Talk:OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Sugar Interface/Input Systems

Trackpad as mouse--Would it make more sense for the rightmost button below the trackpad to be the primary button? It is closer to the right hand, and most people are right handed. 24.19.6.204 16:44, 11 December 2006 (EST)

When you think about it, in order to position the index finger centrally on the trackpad, the thumb of a right-handed individual will naturally rest either directly in the middle, or perhaps even moreso over the left mouse button than the right, especially due to the small size of the trackpads on the laptops. - Eben 13:10, 22 December 2006 (EST)

Trackpad as Mouse - right button

From what I understand, the clicking on the right mouse will bring up the contextual menu. Fine. But why from the element underneath? In the land of Smalltalk the contextual menu is relative to the selection, not the position of the mouse. One annoying thing about some interfaces, is that the context-click is also a select-click making the interface counter-intuitive.

Actually, I would argue the opposite on this point. One of the things we've tried hard to do is make things strongly contextual: information relevant to a particular object or control is accessed and displayed contextually, and positioned spatially on screen to support that. As such, clicking on an object (right-click or otherwise) should always have a reaction that's contextual to the element clicked upon. The idea that the previous selection is the target of any right-click, regardless of the cursor position when the click is made, supports a modal approach where there is first a selection action, followed by a "give me more info" action. - Eben 15:26, 20 February 2007 (EST)

If the objective is to place a way to ask things like 'what is this element', then it could be done when there's no selection (or is nil). --Xavi 11:15, 20 February 2007 (EST)

This is true inasmuch as the clicked upon element needn't be selected at all prior to clicking, which supports the "select-click" you mentioned above. - Eben 15:26, 20 February 2007 (EST)

Description of Keys - Editing Keys

I don't know the culture of the target countries, but to me it seems that some cultural differences may have been overlooked when selecting symbols for the 'enter' and 'escape' keys. Where I come from (Sweden) a tick indicates error, while an x indicates selection. I know this difference has confused more than one user. Is this an intentional design choice, to make the users accustomed to the anglic culture used throughout the internet? -- Mohjive 05:27, 20 March 2007 (EDT)

Really? Swedes read them that way? Ouch... as far as I can tell, in the 'derived' cultures I've seen of spanish, english and french they all use the tick/check as ok, and the cross as wrong... This is not to say that I may have been immersed in a sub-culture that interpreted that way while the rest did otherwise ;)

It's a good point, but most certainly the issue will be raised when trying to determine the keyboard layouts on a per-country base—as I know it has been going on— but if that's the case, then the visuals-on-screen will/should also be parameterized... --Xavi 12:09, 20 March 2007 (EDT)