Possibly Deep Thoughts

While upgrading to Ubuntu Edgy Eft, I was asked this question by dpkg:

There are several entries for swat in /etc/inetd.conf

Do you want to ignore this potential problem and continue, or would
you rather not do so now ? Continue? (n/y)

I answered n, which ignored the problem; the complete opposite of what I thought. I’ll have to file a bug report. I always have trouble parsing questions like this, perhaps because I try evaluate it logically. I might have a touch of Aspergers
in that I take words too literally. If I don’t catch myself, I think somebody saying “How are you?” as a real question, not a empty greeting phrase.

I would make a very terrible witness at a trial if real layers asked questions like tv lawyers:

• Did you or did you not see the suspect? The answer would logically always be yes.


• You saw him, didn’t you? No, where most people would say yes.
  

Double negative questions always confuse me terribly. At least I have some understanding of kids with Asperger’s or autism.

Fitts’ law is often cited by UI experts (like Bruce Tognazzini
) as a primary design principle. Tog says

Fitts’ law dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out.

What bothers me is that there is no mention of how difficult to get the mouse back to where it was. When word processing, you can easily move the mouse to select one of the toolbar buttons, but getting the cursor back to the exact place it was before takes much more time.

It allows appears that tests that are “proven” are always using new, inexperienced users. I started with computer 20 years ago, long before GUI was common. I learned vi and emacs, and have them hardwired in my brain. I can’t tell you which key combination to use, but it’s there in the muscle memory. It’s takes a few seconds to figure out the keys afterward.

Especially for people like me, use of “keyboard shortcuts”, as they’re called today, is much faster than any mouse movement. Naturally, for new users, any use of the keyboard will be much slower than the mouse. With more experience, they may acquire the most important key strokes for the way that they use the software.
In essence, they are learning their own private UI. Consistency of interface is very helpful here. There are a number of shortcuts that are consisistent in Windows, and Gnome, and presumably Mac.

The Windows designer made every menu enter navigable by keyboard. Many Mac users also want that, judging by the number of addons that do just that.

I wish people would understand that the tests that have been done with new users., and not toss the results around as definitive for every single computer user.