Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!pupthy!wrs From: wrs@pupthy.PRINCETON.EDU (William R. Somsky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Mouse cord nuisance from lap (was Re: Monitors: What Next?) Message-ID: <4242@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> Date: 3 Nov 88 17:26:46 GMT References: <15572@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <16891@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <5164@saturn.ucsc.edu> <3549@phri.UUCP> <3954@encore.UUCP> <10868@reed.UUCP> <31811@bbn.COM> Sender: news@phoenix.Princeton.EDU Reply-To: wrs@pupthy.PRINCETON.EDU (William R. Somsky) Organization: Physics Dept, Princeton Univ Lines: 37 In article <31811@bbn.COM> jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) writes: > Infrared keyboard is nice, but typing isn't. The NeXT appears to have > the guts to do speech input to text. Now that will be a revolutionary > development indeed. ... I'd still want a good keyboard, regardless of the possibility of voice input. For somethings vocal commands are AWKWARD. Haven't you ever tried to help someone with a programming project, standing behind them and telling them what to write? Stuff like: "for left-paren i equals zero semi i less-than cap-n semi i plus plus right-paren a left-square i right-square equals i semi carrige-return" That's a h*ll of a lot more work than just typing: "for (i=0 ; i" That's also been one of my pet peeves (Here, peeve! :-) about "point-and-click" mouse interfaces. Flame on! Sure they're easier to learn first off, but once you learn a command line interface, you can usually (almost always) do what you want a LOT faster by typing. Users should be given a choice of interfaces. Unfortunately, it seems that most systems using mice have gone whole hog and dumped the CLI completely. (Yeah, I know you can get some sort of CLI extra, but it should come with the box, not be an extra.) Flame off! Anyway, that's my 20 mils (2 cents :-) worth on this subject. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ William R. Somsky Physics Dept ; Princeton Univ wrs@pupthy.Princeton.EDU PO Box 708 ; Princeton NJ 08544