Re: Middle click, "dumbing down" Slashdotted

[Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave culture-libre org>]

Le 2013-09-24 19:27, Ray Morris a écrit :
> Allan Day <allanpday gmail com> said:
>
> > You're making a lot of assumptions here. When this story broke it 
> > was
> > on the basis of two commits, and had no other background 
> > information.
>
>
> I've read some of the discussion. The news stories did pick up on
> context menu, making it a non-default setting, etc.
> It does appear that there is additional background I haven't located
> any record of.  I'm not making any assumptions 
> about what that may be.  I have read discussion of making things
> easier for new users, the key word "discoverable" 
> is used more than once on the page about the proposal, etc.  Based on
> the available background, I'm pointing out a 
> principle that is true globally.  For any system that will be used
> many times, over a period of time, it is false economy |
> to make it simpler in the beginning by making it harder in the long 
> run. 

There's a pdf document somewhere about gnome design foundations (I 
can't
find it now, but probably I found it on [2], where you can read a quote
which states something like "be usable for new users, hackable for 
power users,
but optimize for middle users".

So I guess gnome designers are aware of this.

As far as I concerned, I like the middle click paste, but I think there 
are
way to improve the copy/paste functions, sometime you inadvertency 
select
something and as a result you don't paste what you want. To my mind, an 
ideal
solution would include a way to paste one of the, say, ten last copied 
items.
But on the other hand, you don't want to cluter the interface…

[2] https://planet.gnome.org/ux/

> The interface we're using right now, English, is a great example.
> Suppose someone proposed simplifying English so 
> that it could be learned completely in six months, that we remove any
> words or language constructs not used by 
> six-month-olds babies? That would of course be ridiculous.

But it does exits and you even have a "simple English" wikipedia 
version[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_english


>  We want
> the interface we're using to be deep, to have more and 
> more power we can discover over time.  Just as young children learn
> "mama", then later learn "maternal", new users can 
> use ctrl-c/ ctrl-v, until they learn more.  (Though ctrl-c is of
> course a _terrible_ habit on Linux.  The same keystroke is used both
> for copying data and for immediately killing the program with extreme
> prejudice, losing all data.)
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