I should mention that the current Squeak idiom (idiocy!) of using the select button to open a menu when on the main display is really stupid and can only be explained by the initial connection to Mac single button mice. Which is another dim idea.
Well it all depends from where you are coming from.
On the Amiga, there was only two mouse buttons. The left-one was for all purposes while the right-one was used to bring the menu in the top menu bar, which acted as a status bar and a way to drag down the screen to see what was going on behind. In DeluxePaint, the right mouse button was used to draw with a secondary color and the user had to move the mouse to top of the screen to open the menu bar. It was practical on Lo-res screen modes (320x256) as the user didn't have to move the mouse that far but became tedious when the first graphic cards were available with Hi-res (800x600 and over) screen modes.
One nice thing was that the Amiga menus permitted to click on menu items with the left-mouse button, even in different groups. So the user could open the menu bar with the right button, and click with the left button on "Find > Next", "Edit > Copy", "Project > Close", "Project > New", "Edit > Paste", "Project > Print" in one go and these items were executed in that order. (It seems that RISC OS borrowed that feature).
So things were quite simple and the two mouse buttons had two very different behaviours. With the special Amiga keys, it was even possible to bring the menu while using only the left mouse button.
What I have learned during this period with end-less hours passed in front of DeluxePaint is that computers feature 100+ buttons. But today operating systems/applications make poor use of them (don't even get me started about shortcut keys...). I don't know when things started to go wrong but suddenly the keyboard was something solely used for inputing text, not for acting on objects, at least on the Windows side of computing.
Sometimes, a one-button mouse is working amazingly well when making good use of the keyboard. For example, if I want to wire two shapes in OmniGraffle, I just keep down the L key and draw the connection line.
It even makes more sense to have a one-button mouse with Squeak: morphs have different menus, depending on the use of the Control, Alt or Command keys. Between delegating some of the menus to the mouse and delegating all menus to the keyboard, I prefer a single-button mouse with the last solution because it puts emphasis on actions and not on contexts.
To illustrate furthermore this issue, take the polygon morph. To add new points, the user clicks on the green triangles, which is an action, but to remove a point, she has to move a point to a neighbour point, which is context. The first one is obvious, the second requires to browse class comments to figure out... Sure a context menu could do the trick, but then the user is confronted to many options, not actions (that's why the menus have to be revisited in Squeak as they appear to have an infinite number of options).
Dan talked about pen computer and it reminds me how poorly supported are these devices in current systems. Wacom pens come with four buttons (the tip, two buttons on the side and the eraser) making it an incredible device for inputing stuff with gestures. The side buttons could be used to apply immediate and delayed actions (and not for opening context sensitive menus) and possibility are endless when using pressure sensitivity. The current PDA and other pen based devices are frustrating to use because they don't make proper use of a pen. The Newton was interesting because it created a complete metaphor around the pen input by using conventions found in text revision made on paper.
Nintendo makes a bold move into this area with the DS and some of the games are amazing. Pen and voice form a pretty combination.
Dominique Dutoit dominiqued@versateladsl.be wrote:
[snip]
mouse to top of the screen to open the menu bar. It was practical on Lo-res screen modes (320x256) as the user didn't have to move the mouse that far but became tedious when the first graphic cards were available with Hi-res (800x600 and over) screen modes.
Pretty much the same view I have about screen-top menu bars. OK on small screens, horrific on large ones - and as for multiple large screens...
One nice thing was that the Amiga menus permitted to click on menu
[snip]
executed in that order. (It seems that RISC OS borrowed that feature).
Possible but unlikely; amigas were never very common in UK so I'd put low odds on anyone on the Acorn team even having seen one. Almost all the staff for the early versions were games-guys which explains two things a) why the kernel OS was (and still is to an extent) pretty poor, technically b) why the screen display quality and performance were staggeringly fast for the time. As game-guys they were utterly obsessed with getting pixels on glass fast.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim Useful random insult:- During evolution his ancestors were in the control group.
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