We've Forgotten How to Use Computers
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
What a waste of a great title.
Kb/mouse > game pad > touch screen
Huge flicks and fine precision on the same device without a dpi switch...
But mouse is far more precise specifically because you are throwing your whole arm around in addition to your wrist and fingertips. there is a far wider range of speeds you can be very precise at. Trackball is not great for FPS, though it's better than trackpads.
Precise control.
I absolutely refuse to play an FPS or operate a productivity program (eg: Illustrator, Powerpoint) without a proper mouse. Trying to do that on a touchpad or a touchscreen is a hell I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemies.
Nevertheless, there are alternatives to a mouse. A trackball can have very similar precise control while being more comfortable (for a productivity program; less suitable for a FPS, because the fingers are slower than the hand).
A stylus on a graphic tablet used in mouse mode (i.e. relative mode) offers even faster and more precise control than any mouse.
Think of complex editors like Office apps or Photoshop. You can do the same things with both input methods but learning keyboard shortcuts makes each operation about five times quicker.
GUIs aren't immune to muscle-memory rigidity.
Back then as a student I was using laptops as desktop replacer, as many others, but when I seriously star using computers I realize that I need a desktop, with a decent keyboard and a thumb trackball. All wired. I realize how stupid big laptops are, since they should exists just for portability needs and on-the-go limited usages. NOT used docked, NOT used directly as a desktop replacer. The mouse here is somewhat substituted by touch screens for those who work on small laptops typically NOT on the go, but mouse means in many case just "consumption" not production.
Plan 9 have tried to be mouse centric, but ultimately fail because while some geek find the wow effect in drawing rectangles on a screen and filling them with live text it's just wasted time compared to free tiling modes like Emacs offer. Mouse is useful, yes, but definitively not the thing users forgot about computers.
Users forgot the CLASSIC desktop model, where they own the data and the system to manipulate data, bendable at their own will with few line of user-programming live code. Users have even forgot what's a file https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... and as they are mostly unable to handle their own paper files they are equally unable to handle their digital files. They have lost the paper knowledge, but never acquired the computer knowledge. The mouse here count next to nothing.
Most people nowadays works like dumb terminals operators of the past with the important difference that the mainframe is not their own, but a distant systems owned by third parties "the cloud". Most people nowadays can't produce anything, only consume, choose stuff pushed in front of them by some ML system...
Ultimately though, we need to remember that mice, keyboards, touchscreens, et al. are all merely compromises that were developed to let humans who speak human communicate with computers who speak computer. If we figure out an overall better way than the means before, it's natural they will be superceded.
I do agree with the author that the mouse lends itself very well to precision control, though. Touchscreen is easy and readily available, but it leaves much to be desired for precise control.
I do love the "real" mouse i use on my desktop system (logitech mx master 3), but there's no reason why a laptop can't "natively" support both mouse button and touchpad interaction styles.
There is never any reason to bother worrying about double clicking. It is just a shortcut to select the default interaction option, which is equally available by selecting the interaction option (usually the right mouse button) and choosing it from there.
In fact the great part of the mouse is how much discovery it enables: you can move the mouse over any element of the screen and see how you can interact with it based on which icon is shown. If you don't know what you can do with a given item, you can right click it and get a menu list.
Apple famousely only had one mouse button, and options where shown when you clicked the option button. If Windows had something similar, do you think people would have realised it could also be used when dragging? I still remember when the group I was in realized you could right-drag things and get a useful menu when you did. I can't remember whether we were CS students at the time or had graduated.
Instead humanity uses supercomputers now.
To this day I see most people do not understand right-clicking, and why should they? Context menus are not in-your-face obvious, let alone right-click dragging and other esoteric maneuvers.
I see something similar with touchscreens too: Most people don't know much beyond pinch to zoom. Any gestures or input involving 3 fingers or more is literal pig latin.
