough to fit on a single screen, you can predict where things are going to be quite accurately. With pop-up menus it's much harder because you have to guess where the origin will be. David W. Berry dwb@well.uucp dwb@Delphi dwb@apple.com 973-5168@408.MaBell Disclaimer: Apple doesn't even know I have an opinion and certainly wouldn't want if they did.
mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (03/24/88)
I use Sun (Sunview) and Mac both at my desk, and often simultaneously. I intensely dislike the 3-button mouse, and frequently hit the wrong button with sometimes nasty results. (I guess the causality should be the other way round :-)). The most non-intuitive thing to me is the confusion I have between the right button, which gives the menu, and the right (oh, no, it's the middle, isn't it) button that extends a text selection. If I have a right and left end to the text, normal control-display relationship considerations tell me that the right and left buttons should define it. Even after more than a year of using the Sun every day, I still make this error sometimes. And I have no real model of a generic thing the three buttons each do. With the Mac, I can generalize--one click to select, two to do something. Option-click to specialize, command-click to generalize (more or less). There are many things wrong with the Mac interface, from a theoretical point of view, but it is much better than anything else around. As for the distance of mouse movement, I have the non-linearity controls set for both Sun and Mac so that I keep my wrist on the desk, and rarely move the mouse more than an inch or two, no matter how far I want the cursor to move on the screen. No problem with the menu bar, except that it is sometimes too short to contain what it should. -- Martin Taylor ...uunet!dciem!mmt mmt@zorac.arpa Talk, n. To commit an indiscretion without temptation, from an impulse without purpose. (Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914?, The Devil's Dictionary)