Hi All,
This may sound silly, but...
Is anyone else bothered by the apparently arbitrary use of "red/yellow/blue" to identify the mouse buttons in the source? I never remember which is which.
Maybe it's because I go from Squeak on Mac to Linux to WinNT, or because I've never had an opportunity to work heads-down with the Smalltalk UI code to get it into my medulla, but it just doesn't work for me.
So, is this an anachronism we can live without?
I'd guess that cross-platform issues are part of the reason it hasn't been changed already (e.g. Macs use single mouse button + modifier key), so perhaps a set of more symbolic labels would work better, like (off the top of my head (or maybe that's the wrong end of the beast :^|)) "select"/"context"/"global".
Or, perhaps the buttons should be relabeled pink/blue/black, to signify incremental improvement, paradigm shift, and no improvement whatsoever :-).
-------------------------------- Robert M. Fuhrer 34-231 (914) 945-3830 IBM T. J. Watson Research Center rfuhrer@watson.ibm.com Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 PGP Public Key available on request
I think that the identification of buttons by color is a good design that transcends multiple hardware configurations pretty well.
I agree that it is problematic for newbies (myself included).
What I find interesting is the pattern.What happened to the orange, green, and violet buttons? Are they the shifted red, yellow, and blue buttons? Are they being resurected in morph halos?
John-Reed Maffeo Phoenix, Az
At 16:10 -0400 9/30/99, Robert M. Fuhrer wrote:
Hi All,
This may sound silly, but...
Is anyone else bothered by the apparently arbitrary use of "red/yellow/blue" to identify the mouse buttons in the source? I never remember which is which. ...SNIP...
Robert M. Fuhrer 34-231 (914) 945-3830 IBM T. J. Watson Research Center rfuhrer@watson.ibm.com Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 PGP Public Key available on request
Maybe it's some infection at IBM, but I never liked the color designations either. I have no clue which button on my Mac two button mouse is the red one without having to look it up, but I recently memorized which is the yellow one. Maybe I haven't written enough UI code yet...
I'd love to see a shift to left/center/right, or better Button1, Button2, Button3.
Dave _______________________________ David N. Smith IBM T J Watson Research Center Hawthorne, NY _______________________________ Any opinions or recommendations herein are those of the author and not of his employer.
For a while in VisualWorks, we made an effort to refer to the buttons as "select/operate/view_menu"
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org