More broken Apples...

Josh Dersch derschjo at mail.msu.edu
Sun May 3 20:53:24 CDT 2009



Warren Wolfe wrote:
> Typists do NOT need to look up, find the cursor, grab the mouse, move 
> the cursor over the text, highlight it, then go up and mouse around in 
> a series of menus....  thus wasting time. 
I can't think of a single, modern word-processor that _requires_ the 
user to do the above for common actions.  Word, Open Office, "Pages" 
from Apple have numerous shortcut keys (some, perhaps, have _too_ 
many...) that make using the mouse/menus unnecessary -- but that option 
is still there for the user who a) is new to the software or b) hasn't 
yet learned what the keyboard shortcut for "insert table at cursor after 
frobbing" is.  (Or perhaps more importantly -- that the "insert table at 
cursor after frobbing" option even exists -- having a well-designed UI 
makes features more discoverable.)

At the risk of making this topic even MORE off topic than it already is, 
I'm curious what specific software you feel falls into the bucket of 
"hard to use but easy to learn."

(Incidentally, where I used to work I knew several touch-typists who 
swore by WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.  Evidently they didn't find it 
"clumsy" at all.  Then again, I found it an incredible pain to use...)

Josh


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