OT -- OS wars -- (was: Re: Apple's Aperature announcement)

According to Jeremy Nixon <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

[ ... ]

> Yes, every single argument used in favor of multi-button mice is basically
> "I like them better, therefore they are better."
>
> Personally, I don't understand why anyone would want all those buttons on
> a mouse. I have over a hundred perfectly good buttons right on my keyboard;
> I don't need to turn my mouse into another keyboard. If you do, then go
> ahead, I have no problem with that.

At least on Sun Workstations, and other unix-based machines
running X11 as a GUI, *three* buttons is the norm, and each of those
buttons performs discrete tasks, and does so quite well.

On such machines, sometimes the middle button (if not present,
e.g. on an Intel box running some unix flavor), has to be emulated by
pressing both buttons at the same time -- and *this* can be a problem if
the timing window which determines "at the same time" is too narrow.

> I do, however, have a problem with the UI issues that it leads to -- on
> Windows (which of course is a shining example of some of the worst UI in
> computer history, but still) you're always dealing with functions that
> are only visible in a contextual menu, that you would never know existed
> otherwise.
>
> Also, I used to do tech support; I know that "right click" is the single
> most confusing thing to new computer users.

It has caused me to slow down a bit from time to time, as for
quite a while I was using a mouse configured for the left hand, to stave
off encroaching Carpal Tunnel syndrome. I'm back to the right hand at
the moment, but I may switch again. Most user interfaces for unix
machines allow you to interchange the buttons -- as do the drivers for
Logitech mice on Windows. Anyway -- when I hear "right click" I have to
pause and translate that to "outside click" before I click when using a
left-handed mouse.

As for "mice with keyboards", you should see the mouse on my
Integraph double-headed machine out in /dev/barn01. It has a digitizing
cursor as a mouse, with something like ten buttons on it -- not counting
the acre of extra buttons on the keyboard. It has a digitizing tablet
as a work area, and that serves for mouse operations as well as for
actual digitization.

> It is more confusing and
> causes more problems than *anything* else about the computer interface,
> and to this day, many or most casual users of Windows don't know what
> the right mouse button does and never use it.

That is probably more attributable to the design of Windows than
anything else. It started from the same core that the Mac OS did, the
Xerox Star. I don't know how many buttons that came with, as I have
never seen one in person.

But unix workstations do use all of the normal (for unix) three
buttons on their mice.

> When I did tech support I learned to seek out other ways to do everything
> that could be done with the right mouse button, and use those alternate
> ways when talking people through operations, because the very act of
> saying "right click" would, 75% of the time, quadruple the length of
> the ensuing phone call and forever slow down everything we tried to do
> from that point on, because I had just introduced a variable into the
> idea of "clicking on something" that made the person now become confused
> every time any clicking, even left-clicking, had to be performed. Just
> avoiding the right mouse button entirely made the job of tech support
> easier and smoother.
>
> Incidentally, I think the second most confusing thing may be the "backslash".

That is attributable to Microsoft picking up the idea of
subdirectories from unix *after* they had already picked up most of the
command line syntax from a DEC OS -- using the '/' as an option switch
character. Unix used the '-' as the option switch, and the '/' to
delimit subdirectories. MS-DOS had already tied up the '/', so they had
to use the '\' instead for a subdirectory delimiter. (Note that at
least up through MS-DOS 3.3 there was an option which you could set
"SWITCHAR" which would allow you to use '-' as the option switch
character, and '/' as the subdirectory delimiter. That went away
sometime before full Windows took over.

> You take this stuff for granted until you spend 8 hours a day dealing
> with people who don't live with it day in and day out. Multi-button
> mice were among the worst ideas in the history of computers, once
> computers became something that normal people were going to use as
> appliances. It has no real-world analogy. You point at something you
> want; it's one of the first concepts we learn. You don't right-point
> at something to do something else with it. You don't double-point,
> either,

It depends on the culture. You double point (index and little
finger at the same time) when you wish to accuse someone of being a
cuckold. There are also meanings assigned to pointing with the middle
finger. :-)

> which leads to another very confusing thing, the "double click",
> though that one isn't nearly as bad. (You probably can't even imagine,
> though, how many people double-click links on web pages even to this
> day.)

Once formed, the habit is difficult to break. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.
--
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