This is mice in view mode; [Up]
Date: Sun 19-Apr-1989 19:27:14 From: Unknown Subject: mice (was Re: X windows on the nExt) In article <18364@vax5.CIT.CORNELL.EDU> ktly@vax5.cit.cornell.edu (Jonathan C. Kagle) writes: >P.S. Does anybody remember Jobs ridiculing mice with more than one button > soon after the Mac came out? The NeXT doesn't seem to be doing anything to deny that legacy -- all NeXT software treats the mouse as a one-button device. This will be even more the case at 0.9, when even what little functionality the right button had ("pop up a menu that in almost every case was already on screen anyway") gets pushed back to the level of an optional "advanced" feature. The default action of the right button will then be to act just like the left button, which sure sounds like they're saying "whoops, why did we put two buttons on the mouse, anyway?" This is one case where the model for the user interface seems to be strictly Mac-derived, and I don't happen to think it's a particularly good choice. Why can't the right button be used to extend text selections, for example? Or, since what it does is already going to be user-modifiable, how about providing a larger palette of selections as to what it can do? Maybe even go hog wild and let the user make it do anything he or she wants, by making it mappable to some arbitrary set of key presses. It's galling to have the second button just sitting there like some atrophied appendage. The usual complaint about multi-button mice is that they're harder than one-button mice for novices to learn, but to build a user interface entirely around the needs of the novice is on the level of welding training wheels on a bicycle. We're not novices forever... (most of us, at least.) And as an aside: who's received 0.9?
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.