A wee bit of humor is needed, and I apologize if it’s geek humor, but it’s the first thing to make me really laugh in days.
From a weblog post on operating system usability and interfaces:
3. Visual Attention - Sine Qua Non
Every single little tiny-weeny little interaction-shraction requires your visual attention. And I’m not talking peripheral attention, nooooo, then we could all go home and interact, couldn’t we? You have to actually drop focus on what you’re looking at and move your eyesight in order to find that tiny little resize button of the window. If your screen is large enough, you are even forced to move your head to find that window resizing widget. There’s more penalty: once you’re done, you must relocate that thing or text you were reading before you got the divine idea of resizing the window. The same goes for moving, scrolling, closing, zooming, panning and… . The Alfred Einsteins over at Adobe’s somehow found out their users like to pan their documents (inside information? mole in the building?), so they assigned the SPACEBAR to invoke the »divine semi-mode of panning«. All respect to Adobe for that - they did better than the combined efforts of Redmond, Cupertino, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder (which equals the combined efforts of Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder). However according to my book, an action as atomic as panning mustn’t be mode driven. In this particular case, Adobes panning only works if the user isn’t inside a text object typing, in which case that »divine semi-mode of panning« is reduced to nothing but a space. An unwanted space at that.
»But sir, all the other keys were busy!!«.
No they weren’t.
Situations like these make me feel sorry for the spacebar. So big and strong… He totally rules over the other keys, and yet all he produces is… nothingness. I hope I never find myself in the situation of having to explain to aliens what the LARGEST KEY ON THE KEYBOARD does. »Well… this key? Right over here? Ah, the chubby one! It.. spaces… kind of… leaps.. a tiny bit. In the text… See…? Nothingness! Hey, I know how this must sound… Hey! Wait!! No!! Come back!! But we just met!! COME BACK!!«
That’s alright, they would probably have left anyway as soon as they saw me clicking »Start« in order to shut the computer down.
Yes, damn it, I’m a geek… and it’s funny to me!!!
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