[comp.sys.mac.misc] Button Wars

nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) (07/19/90)

In article <1990Jul18.195357.18074@uswmrg2.UUCP>, steve@uswmrg2 (Steve Martin) writes:
>I have used HP's
>two button mouse, Sun's three button mouse and Apple's one button
>mouse.  The only time that I thought that the one button mouse was
>less efficient was after several bottles of beer.

The Mac user interface guidelines define things like shift-click and
command-click. Having discrete buttons for these might have been nice.
The big problem with X-windows and all the rest is not the fact that
there's more than one button, but that fact that there's no convention
for what the buttons do - every application uses them for something
different. This is before we start considering ALT, shift, control,
meta-cokebottle, ...

Put it this way: could you see yourself using a Mac with a three
button mouse: one big button, and two smaller ones labelled "shift"
and "command"?

Just a thought...

>Steve Martin

		Nick.
--
Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk    <Atlantic Ocean>!mcsun!ukc!lfcs!nick
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