Re: intelligent dialogs

["Michael T. Babcock" <mbabcock fibrespeed net>]

Not everybody thinks in numbers.  Yes, I'm a big math fan and love reading
books like "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" and other John Allen Paulos
books, but I don't advise people to order their lives by numbering things.
It _isn't_ convention for people to number their fingers.  Some people count
starting with their forefinger, others with their thumbs, and some people
can only count to one, using their middle finger ;-).  That said, no, I
wouldn't advise numbers.  I can understand X using them internally -- just
as this application is residing at a memory address known as 0xC00.....
something, not "Outlook Express".  But I don't want to know that usually,
and neither does any other user.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Fox" <kfox@vulpes.com>


> "Michael T. Babcock" wrote:
> > You're trying to convince me that left handed people in north america
should
> > be taught to count from right to left intuitively for the sake of their
> > mouse?
>
> No, numbering is just a convention:
>
>   little finger = 4
>           thumb = 0
>
> Put both hands palm down on a table in front of you and the
> finger numbers are:
>
> (left hand) 4 3 2 1 0 (right hand) 0 1 2 3 4
>
> We can bind commands to finger-# and it doesn't matter which hand
> you use. (This makes sense because fingers have different abilities
> depending upon morphology not on spatial ordering... ;)
>
> All that's necessary is for the software to know if somebody is
> using the mouse left or right handed and it can reverse the button
> ordering so that everything else "just works". (A really smart mouse
> would do this automatically upon detecting where the user's thumb
> is. ;)
>
> This is why X11 uses Button1, Button2, Button3, etc. instead of
> LeftButton, MiddleButton, RightButton.