[HN Gopher] Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button...
___________________________________________________________________
Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWIG
(2005)
Author : gumby
Score : 143 points
Date : 2024-08-14 11:22 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| colesantiago wrote:
| (2020)
| moffkalast wrote:
| Copy and pasting the old news story has to be some ironically
| fitting way to honor the man.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Larry Tesler was a great figure in computing history, but why is
| this being reposted now?
|
| "Inventor of Cut/Paste" is such a ... limited ... way to describe
| his accomplishments.
| nusl wrote:
| The article does mention other things, though it makes sense
| that they would highlight what he's most-famous for.
| Moomoomoo309 wrote:
| I think it's a fantastic way to describe his accomplishments,
| it gives context to how early and groundbreaking his work was
| in a way that even the least tech-savvy can understand.
| Everyone knows what cut and paste are, no one thinks about the
| fact that someone had to come up with it.
| amszmidt wrote:
| Limited, and also wrong -- Tesler didn't invent any of those.
| They existed already by 1973 (supposed date of these inventions
| at Xerox PARC); e.g. TECO from MIT and E from Yale had
| functionality for cutting/pasting, replacing strings, etc.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Also, I don't think it particularly counts as an invention as
| it was heavily used in publishing well before the computer
| era, and was just shifting to a computing context and re-
| using the same metaphor. For a long time, text was printed in
| sections, physically cut up and pasted to a board, and when
| the entire page was assembled it was photographed to create a
| negative that was used to print the newspaper.
|
| Just to be clear that I'm not intending to disrespect his
| work, just arguing the semantic meaning of "invention" with
| respect to this. His obsession with mode-less user interfaces
| and user-facing simplicity is far more significant a
| contribution to society in general (and ironically, cut-and-
| paste is almost the antithesis of his main philosophy as the
| once-cut data becomes hidden state - it'd be a better
| metaphor to highlight the data and physically move it around
| the document).
| II2II wrote:
| The wording of the article suggests that he came up with the
| term "cut and paste", rather than the concept:
|
| > In 1969 Tesler volunteered to help create a catalog for the
| Bay Area's Mid-Peninsula Free University. He and Jim Warren,
| founder of the West Coast Computer Faire, did the paste-up
| for that catalog. Around the same time, Tesler saw a demo of
| a computer command that allowed you to bring back something
| that you had deleted. The command was called "Escape P
| Semicolon" (or something similarly arcane). Several years
| later, when Tesler was at Xerox PARC writing a white paper
| about the future of computing, he drew on the memory of those
| two experiences to predict that you would be able to "cut and
| paste" within computer documents.
| mark-r wrote:
| It amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and
| paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually
| point to the person that did it.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It's a good reminder, that everything had to be invented at
| some point in time.
|
| Even trivial stuff as boiling tea water ...
| account42 wrote:
| I'm not sure if invented is the right term in all cases.
| Discovered may be more appropriate in some.
| otras wrote:
| I'm loosely reminded of that Roger Sterling quote from _Mad
| Men_ : _"I 'll tell you what brilliance in advertising is: 99
| cents. Somebody thought of that."_
| airstrike wrote:
| Indeed! I'm writing an app that resizes and moves shapes on a
| canvas (among other things) and I'm amazed at how many trivial
| little things I had to write that everyone including me would
| take for granted, including copying and pasting, drawing the
| little handles to resize the shape, changing the cursor based
| on what's below it (the handles or the shapes), drawing a
| translucent version of the shape when it's being moved/resized,
| changing the position of the shape when it is resized from
| _some_ of the handles but not all (top left vs. bottom
| right)...
| rqtwteye wrote:
| There will be a lot of obvious stuff invented in the future
| that we aren't thinking about now.
| bluGill wrote:
| My dad grew up on a farm, and latter regretted not inventing
| the large round baler that most farmers use - he already knew
| about small round bales, so the only thing missing was make
| them larger and then haul them on a tractor instead of
| lifting by hand as you did the small bales. Despite saying
| the above for years it never occurred to him to invent the
| large square baler which the same concept (haul with a
| tractor), but stack better. Everything was known and so
| obvious in hindsight.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > Everything was known and so obvious in hindsight.
