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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!oliveb!intelca!mipos3!td2cad!cpocd2!howard
From: howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.lsi
Subject: Re: VLSI design tools
Message-ID: <1121@cpocd2.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 88 18:01:33 GMT
References: <154@liutde.UUCP> <5751@eecae.UUCP> <1601@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman)
Followup-To: comp.lsi
Organization: Intel Corp. ASIC Systems Organization, Chandler AZ
Lines: 57

In article <1601@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) writes:
>I just wish that the mouse and
>menus weren't so illogical and would work like like a mac mouse.

Don't confuse "unlike a Mac" with "illogical".  They're not the same thing.

>When you want to draw a rectangle, you click with one button aand then the
>other.  Why can't we just drag???

This is derived from Caesar, and makes perfect sense with a 3-button mouse.
The advantage is that, if you have a rectangle that's slightly wrong, you can
adjust it with a single click.  If dragging is your only alternative, then you
are forced to redraw (re-drag!) the entire rectangle, which is impossible if the
rectangle is not all on screen.  Further, suppose you are trying to draw a very
large rectangle that must be precisely aligned.  With dragging, you must zoom
out to a large-scale view and hope your mousework is precise.  With clicking,
you can zoom in to each of two opposite corners and do precise placement very
easily.

So, fundamentally, the problem with dragging is that it assumes that you will
never want to select a rectangle that is not entirely on-screen.  Similar
sorts of brain-damage can be seen in MacPaint, which won't let you erase or
draw on any part of the page that isn't on-screen.  So, if you've lassoed
something, and you want to move it to a place where even a single pixel of it
would be off-screen, you can't.  You have to put it down (but what if you don't
have anywhere to put it without destroying something?), move the window to a
different part of the page (which must cover BOTH the place you put it AND the
place you wanted to put it), re-lasso it (if you can), and then put it where
you really wanted it.  Blecch!  (And HyperCard "solves" these problems by not
letting a card be bigger than an original Mac screen!)

Finally, recall that Caesar and Magic were originally developed on systems
whose displays were serial devices hanging off an RS232 port.  Imagine how
slow and stupid dragging looks in such an environment, and the load it places
on the I/O of your (time-shared) computer.  Even on a single-user computer,
with high bandwidth to the screen, the overhead of dragging would compete
for CPU with Magic's background incremental DRC.

>I hope someone ports this to a Mac(how hard can it be on A/UX?), and I hope
>they use the Mac interface guidelines.

The Mac interface, while well thought out, is not the ultimate interface.
HyperCard doesn't conform to the Mac interface guidelines.  Neither does
original Smalltalk-80.  There are tons of INITs and DAs which do nothing but
patch problems (oversights) in the standard Mac interface, system, and finder.
Modal dialogs are pure poison to multitasking.  And all Mac users take for
granted that any program can crash the entire machine, something that no UNIX
user would tolerate for a second (but, UNIX takes longer to reboot :-).

Of course, with only one mouse button, some severe changes will have to be
made.  Maybe shift-click and option-click and command-click can substitute ...

-- 
	Howard A. Landman
	{oliveb,hplabs}!intelca!mipos3!cpocd2!howard
	howard%cpocd2.intel.com@RELAY.CS.NET
	"I don't really see, why can't we go on as three?" - J. Airplane