Re: Great SWT Program

On Oct 20, 1:04 pm, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1192816503.469468.44...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Owen Jacobson <angrybald...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Oct 19, 10:35 am, Owen Jacobson <angrybald...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 19, 3:39 am, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well, google may or may not be your friend here... I've heard of the
same study, but I couldn't find anything to substantiate it.

Lies.

(Not sure what you're calling lies, but maybe it doesn't matter.)

(It doesn't, but: my own preceeding statement that I couldn't find the
report. :)

<http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html>

Enjoy!

I did. Very interesting reading. I don't want to believe
the stopwatch results, but that doesn't mean they're not true!
(I do question how wading through multiple levels of menus can
possibly be faster than a few-characters shortcut, but perhaps
that kind of comparison wasn't done.)

It's telling that the comparison was done with the Mac OS UI rather
than Windows or a set of X applications. The Apple HIG eschew the use
of nested menus in favour of context-aware toolbars and palettes when
possible, leading to UIs that are (by experience) usually easier and
faster to navigate with a mouse than the equivalent tool designed for
another platform is.

As a concrete example, I've only been using OS X for half a year, but
I already find the mouse-driven approach to switching windows much
faster and more natural than the permutations of cmd-tab required,
because Expose is designed to make that process fast. As another
example, XCode's project window contains toolbar items appropriate for
project-wide actions ("Build", "Clean", a pulldown for switching
between build configurations, various others), but opening a source
file spawns a new window containing a toolbar with source-specific
actions like "Compile", "Breakpoints", as well as some common project
actions that might be relevant ("Build and Go").

At the same time, the HIG does recommend that frequently-used commands
be given short keystrokes. Photoshop, for example, takes this to a
ludicrous extreme by making the shortcuts for various image-
manipulation tools single letters with no modifiers!

I particularly liked the closing paragraph:

"I think Donald Norman [Norman, 1988] put it best when he
said "...the design should not impede action, especially for
those well-practiced, experienced users who have internalized
the knowledge. It should be easy to go back and forth, to
combine the knowledge in the head with that in the world.
Let whichever is more readily available at the moment be
used without interfering with the other, and allow for mutual
support."

Indeed. Given time, even the strangest of key combinations can become
reflex. I certainly don't think "Hit escape, then hold shift, then
hit 5" or even "M-%" when I want to replace text in emacs... I just
think "***, I need to replace some text" and the keystroke comes
automatically. There was a point when I did have to stop and think
both of those things, but it's long past.

In return I offer a link to the Lamport interview, in which
I think he makes some interesting points:

http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/lamport-latex-interv...

Very good stuff.

Maybe this would be a good point to comment -- was that you who
said that text-mode tools and GUIs seem to be converging, and
maybe in the not-too-distant future we really *will* have "best
of both worlds" tools? Agreed!

I don't think I said as much, but I certainly believe as such. My own
text editor of choice (TextMate) behaves a lot like emacs, except with
much more pervasive mouse support than even Emacs.app.

.