[ANN] new version of services available for preview

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Fri Sep 30 18:58:11 UTC 2005


Please don't do this mangling of click behaviour. It can only confuse  
most users, especially those of us with a long history. It will slow  
down editing. It won't really speed up finding senders/implementors  
since the time to ask for the list is small by comparison to the time  
for the list to be built and presented.

How would it work with the other uses of d-click? i.e the d-click at  
the beginning of the line/view/quote-delimited area/etc ? I think you  
are inappropriately overloading a gesture so common it can only cause  
problems.

Consider some alternatives -
a metakey with the click. shift is already used to extend the  
selection though and the others are implicitly used for single button  
systems.
triple-clicking. I've used systems with t-click and they tend to be a  
pain; d-click is pretty much a trivial reflex finger action. t- or  
quad- click requires you to count and slows you down.
hotkey. we already have them and they work quite well.
menu. slower but the action needs to be there for completeness.
toolbar button. reasonable - after a d-click one pretty much has to  
have the mouse in-hand and so a small motion to a reasonably sized  
button not too far away will take very little time and negligable  
cognitive effort.
drag-to tool. slightly off the wall but consider being able to drag  
the selection to a tool that will do the action. such a tool would be  
a 'senders browser' and anytime you drop a selection on it  it would  
display the senders. It could be a stacking browser so that all/some/ 
many recent sets of senders would be available. Similar tools would  
show implementors, references, class refs, variable usages,  
commentary, spelling and thesaurus info, etc etc. Instead of adding  
loads of function to a plain browser you just add the drag/drop and  
then have new specialised browsers.

See? There's lots more exciting ways to improve code exploring than  
ruining my editing experience.

tim
-- 
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim





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