|
| that's why "non-obvious" is so contentious in patent
| examinations. How do you KNOW it was obvious _at the time_?
| cubefox wrote:
| Often the obvious stuff was invented decades ago, but some
| old people in power persistently refuse to implement into
| major products. Like the ability to copy multiple things
| without overwriting the previous entry. Who would ever need
| that?!
| tom_ wrote:
| Not before time, this is in windows 11.
| cubefox wrote:
| I assume the last product manager who vetoed this change
| for decades finally retired.
| qohen wrote:
| Started with Windows 10.
| wruza wrote:
| Winkey+V on windows, for anyone interested. Can be turned
| off in settings app.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Back before 2009, early iPhones didn't have cut/copy and paste.
| Folks had to figure out a good scheme that worked with touch
| screens.
| xattt wrote:
| > Folks had to figure out a good scheme that worked with
| touch screens
|
| In Jonny Ives' brilliance, the magnified view was done away
| with for several iOS versions.
|
| This man was Karl Pilkington of technology.
| layer8 wrote:
| Which I found flabbergasting at the time, because it had been
| a standard feature on PDAs ten years prior. I only bought an
| iPhone once it gained cut&paste support.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Cut and paste is a sort of obvious miss, but in general, I
| think Smartphones benefitted from not taking for granted
| the features of PDAs. There was always something deeply
| niche about the things.
| layer8 wrote:
| There are more misses. For example I found it surprising
| that they didn't include a universal "context menu"
| equivalent (long press would have been obvious) and a
| universal menu bar equivalent (like Palm OS did). Stuff
| like this is why we still have an awfully complex and
| inconsistent UI landscape on mobile.
| qball wrote:
| >and a universal menu bar equivalent
|
| webOS, the poster child for simple and consistent UI, did
| all of this.
|
| Much like the Amiga, this OS is always imitated, never
| copied, even though Android should have thrown out
| everything after Honeycomb to adopt what it brought to
| the table.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think I lightly disagree. Phones are just not good for
| complex use-cases. I don't want a context menu on my
| phone, the depth of interactions in a browser for example
| should be... slide the webpage this way, slide it that
| way, poke a link (or, I guess, to be leave room for what
| I'm doing now, poke a text box to write in it). Dumbing
| down the UI was a good idea.
| layer8 wrote:
| We do have all sorts of inconsistent "context menus" now
| on mobile. Sometimes after you select something,
| sometimes as items under the share button, sometime when
| you actually long press, sometimes a menu appears when
| you tap an item, sometimes as action items that appear
| when you slide an item to a side. And even for a single
| of those variations, different variants with different
| looks exist, etc. A uniform way to "show me all actions I
| can perform on this item" would be greatly beneficial.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality
| especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into
| the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply
| horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I
| think it's a huge regression.
|
| I can't wait until somebody dusts off the design
| principles of Windows 95/2000 or Mac System 7 and will
| sell this as the new UX paradigm.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality
| especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into
| the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply
| horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I
| think it's a huge regression.
|
| Indeed. Remember when every icon had a tooltip that told
| you what it would do? Remember when it shipped with a
| book that also told you what each thing did?
|
| I recently used an app that was a unified phone/pc
| interface and I was pretty sure that somewhere in a list
| of icons was a thing I wanted, but wasn't sure which. I
| picked the wrong one and then had to figure out howto
| undo what I had just done.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Who needs to waste time with manuals when you can just
| Google what you want to do and watch a teenager deliver a
| three-minute monologue with 15 seconds of actual (but
| incorrect) content?
