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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)

#111

Post by AlbertCory »

bluGill wrote: post #28
rqtwteye wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a lot of obvious stuff invented in the future that we aren't thinking about now.

My dad grew up on a farm, and latter regretted not inventing the large round baler that most farmers use - he already knew about small round bales, so the only thing missing was make them larger and then haul them on a tractor instead of lifting by hand as you did the small bales. Despite saying the above for years it never occurred to him to invent the large square baler which the same concept (haul with a tractor),…

> Everything was known and so obvious in hindsight.

that's why "non-obvious" is so contentious in patent examinations. How do you KNOW it was obvious at the time?

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

#112

Post by norir »

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”!!!

The nice thing about a mantra like no modes is that you're right 9/10 times. But I won't go back to non-modal text editing.

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

#113

Post by norir »

ilaksh wrote: post #100
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 enoug…

Vim modes allow you to keep your hands on the home row most of the time and make a mouse unnecessary for editing. That keeps my hands, wrists and forearms healthy and for that I am grateful. Of course a great programmer is not defined by their tools. What matters is what you create, not how you create it.

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

#114

Post by qball »

layer8 wrote: post #77
bee_rider wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut and paste is a sort of obvious miss, but in general, I think Smartphones benefitted from not taking for granted the features of PDAs. There was always something deeply niche about the things.

There are more misses. For example I found it surprising that they didn’t include a universal “context menu” equivalent (long press would have been obvious) and a universal menu bar equivalent (like Palm OS did). Stuff like this is why we still have an awfully complex and inconsistent UI landscape on mobile.

>and a universal menu bar equivalent

webOS, the poster child for simple and consistent UI, did all of this.

Much like the Amiga, this OS is always imitated, never copied, even though Android should have thrown out everything after Honeycomb to adopt what it brought to the table.

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

#115

Post by zzo38computer »

ilaksh wrote: post #99
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?

> where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?

That is why print preview is a good idea (which is possible with most modern computers; this can be done independently of WYSIWYG editing). For example, if you write a TeX file and then make the DVI file and use xdvi or another previewer to display it on the computer before you print it on paper.

Reveal Codes would be another possibility, perhaps in combination with a "partial WYSIWYG" editor which does not display reflowing etc in the editor and only in the preview; if you use Reveal Codes then formatting codes are displayed (e.g. bold, italics, etc), but you can also display the bold, italics, etc directly during editing. This can be a in between way, which gives you some of the benefits of WYSIWYG and some of the benefits of non-WYSIWYG.

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

#116

Post by kps »

layer8 wrote: post #47
kps wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative, as used e.g. by the Xerox Star, was select-and-copy/move. The advantage over cut-and-paste is that you don't have invisible fragile state. However, the Star implementation had copy and move modes (select source, COPY, mouse to destination, CLICK) and Tesler hated modes. I don't know why Star didn't use the modeless version (select source, mouse to destination, COPY).

If you want to replace by pasting, you'd lose the first selection by selecting what you want to have replaced. Which means you'd need different selection modes depending on whether you are selecting the source or the target of the copy/move. Furthermore, mainting the original (source) selection while preparing the insertion point (target) of the copy/move is also fraught with some fragility.

> If you want to replace by pasting, you'd lose the first selection by selecting what you want to have replaced.

Yes, that's the tradeoff; you'd have to delete that separately. This would be quite close the X11 primary selection and middle-click paste. I think that works reasonably well on its own, but trying to provide both models as X11 does is a mess.

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

#117

Post by bee_rider »

ilaksh wrote: post #99
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?

Ideally people would write mark-up in text editors. If you want to be very nice, I guess it would be OK to have drag-and-drop WYSWYG environments that spit out the markup code, but there should be a very high priority on making sure the code produced is human-readable.

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

#118

Post by bee_rider »

rqtwteye wrote: post #82
bee_rider wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut and paste is a sort of obvious miss, but in general, I think Smartphones benefitted from not taking for granted the features of PDAs. There was always something deeply niche about the things.

I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I think it's a huge regression. I can't wait until somebody dusts off the design principles of Windows 95/2000 or Mac System 7 and will sell this as the new UX paradigm.

Oh yeah, phone UI infecting desktop design is a real shame as well. These are just different types of devices.

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

#119

Post by bee_rider »

layer8 wrote: post #77
bee_rider wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cut and paste is a sort of obvious miss, but in general, I think Smartphones benefitted from not taking for granted the features of PDAs. There was always something deeply niche about the things.

There are more misses. For example I found it surprising that they didn’t include a universal “context menu” equivalent (long press would have been obvious) and a universal menu bar equivalent (like Palm OS did). Stuff like this is why we still have an awfully complex and inconsistent UI landscape on mobile.

I think I lightly disagree. Phones are just not good for complex use-cases. I don’t want a context menu on my phone, the depth of interactions in a browser for example should be… slide the webpage this way, slide it that way, poke a link (or, I guess, to be leave room for what I’m doing now, poke a text box to write in it). Dumbing down the UI was a good idea.

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

#120

Post by PhasmaFelis »

aidenn0 wrote: post #86
rqtwteye wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I think it's a huge regression. I can't wait until somebody dusts off the design principles of Windows 95/2000 or Mac System 7 and will sell this as the new UX paradigm.

> I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I think it's a huge regression. Indeed. Remember when every icon had a tooltip that told you what it would do? Remember when it shipped with a book that also told you what each thing did? I recently…

Who needs to waste time with manuals when you can just Google what you want to do and watch a teenager deliver a three-minute monologue with 15 seconds of actual (but incorrect) content?
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