Linked by alcibiades on Wed 10th May 2006 19:40 UTC
I started out as a Mac user in about 1985 in a world which will be totally unfamiliar to almost all readers of OSNews. You wrote out your stuff by longhand, and a secretary typed it on a word processor. If you were lucky and able to manage it, you could dictate it. But you did not dictate into a dictating machine, because these were big heavy and expensive. You dictated it directly to someone who could 'take shorthand'. If you had a PC, it ran DOS. You looked for your files, and moved them around, started applications, one at a time, from the command line, and the command line was not pretty, it was green on black.
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RE[4]: Me too, at least for work.
by twenex on Thu 11th May 2006 00:12
in reply to "RE[3]: Me too, at least for work."
Member since:2006-04-21
They don't have to. They'll use a one button mouse to slowly navigate the menus and press the clearly labeled buttons, icons, etc. They have almost the same amount of access as those who know all the keyboard shortcuts.
You're forgetting that some people use the keyboard to type! :-)
There are probably more touch-typists in the world than efficient three-button-mousers like myself.
Member since:
2005-07-10
Is there even a consistent difference between the use of Alt, Ctrl, Command and Option?
I can't cover it all, but here are some examples:
Ctrl-key works with shells. This is very nice, because Ctrl-C is a common operation in a shell to stop a program. Unfortunately on standard PC keyboards, this collides with the Copy shortcut.
Doesn't on a Mac keyboard, since the Cmd-key is mapped to such operations.
Ctrl-key can also alter the behaviour of the keyboard navigation keys
It even behaves like old-style UNIX cursor navigation and text editing with Ctrl+F, B, D, etc. in normal text fields.
Alt-key provides alternate chars for letters.
Alt-key also alters the behavior of the mouse buttons and is sometimes used in combination
Cmd-key is basically what Ctrl does on a PC keyboard. It provides access to most keyboard shortcuts. It's also what you press to call up popup menus when you have a one-button mouse.
I think the design is very consistent and complete. There is no "Windows-key", a key that you only use for a few things under Windows, where the Cmd-Alt-Ctrl trio provides hundreds of combinations to access things through the keyboard.
And how can users too stupid to use a two- or three- or ten-button mouse ever be expected to cope with an 80+ key keyboard?
They don't have to. They'll use a one button mouse to slowly navigate the menus and press the clearly labeled buttons, icons, etc. They have almost the same amount of access as those who know all the keyboard shortcuts.
The rest of us who know what we're doing can hook up a 27 button mouse and an airplane cockpit for a keyboard.
OSX scales very well with the skill of the user.