| olyjohn wrote:
| Or the content was correct at one point, but 3 weeks
| later the button was moved in some random update.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Yeah. Tooltips are a big loss. They would be so easy to
| implement but nobody seems to care anymore.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Oh yeah, phone UI infecting desktop design is a real
| shame as well. These are just different types of devices.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Yeah i think this was a UI issue more than a 'we don't think
| it's a needed feature' issue. Long press with that sticky
| popup was just something that hadn't come to yet... and
| certainly forcetouch tech didn't exist yet.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be
| invented.
|
| Which is was. A few hundred years ago. Cut-and-paste began as a
| manual process. Arranging material for printed often involved
| very literal cutting and pasting of text and images. Entire
| trades (typesetters) were dedicated to the task. A more
| accurate description of Tesler's contribution was that he was
| the first to _implement_ the concept in the digital realm. The
| person who "invented" the delete key did not invent the
| concept of deleting a character.
| namdnay wrote:
| yes i think it was pretty obvious to anyone reading this
| article that Larry Tesler did not invent the physical action
| of cutting and pasting paper
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I'm not so sure. The art of typesetting something like a
| newspaper page doesn't exist for most people. They see
| oldschool wooden printing press ... big gap ... then
| bubblejet printers. I know people who think newspapers were
| somehow silkscreened. The idea that someone in the mid-20th
| would glue bits of text to a page, which was then
| transformed into a metal printing plate, is a process most
| do not appreciate.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Yeah, in the early aughts I had to explain
| phototypesetting to some students, they just thought
| everyone used metal type or it's evolution, the
| typewriter, until the advent of the computer.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Sliced bread was invented in the 20th century
| no_wizard wrote:
| Important to note: mechanically, uniformly and massively
| available sliced bread.
|
| Of course bread has been served sliced for centuries before
| kps wrote:
| The alternative, as used e.g. by the Xerox Star, was select-
| and-copy/move. The advantage over cut-and-paste is that you
| don't have invisible fragile state.
|
| However, the Star implementation had copy and move _modes_
| (select source, COPY, mouse to destination, CLICK) and Tesler
| hated modes. I don 't know why Star didn't use the modeless
| version (select source, mouse to destination, COPY).
| Retric wrote:
| To be able to do copy (edit) paste (edit) paste you need
| independent storage of what's copied. Move requires new UI
| sate where cut is just Copy (Edit:Delete). With Undo cut is
| safe enough and there's likely something more critical to
| work on than a Move UI.
|
| Also, I've seen some terrible move UI. It may seem cool to
| have a big floating blob of text follow the curser but that
| doesn't work well when you want to move multiple pages or
| across multiple pages.
| layer8 wrote:
| If you want to replace by pasting, you'd lose the first
| selection by selecting what you want to have replaced. Which
| means you'd need different selection modes depending on
| whether you are selecting the source or the target of the
| copy/move. Furthermore, mainting the original (source)
| selection while preparing the insertion point (target) of the
| copy/move is also fraught with some fragility.
| kps wrote:
| > _If you want to replace by pasting, you 'd lose the first
| selection by selecting what you want to have replaced._
|
| Yes, that's the tradeoff; you'd have to delete that
| separately. This would be quite close the X11 primary
| selection and middle-click paste. I think that works
| reasonably well on its own, but trying to provide _both_
| models as X11 does is a mess.
| detourdog wrote:
| The mother of all demos had a chorded keyboard, a mouse,a
| regular keyboard, and video conferencing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I love that piano like chorded keyboard (https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard#/media/File:X...) from the
| alto. I think it's still and interesting UI concept but I
| think it should/could be adapted to a foot pedal design,
| chords would be constrained to 2 inputs though unless maybe
| two of the inuputs were directly side by side then you
| could expand to three. Organists know what's up ;)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There was one guy at Xerox (Smokey Wallace, RIP) who
| loved the keyset and could type like a mad man on it.
|
| Everyone else just put it away and ignored it, until
| MazeWar came along.
| detourdog wrote:
| I thought about it a lot and realize the design was
| swallowed by control key shift combinations.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You're talking about the keyset.
