Article:		Inside Contextual Menu Items, Part 1
Subject:		Feh
Date:		2004-05-28 23:09:28
From:		freelancer
I still can't understand why people want two, three, four, or five-button mice. I hate sitting down at someone's Windows machine with the stupid bazillion-button mouse, where you're never quite sure what's going to happen next time you accidentally push a mouse button you didn't mean to push. I've got more than a hundred buttons sitting on my keyboard. The mouse is for pointing at things; it doesn't need more than one. I have no desire to turn my mouse into a second keyboard. Multiple mouse buttons are a crutch to work around the horrible UI design of Windows. They are one of the biggest sources of confusion to the new user, too, as people who have done tech support will know all too well. While contextual menus can be handy, since they are by their very nature hidden, overloading them is poor UI design. They should always duplicate functionality that can be found elsewhere. But the ongoing whining about the Apple one-button mouse is just plain annoying. A whole lot of people like it better, myself included, and we really, really don't want the Apple UI to start assuming the presence of multiple buttons, or relying upon it, so let's just keep the multi-button monstrosities as add-ons for those who want them. They work just fine, so there's no need to complain about it.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• RE: Feh
  2004-06-01 12:57:48  some-guy [View]
  
  
  I can accept that some folks like their multi-button mice. They are free to buy them, and all the power to them. But I don't need more than one button. Personally, I am a laptop owner. I use the trackpad on my TiBook all day long (I have worn the paint off of the button). I can hit control and get a contextual menu if I want, or I can use keyboard shortcuts (my preferred method) to do things quicker than navigating the menus above.
  
  Frankly, I think mice are pretty awful. I have owned a trackball (Turbo Mouse) for something like 10 years, and have never regretted the $100 I spend on the thing (I have had 2: 1 ADB and the other USB). Groping around on the desktop or having to look away from the screen just disrupts the flow of things.
  
  But I don't program the buttons to do anything custom on the Turbo Mouse. For me, I don't know why I should bother to. I always forget what it they are used for. Chording, etc. is a big whatever to me. But that is me. If someone wants to make some kind of bizarre 2 foot tall rubber smurf that can have its various appendages programmed through a control panel so that, when you pinch its nose and left ear, it performs a copy, or scroll up and down by jabbing a fork in its left eyeball and wrenching it up and down, if it works for you, then have a good time with it.
  
  This is not to disqualify the contextual menu plug-ins people have made. There are several third party ones I need every day, and I had started writing my own about 1-2 months ago. But you don't need a second mouse button to realize the value of contextual menus.
  
  Contextual menus are a tool. They can be abused and polluted, as they have been in Windows (nasty interface inconsistencies abound), and they have been occasionally. Services are the same way.
• RE: Feh
  2004-06-02 05:36:15  jimothy [View]
  
  
  On laptops with a trackpad especially, I think a control-click is much easier than a right-click. I rarely use the button on a Powerbook, preferring to tap to click. But on a PC laptop, there's no way (that I know of) to "right-tap-click."

• Feh
  2004-05-30 10:48:51  senjaz [View]
  
  
  I think they are perhaps aiming for this:
  
  http://www.hallogram.com/bat/
  
  (it's a one handed keyword)