Help pages need your help
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It may be Feature Freeze time but it certainly isn't Help Page freeze. I've submitted some changes for a few of the 'The Project' pages but there are still lots needing improvement.
A few suggestions for things to write about - (general) clean up references to the various screen menus and TheWorldMenu and Dock menus and .... it's complicated. If you refer to mouse buttons please consider using the venerable Red/Yellow/Blue names instead of cmd-click etc - those are very machine specific. I added an explanation of red/yellow/blue to the 'Squeak User Interface' page. Browser(s) - there's no help page for code browsers! We really could do with explanations of the system browser, the message browsers ( including the joy of the tracing browsers capabilities) hierarchy browser... pretty important tools. Debugger - needs waaay more. Tutorials->Command Key Mappings almost certainly needs checking and extending. And should it perhaps be moved to the Tools section? Core Packages->Commonly Used - Traits ? commonly used? Really? And at the very least the URL pointed to needs checking Terse Guide - it would be smart tp run through all the sections and make sure everything works as expected. The underscore assign needs removing, as has already been mentioned today. tim -- tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: MD: Move and Drop bits |
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> Red/Yellow/Blue No, it should be RED BLUE YELLOW for LEFT MIDDLE RIGHT. :-) Because it was RED YELLOW for LEFT RIGHT on two-button mice. Or it should be but was not. Not sure. :-D Happy holidays! Marcel
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Re: Help pages need your help
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I leave you my humble opinion guys. Referring to the mouse buttons by color should be *retired* if favor of the direct "Left, Center, Right -- Wheel". For a simple reason. Nobody aged <= 40 ever saw a mouse with colored buttons. It is an un-necessary level of indirection. If a mouse/input-widget does not have 3 buttons then, "Left, Center, Right" will not fit, but "RED, YELLOW, BLUE" wouldn't in any case. I think Squeak/Smalltalk is intended to have rich GUI interactions, so we must suppose the user has a good mouse. As in CAD programs, if you don't have a good mouse you can't work well, you know and you are supposed to get one. (I dropped the MagicMouse in the moment I needed to do some CAD drawings) bye Nicola
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As a person who works on multiple OS on a regular basis , I appreciate the thought that went into the decision to provide a non-specific definition of the mouse buttons. The fact that there is an option to swap mouse buttons speaks to the need to document mouse buttons in a non-specific way. There are still a variety of mouse designs which provide more or less buttons and balls instead of scroll wheels, using the colors ensures that documentation provides a correct definition if a person has reprogrammed their mouse because the are left handed or live in the Southern hemisphere or work on a computer who's developers chose to think differently. Check out SensorReporter on the wiki for tool that helps to identify mouse and significant key board buttons. -jrm On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 4:46 AM Nicola Mingotti <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- John-Reed Maffeo |
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Nicola is probably right about sunsetting our beloved Red/Yellow/Blue; it's certainly ancient and archaic. Mind you, it *is* still enshrined in a fair bit of code. It would however be reasonable to try something more helpful in documentation and I am reminded of the RISC OS approach of referring to Select, Menu, Extend (which were left/middle/right buttons). That kind of naming has a decent clue as to function in the name and it isn't hard to explain that three-button mice have A/B/C, two button mice (do they still exist? a stupid idea that I hope has died) are A/B and shift-key-B for C, trackpads are... a bit more complicated because so many different types, and so on. Could we perhaps settle on Select/Menu/Halo and explain that you can choose from a variety of settings for which button/key/gesture/voice-command maps to each? JRM pointed out how the whole left/middle/right can get messed up by a left-handed-mouse option in some OSs. I've never used that despite being left-handed!
