[ANN] new version of services available for preview

Romain Robbes romain.robbes at lu.unisi.ch
Mon Oct 3 11:50:17 UTC 2005


On Oct 3, 2005, at 11:05 AM, Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:

> Romain Robbes wrote:
>
>>> hotkey. we already have them and they work quite well.
>>>
>> but they are slower when you have to explore deeply (5-10 senders/  
>> implementors)
>>
>
> I don't understand this. How exactly are they slower? Perhaps you  
> could use KLM-GOMS to sketch out a quantification of some of these  
> design decisions:
>
> http://www.rpi.edu/~glasse/HCI-HOWTO/ar01s03.html
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2002/cmsc838s/tichi/printer/goms.html
>

ok, I did a quick computation

with double-click:
     reach mouse: 400
     reaching a piece of code: 1100
     double-clicking: 400
total is 1900

with a keystroke:
     reach mouse: 400
     reaching a piece of code: 1100
     pressing alt-n: 280*2 (not sure whether this is two characters,  
or less)
total is 2060, or slightly less

I did not count navigation using keys which would be too variable.
This assumes that we define a shortcut (alt-n above) which determines  
from
the context the right action to do: senders, implementors, or  
references to variable/class.

So the two are close to each other.
The thing is that it seems more natural to me to do everything with  
the mouse
in this case, especially when you have to click several times in a row
(and, as I said before, this is a Vim user talking ;-) ).

Anyways, we can compare with the current system:
     reach mouse: 400
     reaching start of entity: 1100
     "Mental", thinking : 1200
         (thinking about whether typing the shortcut now is enough or  
if you should
            select the entire entity when messages are nested).
     "Mental", thinking : 1200
         (thinking whether to use alt-n, alt-m, alt-N, or the menu  
item to
         get references to the instance variable (no shortcut for  
this one?)
     keystroke: 280 * 2
total is 4460, in the best case (no selection of code,
and no going to select an item in the menu).


Romain

> Tony
>
>

--
     Romain Robbes
     http://www.inf.unisi.ch/~robbes/





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list