Re: Keyboard usage on some Gnome windows not working



On 21 Oct, 2005, at 2:12 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 13:14 -0200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 09:47 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 08:49 -0200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
...
No, there aren't. <http://asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html>
...
The keyboard is clearly faster at many tasks.  For instance,
I type anywhere from 130 to 150 wpm, depending on the day.
If you tell me I could mouse that faster with GOK, I will
laugh at you and ignore every post you make from now on.

This thread is about keyboard equivalents to menu/toolbar/title bar
commands. If you construct straw men like "the mouse is faster than
typing" when no-one suggested that, I will laugh at you but keep reading your posts. I like laughing.

From Tog's article:
* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than
mousing.
* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

There's no qualifiers here.  In the absence of any qualifying
statements, I'm forced to assume he means "for all tasks" or at least "for most tasks".

Not really. If you read the rest of the page (even the first two paragraphs will do), you can see that the subject under discussion is keyboard combos for commands like Print, Redo, and Delete.

...
This article, like most stuff I've read from Tog, is sloppy.  It takes
some statistical data that's probably relevant to a lot of things we
might discuss here, and wraps it in universal dogma.  This, in turn,
creates legions of OSNews posters who think they understand the very
essence of existence because they read an "Ask Tog" article.

True. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to have been much relevant research on the public Web until the past couple of years, so Tog had the topic to himself.

...
Agreed, more detailed research would be nice. Lane et al. 2005 found
keyboard equivalents to be faster for Copy, Open, Paste, and Save, but their experiment seems rather unrealistic -- people were given several practice runs first, allowing them to keep the keyboard equivalent in their short-term memory, when in real life it wouldn't be. (It's the retrieval from long-term memory which is the big time-sucker, according to Tognazzini.)

Well, I think it's fair that you test shortcuts when they are
ingrained in muscle memory, because that's when they're really
useful.

Part of the speed of a keyboard equivalent is whether it is in someone's muscle memory in the first place, or whether they have to dig it out of long-term memory. Putting it in short-term memory instead is dodging the question.

To get back to access keys, probably the only access key that's in the muscle memory of a non-trivial number of people is Alt+D in Internet Explorer for Windows.

...
Other than not having home-row-accessible cursor movement
key commands, our interfaces right now work pretty well for
both the keyboard and the mouse, as well as many other input
devices.  Why change what's not broken?
...

Because like typewriters in the 1880s, cars in the 1910s, and music players in the 1970s, personal computers today are still horribly awkward things to use.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/




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