Does Select/Menu/Halo seem suitable? tim -- tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building |
Re: Help pages need your help
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My thoughts are the following. This matter is not urgent in my opinion, but a change would be helpful for newcomers. So, I will support a bit more my point. But, I am not willing to push too much, so this is my last mail on this subject:) Executive Summary. We should copy the way CAD programs name pointer actions: Left+Center+Right+Wheel. For a few reasons [1] they have a vast audience [2] They have exactly our same problem: rich interfaces requiring complex interactions. [3] Professional of CAD drawing usually own a special pointer device which is quite more expensive than a normal mouse, so the problem for them is also amplified. => If the CAD people chose to use Left+Center+Right+Wheel to refer to actions (If I remember well they do, I learnt to use a few CADs in last years) it means it is the best way they found to communicate => we should stick to their solution. We have more complex things ahead, mouse button names for us is really the tip of the iceberg. We must try not to confuse people too much when they approach Squeak. Please, don't be misguided by the left handed example (@John example). I am left handed myself. Consider these few cases. Guitar playing, if your are left handed and you want to play like that you need to remove and reposition all the strings. You can still do it. Piano playing, you adapt or give up, the hardest part is most often for the right hand. Consider pen writing, problems, your wrist runs on fresh ink making a mess on the page with very high probability. In short, we left handed are used to live in a world for right handed, don't worry, we can make it:) Mice with 3buttons+wheel are the most cheap and widely available. (I don't have statistics, this is just an my impression). If we use the Left+Center+Right+Wheel naming, people who have other stuff and are really really in trouble, can buy a normal mouse with $10 and then map the equivalence to their own pointing device of choice by themselves. If you have a wired pointing device you know it. Apple guys, you know, the company changes the pointer behavior when it does not have anything better to do. The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is to "fix" the touchpad to behave in the "standard" way. The first thing I need to get started is to find the equivalent of LeftClick, RightClick, and ScrollUp, ScrollDown ... don't you do the same ? So, I keep thinking in mouse actions, even if I have a touchpad. If you use another naming scheme: which can be alfa-beta-gamma, or halo-menu-world or else, you will make the thing not-obvious not only to the minority of programmers who do not own a standard mouse, but to the totality of new potential users. bye Nicola -] I am left handed myself. I understand your cocenrns. On the other side, failing to stick to a particoluar convention will confuse not only the left handed, but all of the people. Let me explain Many years ago I started to play guitar, guitar strings / books are written for, right handed people. So, if you really don't want to > On Dec 24, 2019, at 8:19 PM, tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote: > > Nicola is probably right about sunsetting our beloved Red/Yellow/Blue; it's certainly ancient and archaic. Mind you, it *is* still enshrined in a fair bit of code. It would however be reasonable to try something more helpful in documentation and I am reminded of the RISC OS approach of referring to Select, Menu, Extend (which were left/middle/right buttons). That kind of naming has a decent clue as to function in the name and it isn't hard to explain that three-button mice have A/B/C, two button mice (do they still exist? a stupid idea that I hope has died) are A/B and shift-key-B for C, trackpads are... a bit more complicated because so many different types, and so on. Could we perhaps settle on Select/Menu/Halo and explain that you can choose from a variety of settings for which button/key/gesture/voice-command maps to each? JRM pointed out how the whole left/middle/right can get messed up by a left-handed-mouse option in some OSs. I've never used that despite being left-handed! > > Does Select/Menu/Halo seem suitable? > > tim > -- > tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim > Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building > > > |
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In reply to this post by timrowledge
I don't remember when and never knew why the "Swap Mouse Buttons" preference was enabled by default, but that broke the documentation along with messing with command and control buttons, changes which were driven to adhere to various OS developer idiosyncrasies. Tim's reference to"Select, Menu, Extend" on RISC OS seems to echo the original definitions of buttons for the three button mouse which was used with Smalltalk and I would be fine with using them in the wiki documentation. However, the reality is that any term for any button, key, hand gesture, etc. is arbitrary and subject to change by the underlying OS and/or application setting and the best Squeak can aspire to is precise standardization of the words used in the code and documentation. Since we have so much invested with RYB in code and documentation, I suggest we stay with it. Select, Menu, Extend -jrm On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 12:19 PM tim Rowledge <[hidden email]> wrote: Nicola is probably right about sunsetting our beloved Red/Yellow/Blue; it's certainly ancient and archaic. Mind you, it *is* still enshrined in a fair bit of code. It would however be reasonable to try something more helpful in documentation and I am reminded of the RISC OS approach of referring to Select, Menu, Extend (which were left/middle/right buttons). That kind of naming has a decent clue as to function in the name and it isn't hard to explain that three-button mice have A/B/C, two button mice (do they still exist? a stupid idea that I hope has died) are A/B and shift-key-B for C, trackpads are... a bit more complicated because so many different types, and so on. Could we perhaps settle on Select/Menu/Halo and explain that you can choose from a variety of settings for which button/key/gesture/voice-command maps to each? JRM pointed out how the whole left/middle/right can get messed up by a left-handed-mouse option in some OSs. I've never used that despite being left-handed! -- John-Reed Maffeo |
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> On 2019-12-27, at 2:52 PM, John-Reed Maffeo <[hidden email]> wrote: > > I don't remember when and never knew why the "Swap Mouse Buttons" preference was enabled by default, It was quite a long time ago and almost certainly done by Andreas to match what Windows typically does. Remember that waaay back Windows normally expected a two-button mouse (just to be awkward, like always) and so a lot of people felt more comfortable with left->select, right->menu. Because of that the halo had to be done with a cmd/alt/opt/windoze/meta/whatever key-right-button combo. Some time around then Mac GUI sort of drifted into using left->select, right->menu, middle->just be a scrolley-thing. Then it just got more and more confusing. I've committed (yesterday) some changes to the inbox for several help packages that are an attempt to clean up the descriptions as well as explaining a few more points of the UI. There's a *lot* more that could be done, including probably breaking up the UI descriptions into separate pages and adding illustrations. One of the things you learn when trying to describe stuff is that too much of it is far too complex. Which is why I keep trying to teach people to write a user manual first - so you work out what you're trying to do and actually do that instead of just a random pile of what seemed cool at the time. After all, if you can't explain it so people can use it, what on earth is the use in writing it? tim -- tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Useful random insult:- Hid behind the door when they passed out brains. |
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In reply to this post by jrm
> Since we have so much invested with RYB in code and documentation, I suggest we stay with it. Yes, but yellow is the right one. Blue is the middle one: SELECT, EXTEND, MENU Best, Marcel
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