Talk:OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/The Frame

"As Fitts' Law implies," ... uhhh, the XO doesn't actually come with a mouse... it comes with a touch pad. Does Fitts' Law apply to touchpads? Think about it.. I think you can agree it doesn't.

Actually, I argue that it most certainly does. As Wikipedia states, "Fitts' Law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, for example, with a hand or finger and on computers, for example, with a mouse." The act of using a trackpad is really nothing more than a pointing gesture constrained to the plane of the trackpad, so even without a mouse the rule still applies. - Eben 15:34, 12 January 2007 (EST)

Clipboard

Regarding the Clipboard, actually I believe that over the past 20+ years Apple, Microsoft and Lotus have all tried to enhance the flexibility of the clipboard. The original Mac OS had some very cool multi-page clipboard features. At Lotus we tried a lot of experiments with more clipboard objects and pages. In the end, the users said they found it too confusing and really only needed one thing at a time most of the time. -- Len

In general, I agree: the clipboard should not be as simple as possible.

On the other hand, I still miss VisualWorks Smalltalk's clipboard, simple, elegant and extremely practical.

• standard copy-paste functionality (Ctrl + c, Ctrl + v) (note lowercase)
• extra paste-from-buffer (Ctrl + V or more correctly Ctrl + Shift + v)

The paste-from-buffer used a small stack of 4-5 previously copied elements (iirc) that popped-up in a menu to chose from (being the first one the non-buffer paste). This was very handy, practical and unobstrusive.

Another cool thing (common to all Smalltalks)—not only for writing code, but extremely helpful there too—was the 'enclosure selection', or more precisely: if you double-clicked on any ([{'" character, the editor would select the text until the corresponding closing element. Most code-editors just highlight (not select upto) the closing element, making the shifting of text or code a hassle since you have to memorize where it actually ends and manually select it (or enter the hidden domain of n-key combinations documented somewhere in the manuals).

I like the proposed clipboard metaphor. Was it informed by the Apple Newton or E-mate? In this tablet system, you used a stylus to select objects (text or graphics). The selected item could then be dragged to the sides or top of the screen where it would stick in an iconic form (first words of the text or a graphics thumbnail). You could then switch between tasks and the clipboard icons would remain where they were placed. You could then drag clipboard items into appropriate places. If you double-tap dragged, then the item would remain in the clipboard (a pervasive cut vs. copy gesture). I found this to be very intuitive. --IanOsgood 11:46, 19 January 2007 (EST)