Simplifying the mouse down to one button is an engineering decision that aligns with human psychology, even if it's one that rustles the jimmies of many nerds and beards.
uh, except for their physical placement and accessibility with a given digit, sure.
This was the reason why Microsoft introduced Minesweeper to Windows 3.1:
> https://web.archive.org/web/20190925214943/https://mentalflo...
"Decades later, in 1992, the Microsoft version Minesweeper was introduced to Windows 3.1—not to demonstrate that Windows was an adept gaming operating system, but to make the idea of left and right clicking second nature for Windows users, and to foster speed and precision in mouse movement."
On the other hand: if you do consider these coincidences to be spurious, I won't urge you to change your opinion. Instead I give a famous quote from the movie Matrix:
"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes… Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more…"
(quoted from https://www.matrixfans.net/movies/the-matrix/transcript/)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Commands
Even today, I posit that twitch video games train future developers and users on UX/UI features. In a mobile or web GUI, there are moving targets; there is progressive rendering; there are ephemeral dialogs. If you've played DOOM and Fortnite, then you're better equipped for all that.
> Microsoft originally put Solitaire into Windows to soothe people intimidated by the operating system, according to Duzan. It gave them something familiar and fun to do with their computer while it also taught them how to use a mouse. Not surprisingly, for years Solitaire was the most-used application for Windows, Microsoft officials say.
> Minesweeper got in because, at the time Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, it was the favorite game of everybody involved in creating that software, including overlord Gates.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1994/03/09/...
I switched to OS X in 2006 or so and have never enabled right-clicking on any of my mice (with the exception of the occasional game that requires a right-click action).
For casual pointing, clicking, dragging, the one-button mouse does exactly what I want and nothing more. For more advanced mouse gymnastics, my left hand is usually hovering over Control/Command/Alt/Shift. I feel like I've got the best of both worlds.
Except the top of this mouse was one piece of metal that rocked left and right for left or right click. It was impossible to do both at the same time.
-> Bin
I’ve been on Macs for 16 years now and every single Apple mouse I’ve ever used was utter crap.
Computers are tools. Do you see grinder manufacturers say "we only need one type of disk, because people should not have to remember whether they need a diamond blade for masonry or a metal cutting one?" You do not.
There is a frame in which Jobs is correct - the frame in which computers are not tools, but devices intended for the passive consumption of content produced by others. A frame in which tool using never requires skill acquisition (a total inversion of tool use among (at least) humans for (at least) 10's of thousands of years.
No, he was wrong, and if he was right, I refuse to live in that version of the world.
No, it is an imperative driven by capitalism. Employees don't want this. Tool users don't want this (because as you note, if the blade can cut everything it likely doesn't cut anything very well).
The motivation for the kind of tool development you're referring to is not the development of improved tools, but reduced labor costs (and sometimes, possibly, tighter tolerances). That's not a model for tools explicitly marketed (by Jobs!) as tools for everyone.
Haha. Sounds like Java/C#/Go. All corporate (Oracle/Microsoft/Google) languages. Coincidence? ;p
Likewise, Apple mice only ever click. It doesn't left and right click.
Speaking more broadly, Apple computers only ever do One Apple Way(tm). They don't do One Apple Way(tm) and also IBM-compatible/Windows/Linux.
Tools are supposed to be simple in design, because their value is in them delivering results quickly and easily for everyone. And most people using computers want results because computers are tools, they couldn't care less about the process other than keeping it as simple as possible.
I would be the last person on the planet to defend Jobs or Apple's philosophy, but I will give credit where credit is due because they by far understand human psychology the best out of everyone in the tech industry.
Precisely. It's like DeWalt or Milwaukee only making a diamond blade, because "you never need to cut metal, and you shouldn't have to think about that anyway".
> Tools are supposed to be simple in design, because their value is in them delivering results quickly and easily for everyone.
This is not the history of human tools.
