23 May
2001
23 May
'01
5:32 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great John Foust once
stated:
> See his 1991 book "Tog on Interface", where he claims in the 80s
> Apple performed $50M in tests that showed that people consistently
> reported believing that keyboarding (using shortcuts, etc.) was faster
> than mousing, yet the stopwatch consistently showed that mousing was
> faster than keyboarding.
> His explanation for this is that deciding among
abstract symbols is
> a high-level cognitive function, and that this decision is not only
> boring, but that the user experiences near-amnesia in the approximately
> two seconds needed to remember the chord keystroke. On the other hand,
> Tog also argues that two-handed chords (think the handy cut-and-paste
> CTRL/C /V) result in solid productivity gains.
> Around page 180, where in fact he discusses
Raskin's Cat interface and
> the decision to use a single dedicated key for operations such as "Find",
> Tog admits was actually fifty times faster than the Mac's mouse-move.
Hold on a second ... according to Tog, which is
faster? He seems to be
arguing out both sides of his mouth here. First he says the mouse is
faster, then the keyboard. It can't be both. And was Apple testing people
who *could* type, or *couldn't*?
Well, you have to read carefuly, since the above description is shortened.
The mouse is faster if you have _only_ shortcuts and a system of endless
combination. Just think about all these shells for Emacs.
On the other hand, if you only have a few functions, especialy when they
offered to the usa via special keys (not keycombinations or spread out
shortcuts) the keyboard interface is again faster.
And you're unbeatable when you combine both.
And if this was in the 80s, then that was with Apple
keyboards that didn't
have a numeric keypad/editing pad, or (on the later keyboards) the separate
editing keys *and* the numeric keypad.
-spc (But there's a reason why Raskin's
``Find'' function was 50 times
faster ... )
If you ever worked on a Xerox, where you had the copy/move/prop/... special
keys on the left hand side of your keyboard you'd know how easy handling can
be ... unlike todays interface, where you use the mouse for several thing,
here the little critter was only a pointing device, while you selected most
functions via keys (and your left hand). In fact, I still belive we schould
go back there and add some keys - the old PC Keyboard could be used in a
similar way, and one of my first tasks I did with GEM on the PC was a Desktop
which used the function keys in a way similar to the Xerox system.
--
VCF Europa 3.0 am 27./28. April 2002 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/