On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Neil Williams wrote:
On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 01:58:37 +1030, (Aidan Stanger)
wrote:
Apart from when you're playing minefield, it doesn't usually lead to a
less efficient UI design either. Most Mac browsers give you a
contextual menu if you hold the mouse button down for half a second. I
think the alternative of control clicking only came about because
someone noticed the control key was hardly ever used...
Possibly. But on the Acorn Archimedes, which was a 3-button design from
the start, the usage was easy to teach and very consistent. From left
to right, the buttons were select, menu and adjust.
S - M - A: "Like the baby food", as one of my primary school teachers once
said!
This would be what they always did - basically, left would select an
object (file, text, drawing, icon etc), the middle would give a context
menu (no top bar menus at all on the Arch - 100% context menus) and the
right would "adjust", e.g. multiple selections, selecting an OK button
or similar on a dialogue without closing it, or any other similar
action.
Hmm. Select and menu were consistent, but adjust wasn't - it always did
somethink that wasn't selection or menu-opening, but what it did do was
completely context-dependent and random.
Incidentally, many of its features made it to Windows, especially from
95 onwards - more drag-and-drop, the taskbar (RISC-OS pioneered the idea
of that with an icon bar, which didn't work in quite the same way but
was similar enough), context menus and such. (Some features obviously
came from the Mac as well!)
Indeed - the Arc was way ahead of its time. I was particularly impressed
by the way saving files worked: you popped up a menu, went to the save
option, and up popped a submenu containing an icon representing the file;
you then simply dragged this to wherever you wanted to save it.
Incredibly elegant - it makes saving just another case of a normal file
move, unlike under every other OS, where saving (and opening) takes place
in a special dialogue box that's totally separate from normal
finder/explorer windows.
tom
--
File under 'directionless space novelty ultimately ruined by poor self-editing'