Re: OS X Finder

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: OS X Finder
Date: 12:45 on 14 Jan 2004
> That's the thing.  Back when they did the studies (early 80s) there was just
> click, double click and that's it.  The magic key combos came waaaaaaay
> later.  Like > ten years later.  I don't think contextual menus were added
> until OS 9.

I'm pretty sure shift-click and command-click were there pretty much from
the start.

> So when the studies were done it made sense.  Now, though, it smacks a little
> of slavish devotion.

Xerox had three buttons: select, action, and menu.

Sun had three buttons: select, extend-select, and menu, plus double-click
	for action.

Apple had three "buttons": select, extend-select and append-select, plus
	double-click.

Then they added option-click for a fifth button, so some objects that
used "select" for their "action" operation could have a selection
operation.

But different applications did different things for command-click and
option-click and sometimes even shift-click, because there were so
many alternatives that a single "action" didn't cover. So finally in
OS 8 they started trying to clean things up with contextual menus. Too
little too late.

So, no, it never made sense except through a very specialised viewpoint
that said "this GUI needs to be easy to demonstrate". They used to say
as much: that having multiple buttons confused people who had never used
any kind of GUI before so they had to stop and explain how the multiple
buttons worked.

That could take several minutes with some people.

A few minutes isn't a lot of time compared to how long you're going to
be using the interface, so I never understood why that was such a big
deal. Then I realised that it's an awfully long time to expect people
walking by in a computer store to pay attention. As a marketing tool
it makes sense.

There's stuff above here

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