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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)

#131

Post by marssaxman »

bluGill wrote: post #59
layer8 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, people also had to be taught how to point with a mouse. The double-click also wasn't essential, you could perform all actions using the one-click menus. The double-click was introduced as a shortcut. From the Apple Lisa Owner's Guide: 8 Shortcuts The File/Print menu contains all of the commands you need for creating, opening, closing, and storing your documents. Because you use these commands so frequentl…

Pointing with the mouse is discoverable though. If you start moving it - which odds are you will do sometime (even by accident) you will see the pointer moving and eventually figure it out. You are very unlikely to discover the double click by accident.

The original Macintosh came with interactive tutorial software demonstrating the use of the mouse and giving you practice manipulating it. The double-click was part of this instruction.

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

#132

Post by degauss »

chongli wrote: post #50
II2II wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the ideal number of mouse buttons, but agree that it is more than one. The odd thing is it's appearance in the Macintosh: a computer where the user was supposed to orient most of their actions around the mouse. That said, I'm pretty sure the double click came about because certain operations were costly. There is no particular reason why would couldn't use a single click to launch and application or…

I used a (OS 7/8/9) Mac for years with a one button mouse. I was very productive with it! I remember seeing Windows 95 with its right-click context menus but I wasn’t very interested at the time. I was happy using keyboard shortcuts and the like. I believe Steve Jobs was pretty adamant about keeping the one button mouse on the Mac for years and it was absolutely the right call. The Mac was way easier to use back then…

"... keyboard shortcuts ..." is a common response to defend Mac design choices.

The single shared menu is also something that made sense on the original 9" 512x384 Mac screen to save but it really is nonsensical in the days of 32" 6k displays, so much mousing to get up to that menu but of course "... keyboard shortcuts ..." comes the refrain.

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

#133

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

zzo38computer wrote: post #115
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?

> 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 i…

while writing documentation in Markdown, I almost always have the preview open in split-screen in vscode, not because I need it, but mostly to make sure that the other people reading my work have a good experience.

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

#134

Post by FjordWarden »

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)

But for those cases you just use cmd+v or whatever

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

#135

Post by shiroiushi »

kimixa wrote: post #94
hulitu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 en…

>Or using a mac - ...(it seems to encourage wasting screen space and peer at a tiny window in the middle of a massive screen....)

Isn't this normal on Windows too? The few times I have to use it, it seems I'm always doing something where some sub-window will pop up that I need to use or read, but the stupid thing is comically small, but needs to be scrolled (because there's too much content inside it for its size), but I'm forbidden from expanding the window size the way you can with normal windows.

This never happens to me in KDE: if a window is too small by default (which sometimes happens), I can always expand it.

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

#136

Post by pests »

kimixa wrote: post #94
hulitu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 en…

I don't think I've ever clicked into a category on Amazon. I wouldn't need to know it's under Mac accessories, id just use the search bar and type in thunderbolt. In what world would clicking through a hierarchical UI be faster or easier than a search?

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

#137

Post by escapecharacter »

airstrike wrote: post #23
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.

Indeed! I'm writing an app that resizes and moves shapes on a canvas (among other things) and I'm amazed at how many trivial little things I had to write that everyone including me would take for granted, including copying and pasting, drawing the little handles to resize the shape, changing the cursor based on what's below it (the handles or the shapes), drawing a translucent version of the shape when it's being mov…

just wait until you get to the undo/redo stack! That's one of my favourite parts of a UI to program.

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

#138

Post by mark-r »

escapecharacter wrote: post #137
airstrike wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! I'm writing an app that resizes and moves shapes on a canvas (among other things) and I'm amazed at how many trivial little things I had to write that everyone including me would take for granted, including copying and pasting, drawing the little handles to resize the shape, changing the cursor based on what's below it (the handles or the shapes), drawing a translucent version of the shape when it's being mov…

just wait until you get to the undo/redo stack! That's one of my favourite parts of a UI to program.

My experience is that undo/redo isn't something you tack on at the end of the project, it has to be baked into the infrastructure. Every action you take has to be delegated to an object that has all the information it needs to both do the action and undo it. Then you can just keep a stack of those objects and call them as necessary.

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

#139

Post by mark-r »

rqtwteye wrote: post #129
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…

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

Absolutely, tooltips were the best. But how do you do tooltips on a touch interface?

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

#140

Post by riquisimo »

WYSIWYG is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get" that refers to software which allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation.

... For anyone else who didn't want to look it up.

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