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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)

#121

Post by AlbertCory »

bee_rider wrote: post #117
ilaksh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mark-up is something that ordinary users will never understand. "Good enough" is what they want. Printing it to check that it came out right is just fine with them. It is simply not worth it for the software to try to make everything perfect.

Case in point: my book was edited in Vellum, and it can generate PDF and EPUB. The PDF had a widow (one line at the top of the last page of the chapter), and Vellum just omitted that one-line page. To the reader it seemed like a typo (which it was, in a sense).

I "fixed" it by removing a few words up above it, so everything fit on the last full page. But it was only that I knew about widow/orphan control that I could figure that out. Just imagine how much trouble it would be to make things perfectly WYSIWYG on every printer and every type of document.

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

#122

Post by AlbertCory »

sleepybrett wrote: post #72
detourdog wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mother of all demos had a chorded keyboard, a mouse,a regular keyboard, and video conferencing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

I love that piano like chorded keyboard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard#/media/File:X... ) from the alto. I think it's still and interesting UI concept but I think it should/could be adapted to a foot pedal design, chords would be constrained to 2 inputs though unless maybe two of the inuputs were directly side by side then you could expand to three. Organists know what's up ;)

There was one guy at Xerox (Smokey Wallace, RIP) who loved the keyset and could type like a mad man on it.

Everyone else just put it away and ignored it, until MazeWar came along.

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

#123

Post by strangemonad »

gymbeaux wrote: post #84
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…

My main gripe with Amazon is how slow it is. It takes me like 30 seconds to change my shipping address and payment method before placing an order. I always assume it’s because they’re using Glacier on AWS to drive that functionality.

I literally chortled reading that. Thank you for making my day

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

#124

Post by detourdog »

sleepybrett wrote: post #72
detourdog wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mother of all demos had a chorded keyboard, a mouse,a regular keyboard, and video conferencing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

I love that piano like chorded keyboard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard#/media/File:X... ) from the alto. I think it's still and interesting UI concept but I think it should/could be adapted to a foot pedal design, chords would be constrained to 2 inputs though unless maybe two of the inuputs were directly side by side then you could expand to three. Organists know what's up ;)

I thought about it a lot and realize the design was swallowed by control key shift combinations.

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

#126

Post by jecel »

The comments show a lot of confusion about what Tesler invented. Other industries did indeed use cut/copy/paste and older editors had ways to do these functions. But the cursor in these editors normally indicated a character. Larry figured out that if instead the cursor indicated the space between characters and he sometimes had a second such cursor to indicate all characters between them then he could do what previous editors needed various commands with a single operation: replace the selection with what has just been typed and move the cursor to right after that. "paste" would the just the equivalent of retyping a previous selection that had been either "cut" or "copied".

If the two cursors were at the same spot (just a blinking vertical bar) then you are inserting text as you type it. If there was some selected text then you are replacing it and then inserting anything more you type. And so on.

Both at Xerox Parc and at Apple he actually tested his ideas on potential users and often found he guessed wrong about what would work and what wouldn't. He would then try something else.

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

#127

Post by layer8 »

bee_rider wrote: post #119
layer8 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We do have all sorts of inconsistent “context menus” now on mobile. Sometimes after you select something, sometimes as items under the share button, sometime when you actually long press, sometimes a menu appears when you tap an item, sometimes as action items that appear when you slide an item to a side. And even for a single of those variations, different variants with different looks exist, etc. A uniform way to “show me all actions I can perform on this item” would be greatly beneficial.

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

#128

Post by olyjohn »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #120
aidenn0 wrote: post #86

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. 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?

Or the content was correct at one point, but 3 weeks later the button was moved in some random update.

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

#129

Post by rqtwteye »

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…

Yeah. Tooltips are a big loss. They would be so easy to implement but nobody seems to care anymore.

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

#130

Post by ropejumper »

chuckadams wrote: post #96
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)

> Which makes it impossible to replace a selection by pasting.

In principle this is false with a Plan9-like model of mouse chording. Holding left click over a selection and tapping middle click is a reasonable solution.

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