Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mcnc!kk From: kk@mcnc.org (Krzysztof Kozminski) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: The Mouse and HI design (Was: Re: There *ARE* uses for forcing...) Message-ID: <2301@speedy.mcnc.org> Date: 9 Jun 90 04:15:18 GMT References: <2291@speedy.mcnc.org> <1990Jun8.200303.19157@d.cs.okstate.edu> Reply-To: kk@mcnc.org.UUCP (Krzysztof Kozminski) Organization: MCNC; RTP, NC Lines: 109 OK, my last submission on the subject (I am off the post-surgery painkillers :-( and having regained full control of my mind gotta go back to do things I get paid for :-). First, a question: it has been assumed throughout this discussion that Human Interface prohibits the 'pointer warp'. Wanting to know what was the original HI argument, I just scanned all HI chapters in the IM, browsed through the files on Apple.COM, and could not find anything on the subject. Where is this proscription exactly stated, then? Should I go to see an eye doctor, or what? (Could not find anything prohibiting 'window warp', either, and I *am sure* I saw it in the past ...). Anyway, the arguments from Larry Rosenstein and Graham Norman Perc have undeniable merits. Instead of exchanging 'my gut feeling is different than your preconception' arguments, it would be useful to make an actual experiment to determine whether 'mouse warp' or 'palette warp' are Good Things, and, if they are, which one is a Better Thing. I just hope that my contribution (if any) was to point out a couple of situations where it is conceivable that it could be a Not So Obviously Bad Thing. I have also to admit that Larry convinced me that the 'mouse warp' should be an attribute of an application, not selected in the Control Panel. I would volunteer to put mouse/palette warps into the ArtClass included with Think C4.0, if not for the fact that this is the third month of my waiting for Symantec to replace a defective disk with the sources :-( Any volunteers with the complete set of sources out there? Then again, wait a second. Since apparently the HI guidelines are against either or both of these techniques, I presume that such experiments were already conducted by the Apple HI Group - could we hear more about this? ----------------- Now some minor wrap-ups on some arguments I did not quite agree with: >From: lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein) >>[somebody's suggestion: mouse warp to the default button in a dialog] >You can achieve the same result by displaying the dialog box so that the >safest option is under the pointer. Your suggestion will not work close to the screen edge - part of the dialog may be off-screen. >From: bskendig@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Brian Kendig) >>[Palette warp may cause long update times - (KK)] >And update events are practically instantaneous, so that's a non-issue >unless you're using some heinously kludgey plotting program, in which >case the time spent in cleaning up after a palette will be negligible >compared with the time spent in cleaning up after other things. This would be a non-issue in Finder. A floating palette in MultiFinder may obscure other applications' windows, and no matter how smart your program is in doing instanteneous updates, if your palette moves off a Word document containing a complicated table displayed in a page view mode, you'd better expect some waiting. I am trying to look at this whole mouse warp issue from the perspective of a power user, working on a *large* monitor, and trying to shave fractions of seconds from frequently repeated actions - personally, I've never used anything but the fastest mouse tracking setting, but on the 1600x1200 (not sure about the exact numbers - so please don't pick on them) monitor I still would like to do mouse warp now and then. >By refusing to allow programmers to go add all sorts of obscure >functions to the machine, Apple is trying to ensure that it remains as >simple as possible while still being powerful. How was this saying ... make something as simple that an idiot can use it ... (again, I'm not trying to pick up another discussion, just that it depends on the intended users what is obscure and what is not). >(...) by having the Mac be as intuitive as possible. It >resembles familiar things: the pointer is your hand, you throw things >in the trash can to get rid of them, you can drag icons that look like >pieces of paper into folders. >[latter, about mouse warp] >Except that it just doesn't model the real world. My intuition tells me that I do not have to drag a piece of paper from underneath other papers if I want to write something on the part that sticks out, yet Mac alows me only to interact with the top window ... (this is not meant to start another discussion, just to point out that some things fail to model the real world already). > Modal dialogs shouldn't be movable. Not so, see HI note #4. >Or, perhaps, the fact that the pointer doesn't jump all over creation >will become an inspiration to X programmers everywhere, sparking a >worldwide rush to rewrite code. Ya never know. :-):-):-):-):-):-), right? >>[description of my mouse warp (KK)] >Now, let me try to figure that out... better yet, have a >novice try to figure that out Let's make a bet - I teach a novice handling the mouse warp, you teach another novice assorted power-user features of Word 4.0 - say, how to handle 'Position' attribute of paragraphs in a multi-column document (ok, you're off, I spent some frustrating times trying to teach some folks to do the latter :-). KK -- Kris Kozminski kk@mcnc.org "The party was a masquerade; the guests were all wearing their faces."