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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)

#141

Post by nine_k »

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…

But, sorry for stating the obvious, the point of the Amazon web site is not to be convenient, or beautiful, or understandable. Its purpose is to sell you stuff, more stuff, more often. I bet some non-zero amount of confusion is increasing sales. It's much like supermarkets that put simple repeat-purchase items like milk at the other end of the store, to make customers walk and notice other items.

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

#142

Post by wodenokoto »

bluGill wrote: post #29

One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful. You sometimes need to select something and sometimes you need to launch it. Or you need to select in several different ways. Because of this miss-invention they had to invent the double-click and all the complexity of timing (try making double click for someone old an nearing senile and someone young and fast with the same ti…

> One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful.

I think the way the article lays out the invention shows that it was a good idea at the time. Apple sticking to a single button mouse was a bad idea. But it wasn't like Tesler saw three buttons and said "If I remove two, I'm a genius".

I don't know what you do with your third button, but I have never used it. It's not a core interaction in any interface I've seen. On my windows machine it does all sorts of unexpected things from starting a scroll mode, dragging items (very rarely) to closing tabs, to nothing on most things. It's not useful. Now the back and forth buttons are super handy, but I wouldn't say they are essential to a mouse.

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

#143

Post by kalleboo »

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…

The only thing more frustrating than sizing and aligning a figure in MS Word is sizing and aligning a figure in LaTeX.

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

#144

Post by kalleboo »

layer8 wrote: post #44
bloopernova wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back before 2009, early iPhones didn't have cut/copy and paste. Folks had to figure out a good scheme that worked with touch screens.

Which I found flabbergasting at the time, because it had been a standard feature on PDAs ten years prior. I only bought an iPhone once it gained cut&paste support.

Even feature phones had copy/paste!

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

#145

Post by southernplaces7 »

nine_k wrote: post #141
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…

But, sorry for stating the obvious, the point of the Amazon web site is not to be convenient, or beautiful, or understandable. Its purpose is to sell you stuff, more stuff, more often. I bet some non-zero amount of confusion is increasing sales. It's much like supermarkets that put simple repeat-purchase items like milk at the other end of the store, to make customers walk and notice other items.

I would argue that Amazon's UI could garner more sales and reconstruct more of its slowly fading popularity if it simply stopped being such a dumpster fire of bad design, confusion, chaos, searches that barely work and of course, rampant links to attempts at sales fraud.

The confusion, coupled with Amazon's reputation inertia, does probably drive some bulk sales metrics, but it's a poison pill of scrounging what you can from existing users while potential new ones trickle away to sites that are simply better, easier to navigate and just less likely to sell you falsely packaged shit.

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

#146

Post by nine_k »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #145
nine_k wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, sorry for stating the obvious, the point of the Amazon web site is not to be convenient, or beautiful, or understandable. Its purpose is to sell you stuff, more stuff, more often. I bet some non-zero amount of confusion is increasing sales. It's much like supermarkets that put simple repeat-purchase items like milk at the other end of the store, to make customers walk and notice other items.

I would argue that Amazon's UI could garner more sales and reconstruct more of its slowly fading popularity if it simply stopped being such a dumpster fire of bad design, confusion, chaos, searches that barely work and of course, rampant links to attempts at sales fraud. The confusion, coupled with Amazon's reputation inertia, does probably drive some bulk sales metrics, but it's a poison pill of scrounging what you…

What are these sites that are simply better?

Also, Amazon's retail empire is very much buttressed by its speedy delivery service, and thus warehouses and the truck fleet. A much better web site sometimes cannot compete with next-day delivery. (And sometimes can, of course!)

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

#147

Post by kalleboo »

ralferoo wrote: post #16
amszmidt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limited, and also wrong -- Tesler didn't invent any of those. They existed already by 1973 (supposed date of these inventions at Xerox PARC); e.g. TECO from MIT and E from Yale had functionality for cutting/pasting, replacing strings, etc.

Also, I don't think it particularly counts as an invention as it was heavily used in publishing well before the computer era, and was just shifting to a computing context and re-using the same metaphor. For a long time, text was printed in sections, physically cut up and pasted to a board, and when the entire page was assembled it was photographed to create a negative that was used to print the newspaper. Just to be…

> the once-cut data becomes hidden state

It's not completely hidden - you can view it using "Show Clipboard"

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

#148

Post by dredmorbius »

creeble wrote: post #81

My favorite Larry Tesler contribution is Tesler’s Law or the Law of Conservation of Complexity[1]. It answers the question “why does this have to be so complicated?”, which I have found to be useful in countless numbers of UI discussions. “We need it to do this, that, and this other thing, but in an uncomplicated way.” Well, it can’t be less complicated than any one of those things then. https://medium.com/kubo/tesle…

What's the relationship with Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_r...>

There's also Larry Wall's "Waterbed Theory", effectively that complexity cannot be squashed down: it will out. Though I suspect this post-dates Tesler.

https://nick.groenen.me/people/larry-wall/>

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

#149

Post by n4r9 »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #145
nine_k wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, sorry for stating the obvious, the point of the Amazon web site is not to be convenient, or beautiful, or understandable. Its purpose is to sell you stuff, more stuff, more often. I bet some non-zero amount of confusion is increasing sales. It's much like supermarkets that put simple repeat-purchase items like milk at the other end of the store, to make customers walk and notice other items.

I would argue that Amazon's UI could garner more sales and reconstruct more of its slowly fading popularity if it simply stopped being such a dumpster fire of bad design, confusion, chaos, searches that barely work and of course, rampant links to attempts at sales fraud. The confusion, coupled with Amazon's reputation inertia, does probably drive some bulk sales metrics, but it's a poison pill of scrounging what you…

I'm dubious. Investing in development and design is one of the more expensive ways for a company to increase returns. Plus, Amazon are in such a dominant e-commerce market position [0] that they don't need to worry about UX beyond the ability to click "buy". Despite the poor design, their share is forecast to continue growing past 40% this year [1].

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t... (I'm not sure why ebay isn't in this chart?)

[1] https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-will-surpass-40-of-...

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

#150

Post by chongli »

degauss wrote: post #132
chongli wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The single shared menu bar has one huge advantage over per-window menu bars: infinite mouse target size along the vertical axis. When moving the mouse to a narrow strip menu bar at the top of a window you need to accelerate the mouse towards the target and then decelerate in time to stop on the target without overshoot. With a menu bar at the top of the screen you can skip the decelerate part and just slam the mouse to the top of the screen without worrying about overshoot.

You’re right about giant displays though. The best menu system for those is pie menus [1]. Although I would still dispute the advantages of the second mouse button for activating those. The F1-F12 function keys would be much better since you could have instant access to 12 different pie menus instead of a single one with right click.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

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