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Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

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Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#91

Post by alexpotato »

mark-r wrote: post #6

It amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually point to the person that did it.

Almost everything you see or use around you was invented at some point.

e.g. the following things were all invented:

- that a human dwelling has space between adjacent dwellings and/or eventually streets (straight streets came even later)

- punctuation and spaces between words (looking at you Ancient Greek)

- what word to use when answering the phone ("ahoy hoy" was one proposed option)

It really is true what Steve Jobs said (apropos given Larry Tesler worked at Apple):

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.|

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#92

Post by outlore »

“no modes”, i’ve always considered that to be a bit of a mantra worth following. but now i seem to be breaking that rule while learning Vim (normal mode, insert mode, and so on).

yesterday i was test driving a car with eco mode, sport mode..the Larry in me was yelling “no modes”!!!

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#93

Post by zzo38computer »

bee_rider wrote: post #73

I wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having WYSIWYG in the article. Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability…

I agree, WYSIWYG is not a good idea, and a one button mouse is not a good idea.

You can have print preview if you want to preview the page layout. This is also faster and more efficient than reflowing the text as it is being typed, anyways.

(I don't know why the spelling is different)

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#94

Post by kimixa »

hulitu wrote: post #78
themacguffinman wrote: post #52

His Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was described less amicably: > Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every god…

> surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company. surprisingly bad ? Ever saw a Microsoft product ? A Google product ? I already set my preferencies. I don't want to set them a hundred times. No, i don't want a 1 px border, no title bar and no scrollbar.

Or an apple product? :P

Good luck trying to find a thunderbolt cable unless you already know they categorize it as a "Mac Accessory - Charging Essentials". Lots of big carousels showing a sum total of 3 items at a time, and you better know the what a thunderbolt cable looks like, and don't mistake it for "merely" a usb3 charging cable. Or the 0.5m vs 1m.

Or using a mac - window management issues aside (it seems to encourage wasting screen space and peer at a tiny window in the middle of a massive screen....) - the "settings" app is a joke. A huge list of sections on the left, grouped seemingly arbitrarily, with a "Search" that only really works is you already know the exact wording of the option you're looking for. But hey, it's got fancy icons, so I guess that's nice.

This is all a bit tongue in cheek - using a mac to write this. All UX is "bad" in different ways IMHO. "Objectively best" UX is a pipe dream.

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#95

Post by IncreasePosts »

themacguffinman wrote: post #52

His Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was described less amicably: > Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every god…

I'm an absolute nobody compared to Tesler, but I remember a hack week we did at Amazon probably in 2009 or so - the SVP (reporting directly to Jeff) was giving a little intro speech to what they hoped to see out of the hack week, and he ended with an admonition: "Whatever you do, DO. NOT. ATTEMPT. TO. REDESIGN. THE. SITE. UI.", and then later was told by him that Jeff will literally rip your head off if he caught wind of it.

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#96

Post by chuckadams »

FjordWarden wrote: post #85

I've always missed is this X.org behaviour on OSX where you copy just by selecting text and past text by pressing the middle mouse button.

Which makes it impossible to replace a selection by pasting. Also, except for terminals, it typically pastes at the pointer location, so you need precise aim (emacs thankfully lets you customize this, but UI toolkit widgets usually don’t)

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#98

Post by dang »

aaron695 wrote: post #12

(2020) and a shit article. Better - https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men He (helped) coin WYSIWYG and browser and user friendly all in the 70's. BBC wrongly somewhat implies Cut/Paste was 80s, in the post computing invention era.

Ok, we changed to that article from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695. Thanks!

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#99

Post by ilaksh »

bee_rider wrote: post #73

I wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having WYSIWYG in the article. Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability…

Fascinating.. you are aware of the context of how WYSIWYG came about?

So presumably you don't want to return to that state, where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?

Can you explain a little bit further what your ideal paradigm is?

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#100

Post by ilaksh »

outlore wrote: post #92

“no modes”, i’ve always considered that to be a bit of a mantra worth following. but now i seem to be breaking that rule while learning Vim (normal mode, insert mode, and so on). yesterday i was test driving a car with eco mode, sport mode..the Larry in me was yelling “no modes”!!!

I also use vim (or neovim). But that doesn't mean that I believe in modes or that neovim/vim is a good editor.

I think there is some kind of psychological thing driving this. Like subconsciously, I came to the conclusion many years ago that "real programmers" use vim or Emacs, and then consciously decided that the default keybindings for Emacs were slightly worse.

So for decades I have been trying to learn just enough vim to get by. But practically every day I miss my PC keys for things like selecting text.

At least three times I have got my keybindings the way I wanted and then after a new install or something just decided to deal with the outdated way that vim does it.

You have to realize the context that vim was invented. There was no WYSIWYG. People were used to things like 'ed' where everything was a command. Just being able to stay in a mode and move around freely on the screen was a big deal. The terminal hardware didn't even have a way to hold a key combination.

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