Re: WM standards

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Carlos Pereira wrote:

> I do have pop up menus (for example to select on the fly
> objects that don't have a visual representation and therefore
> cannot be selected by clicking on them, as lights and layers)
> and I plan to have wired windows with moving ants (to select
> many objects at once, etc...), etc. but these need always
> to be triggered by some previous information. If you are
> just manipulating objects with the mouse you really don't want
> pop up menus coming up all the time, do you? 

No, very true.  But a menu only pops up on a right-button click, not on
a right-mouse drag, and it's easy enough to distinguish between the
two.  That's how we can have both a context menu and right-mouse
dragging on Nautilus icons, for example-- and it's also how we managed
to get context menus in our visualisation software when all three mouse
buttons were used for scaling, panning and rotating.

> And there is no
> vacant button either: I have x,y,z (trackball) rotations on
> the left, x,y movements on the middle and up,down scaling
> on the right (the trackball code was developped by SGI
> years ago and works very well with mouses, actually).

Yes, I know it... the visualisation software we wrote ran very nicely on
a Monster Reality Engine :)

> Moreover, I don't want to slow down the expert with
> something that is usefull only for the first time newbie.
> This is a cheap, very serious, mistake, I believe.

I quite agree.

> For the time being, Escape to go up,
> Escape to go down, is simple and works.

Hmm, I think you've just made a good argument for not using Escape
actually... assuming you'd want to use the same key for both actions,
exiting a mode by pressing Escape sounds reasonable, but *entering* a
mode by pressing Escape sounds rather... well, weird :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems