That ties into another of my beliefs: we need interrupt driven events, not
polling.  Polling results in lost events or delayed event handling, both of
which are miserable for usability.  Squeak should be able to guarantee that
user inputs will be handled within ~100 ms (preferably < 50 ms), even if
the system has to interrupt computation to do it.  And no user action
should ever, under any conditions, be lost.

Regardless, the system could bundle the modifier key status into the mouse
down (or keyboard) event, so that the programmer can determine both what
the state of the modifier keys were when a key press or mouse click
occurred, as well as their current state.

Jeff

At 10:58 AM 8/8/00, Tim Rowledge wrote:
>In message <4.1.20000808130333.00942980 at ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu> you wrote:
>
>> I'd recommend that change from a usability perspective, if nothing else.
>> As a user/programmer if I ask if the control or shift keys are pressed I
>> mean right now, not at some indeterminate point of time in the past.
>Not neccessarily; it's entirely plausible you might need the metakey
>state at the time that some keyboard or mouse event was recorded.
>Consider the class KeyboardBuffer for example.
>
>tim
>
>-- 
>Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
>Strange OpCodes: NBRM: Unconditional No BRanch Multiple