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> I can't remember what book it was I read it in, possibly Insanely Great > by Steven Levy, where it was indictaed the the reasoning was that whilst > there was a strong metaphor for the one button mouse (i.e pointing with > your index finger) there was nothing for a second mouse button. Sure there is. How many things in the real world respond to pointing? Well, there's buttons. And... there's buttons. Here's a doorknob, what do you do with it? You can lock it, you can open it, you can take it apart and fix it, you can oil it. Here's an icon, a file, what do you do with it? You can open it, you can delete it, you can look at its properties, you can do all kinds of things. I have four reasonably dextrous fingers, and a prehensile thumb. I can point and I can grab and I can twist and turn and pull and push and tweak and rub and poke and scratch and ... you get the picture. There's a whole menu of actions I can perform with my hand! Similarly, on the screen, you have an object metaphor. If the object is fixed in place and only has two states, then you only need one button to operate on it. But most of the objects on the screen aren't like that: they can be dragged, opened, examined (different operation), duplicated, collected with other similar objects, and so on. In Apple's model, that button is your index funger when you're using a menu, or clicking a button, but it's your prehensile thumb when you're selecting or grabbing an icon and you have to double-click to just 'press' it. And if you want to use the rest of your fingers, you go all the way to the top of the screen and point at these *other* objects. It's a marketing metaphor, that's all. "We need to explain this in a 30 second TV commercial, who cares if it's still a good idea after a couple of hours".There's stuff above here
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