Re: OT: Mac Newsreader?

begin quoting Chuk Goodin <cgoodin@xxxxxx> :
On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:15:51 -0500, dbd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (David DeLaney)
wrote:
Keyboard is _faster_ than mouse, also. Perhaps not for someone who spends
10 hours a day for a few years practicing their point and click and does
not practice their typing - but if you practice both equally, keyboard's
faster. (Mentally compare your typing speed on the keyboard, versus your
typing speed using a mouse to point and click on the KeyCaps information
screen, for example.)

Depends what it's for. Obviously keyboard typing words is faster than
mouse clicking letters (or even drawing letters with a stylus), but using
a keyboard for commands has been shown to be slower than mouse commands.
(As you mentioned in the part I snipped, using both is the slowest of
all.) I saw a study last year that mentioned that users often perceived
the keyboard as being faster, even if the stopwatch showed otherwise.

I think the speed of the mouse depends heavily on the command set. I'm
trying to think of what commands I'd use with a mouse, and I come up with
a limited set: 2-d selection, navigation, and menus.

The problem I have with mice is that they're imprecise. I OFTEN click
on the wrong thing. Drag-and-drop? Sure, it's nice, but I often drop
stuff in the wrong place -- a couple of pixels makes a difference, and
it's easy to screw up a couple of pixels with a mouse.

Cut-and-pasting text is a big task that one would *think* that a mouse
would help. And, yes, selecting most of the text is indeed faster with
a mouse. Except I never get the selection right the first time. Often,
the second time is wrong as well.

And then the pasting... I often paste to the wrong location (most often
due to the problem that a mouse-paste doesn't respect the cursor for most
gui-aware systems), which means frantic scrambling to undo the poor paste.

It's not the speed that bothers me with mice. It's the error rate.

--
--Stewart Stremler----------------------------------stremler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final. --Roger Babson
.

Relevant Pages

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