thenk yew, thenk yew
jjmaximum said:
All of this is truly silly, you know? Back at my job, we once had to work with a custom DOS program to make our captions and subtitles. All keyboard commands, yuck. Then we switched to... Windows. Boo. But anyway, things were in that (almost) GUI of Windows. I also was given one of those strange, two-button mice.
So... what I had to do every day was watch movies, and place the subtitles on a time code and type out what the actor had said. The Windows part was great in that we could use DiVx files, not 3/4" tapes, and watch our titles on the actual image, for placement and so on.
This is like film editing, though. Know what kind of mouse an editor uses? A custom keyboard. Colored keys with all kinds of meaning only for that program. Way faster than any general interface ever.
At first, I used the mouse to place the cursor, and stuff like that. Then an editor used macros to make up a set of basic commands. But that broke every time the programmer made another version, so he hard-coded some commands into the program and we tossed the macro program.
The goal, in uses like this, is to work ALL on the keyboard. Otherwise, you get to a point, you have to find the mouse, use it, find the keyboard again, and go on. But once you've got all the typing, and all the basic commands, on the keyboard, you can really fly. Productivity went up maybe 20%, once people mastered the simple commands on the number pad, which for this program, had been reassigned to commands like, "back up ten seconds and start playing with the titles I just laid in," or "save this title, and make a new one, putting a time code at the instant I pressed the command, and stop the film." Three or four mouse-clicks became "Alt-8 [number pad]."
What I'm trying to say is, it all depends. The Mac has been designed as a one-button environment on a general level. If our subtitle program was on the Mac, what you'd want most is a way to do it all quickly from the keyboard. Screw all mice, they slow you down in that context. Other programs have different rules.
I like it, in general, that the Mac can be run from the Menu (and check out Tiger, and how much the menus can be controlled from the keyboard, or the voice--!), and you can also use keyboard shortcuts if you like that, or yes, you can right-click -- though, really, you would have to use a two-button mouse on the Mac with a certain macro capability, so that Windows users could find familiar commands with their right-clicks and all that apostasy.
The Mac isn't a one- or two-button world. It's all for the user. It should be about users controlling things the way they want.
just before my first mac... and then (even on windows) there were no contextual menus, so the 2nd button was even more useless... I remember in the amiga you used the right button for the regular menu bar... quite pointless...