According to your theory, most people should cut their extra fingers, because it is too difficult for them to remember that they can do and they should do different actions with each finger.
The user must input eventually the same information with a 1-button Apple mouse or a 2-button Microsoft mouse or a 3-button Mouse Systems mouse.
An Apple user must compensate the lack of mouse buttons by either making multiple mouse clicks or pressing simultaneously with the mouse various keyboard keys.
All these additional actions are slower, more complicated and harder to remember than the task of a user who must just choose with which finger to click.
So no, the idea that a one-button mouse is simpler for the user is just wrong. In fact it is both slower and more complicated.
I think you see a lot less power-users these days in the heyday of the mouse oriented GUI. Even in my own usage of computers I find right-clicking less significant now than 25 years ago.
I even despised the two-button Microsoft mouse.
Both were much worse than a three-button mouse, when the buttons were used cleverly by the user interface. The replacement of the third button with the scroll wheel has started for me the process of finding alternatives for a mouse and eventually abandoning its use.
Most people have never seen a user interface that uses properly all the three buttons of a mouse, so they have no idea how much better that can be than having an uncomfortable scroll wheel in the place of such a button.
Such a good user interface was used for instance around 2000, when you could still find Logitech three-button mice, in the Mentor programs for drawing circuit schematics and PCB layouts.
The third button was used for making mouse gestures, i.e. tracing some pattern on the pad. Each mouse gesture was pretty much equivalent with pressing a keyboard shortcut, but being able to use them with the mouse enabled the user to make most drawings without ever moving the hand from the mouse to the keyboard, which sped up the work a lot.
Scrolling was done in a much better way than with a scroll wheel, by just moving the mouse cursor close to the window side corresponding with the desired scroll direction.
Bring back IRIX. Those guys had everything figured out and it worked great.
If I had to guess, I've probably lost all progress on something around 30 times just from pull to refresh. I'm not even sure how some of these features are legal without any kind of toggle... I can't imagine they're great for anyone with movement disorders.
The thing that makes me feel less confident about the future is that it seems like fewer even people want to know how computers work, even though they mediate their lives through them. There was a generation or two of people who had the opportunity to understand computers, because they were cheap enough to get access to them, and they were open enough (in every sense) to actually be tinkered with.
I don't necessarily believe we're living through a civilization-wide decline of the post-Western Roman Empire variety, because I'm not even sure what that means in a globally connected world. But there are localized areas and domains where it seems like it is, just like there are certain domains where it may seem like the opposite is happening.
Computers for most people are just another household appliance or tool of their trade. They use computers to achieve certain tasks and they don't have time nor interest to figure out the details of how. They want the results, not the process.
Abstraction of the file system is a step in the right direction, even if it rustles the jimmies of nerds and beards everywhere.
There was a time when programmers were all physicists, but I think it'd be silly to measure the talent of developers from the 90s by that standard. Ditto for measuring full stack developers by standard from a time when you needed nothing more than C and shell access to a cgi-bin folder.
Next you need wide hallways, leading to atriums, with smaller doors, leading to apartments, individual rooms, cupboards, shelving, etc.
A building is hierarchical, and similar to a file system. You can explain flow of people, flow of stuff, storage, whatever.
Object store on AWS, say, sort of looks like that in that AWS essentially presents it as a filesystem structure by default but that's mostly hiding the actual structure.
It bears keeping in mind that the traditional folders and documents desktop model is in no way fundamental or universal; its just one mode of computing that was popular in the turn of the century and steeply waning these days.
And its not just phones where the change is happening. Cloud services and other saas have had at least as much if not more influence here. And of course in enterprises people have been using all sorts of weird internal software, erps and crms etc, that might also not been very document oriented. And its not just modern time thing too, for more historical viewpoint you could look at mainframes (IBM big iron etc) which had all sorts of data store models, both from system and end-user viewpoints.
They're called speed holes, because they make the mouse go faster.
:%s/computers/mouse/g