creat 1222
Charlie Gibbs
Exactly. Furthermore, one of the great arts is designing things so that the user can progress from "beginners mode" to "advanced mode" without having to unlearn and relearn. Sometime one see horrible things that have a set of "simple commands" and a set of "advanced commands" that you are forced to choose between and that have nothing to do with each other, or pointy-clicky and the typeity ways of doing things that are completely different in structure and approach.
However, on the other hand, it's also bad design when the keyboard "shortcuts" force the user to mimic the use of the mouse with the GUI -- so that most of the keystrokes are presses of the tab or arrow keys (etc) to navigate in space from one widget to another, to press buttons, and to do other things much more easily done with a mouse. That's just a mouse emulator: not a keyboard-based interface, but rather a excuse for not having designed one. It's a useful thing to have around for users who can't use a mouse or other conventional pointing device due to physical limitations, but that's about all that can be said for it.
Roland Hutchinson) writes: I hadn't really thought about it that way, but you have a good point. On the other hand, I do like being able to use shift-tab and...
The flip side of this is a dialog box that obviously just a list of command line options with checkboxes and fill-in-the-blanks.
In short: if the user-facing interface is going to offer a choice between the pointing device and the keyboard for all or most of its operations, it has to be designed with that in mind from the outset. You can't just do one (however well) and bolt on the other as an afterthought.
Yes, spouses, particularly preternaturally gifted ones, are useful for that kind of thing! (I've been fortunate enough to have had some experience of that -- still ongoing, I am happy to say...
As always, it is not dogma but balance, intelligence, and creative design that will produce useful solutions.
Agreed.
-- Roland HutchinsonÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWillÊplayÊviolaÊdaÊgambaÊforÊfood.
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