Mouse Editing

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <28684 at ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> jas at ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Jim Shankland) writes:
>That's tantalizing.  Would you be willing to elaborate a little on what
>you think makes a good graphical interface, what's a good example and why,

Unfortunately that would take too long to cover in sufficient detail
to help anyone.  The point is to hunt around and study a wide variety
of interfaces, analyzing them for yourself.  Some of the best examples
are not recent ones.

>and what's wrong with the IBM PC keyboard and Macintosh icons?

Now, that one is easy to answer:  They suck rocks.

The way to compare keyboards is to use a large number of them for a
substantial amount of time each and see how you like them.  I find
the ones that have pleased me the most have all been considerably
smaller than the ones found on typical workstations, and the worst
have almost all been those that followed "ergonomic standards".  Hmm..
Quite a large number of people I've talked to share my preferences,
by the way; it's not just personal idiosyncracy.

The Macintosh interface is PERHAPS good for couch potatoes, but if
one needs to do anything really interesting it always seems to turn
out that it hasn't been anticipated by the providers of the Mac
programs (which seldom cooperate with each other in a convenient
way), and one is totally out of luck at that point.  That approach
is almost totally opposite the one successfully taken by the
designers of UNIX.  It is possible to obtain a toolkit-oriented
environment on a Mac, but only by escaping from the mode that Apple
intended Mac owners to use.

As an example of the ridiculosity of the Mac design, the mouse was
given only one button to keep it simple enough for morons -- can't
push the wrong button, we were told.  Then applications resorted to
double- and triple-clicking in order to multiplex the uses of the
single button.

Pull-down menus are also a nuisance in many cases where pop-up menus
would have been ideal.  To fix that (last I looked) one has to design
his own menu subroutines.

Apple has been pushing the Mac interface for their Apple IIGS also;
the most highly regarded games and applications for the IIGS seem to
ignore Apple guidelines and provide whatever interface best fits
their needs.  Hmm..

Basically my complaints against the Mac come down to Apple pushing
a particular style of interaction for universal use when it is far
from optimal for many common applications.  I find it really
humorous how hard they fight to protect the "look and feel" of that
environment, as though anyone in his right mind would steal it (as
Apple basically did in the first place).  What's even funnier (in a
dark-humor sense) is that people ARE trying to steal it!