|
| Most Alto users didn't even use theirs until MazeWar came
| along. Then tech support was flooded with bad keysets that
| people wanted to start using.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Does anyone actually use cut-and-paste? Copy-paste-delete is
| the less scary option, right?
|
| There's a reason copy usually gets the C shortcuts I think.
| kbolino wrote:
| I use cut and paste pretty often. Besides giving visual
| feedback that the operation actually worked, it also makes
| it easy to move things around, including between files.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Almost everything you see or use around you was invented at
| some point.
|
| e.g. the following things were all invented:
|
| - that a human dwelling has space between adjacent dwellings
| and/or eventually streets (straight streets came even later)
|
| - punctuation and spaces between words (looking at you Ancient
| Greek)
|
| - what word to use when answering the phone ("ahoy hoy" was one
| proposed option)
|
| It really is true what Steve Jobs said (apropos given Larry
| Tesler worked at Apple):
|
| "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people
| that were no smarter than you and you can change it.|
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Demonstrably untrue, since humanity was made up of people who
| lived happily without those things and never even thought of
| them. Probably even laughed at them when they first appeared.
| delduca wrote:
| Larry Tesler: Computer scientist behind cut, copy and paste dies
| aged 74
| chucksmash wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| Larry Tesler Has Died (gizmodo.com) 1346 points on Feb 19, 2020 |
| 155 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282
|
| Edit: Original URL updated from BBC obit to IEEE post so this is
| a bit of a non sequitur now.
| milkshakes wrote:
| Bret Victor - Larry's Principle:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGDrIy1G1gU (~38:08)
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 'No modes' ...this was a super influential talk for many of us
| a decade ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591298
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315328
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196513
| aaron695 wrote:
| (2020) and a shit article.
|
| Better -
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men
|
| He (helped) coin WYSIWYG and browser and user friendly all in the
| 70's.
|
| BBC wrongly _somewhat_ implies Cut /Paste was 80s, in the post
| computing invention era.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we changed to that article from
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695. Thanks!
| globalise83 wrote:
| Ctrl C, Ctrl V 1946. Ctrl X 2020.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Ctrl Z
| bee_rider wrote:
| Do'h
|
| fg
| PorschtU wrote:
| RIP to a legend!
| jrh3 wrote:
| Nice features but I still prefer yank and put.
| Cerium wrote:
| (cough) kill and yank.
| zuckerma wrote:
| What a sad story.
| 1equalsequals1 wrote:
| How so?
| bluGill wrote:
| One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at
| least 3 buttons to be useful. You sometimes need to select
| something and sometimes you need to launch it. Or you need to
| select in several different ways. Because of this miss-invention
| they had to invent the double-click and all the complexity of
| timing (try making double click for someone old an nearing senile
| and someone young and fast with the same timeouts - this is often
| impossible)
| kps wrote:
| Double-clicking is also _undiscoverable_. People had to be
| taught about it. Nothing natural or previously familiar works
| that way.
| layer8 wrote:
| To be fair, people also had to be taught how to point with a
| mouse.
|
| The double-click also wasn't essential, you could perform all
| actions using the one-click menus. The double-click was
| introduced as a shortcut. From the Apple Lisa Owner's Guide:
|
| 8<------------------------------------------------
|
| _Shortcuts_
|
| The File/Print menu contains all of the commands you need for
| creating, opening, closing, and storing your documents.
| Because you use these commands so frequently, the Office
| System includes a simple shortcut for performing these tasks:
| clicking the mouse button twice.
|
| To tear off a sheet of stationery, click twice rapidly on the
| stationery pad icon.
|
| To open an icon into a window, click twice rapidly on the
| icon.
|
| To close an open window, click twice rapidly on the window's
| title bar icon.
|
| Clicking twice to close a window can either set aside the
| object or save and put away the object, depending on where
| the object's shadows are. If there is a shadow on the
| desktop, clicking twice causes the object to be set aside. If
| the only shadow is in a folder or on a disk, clicking twice
| summons a dialog box, which asks you whether you want the
| object set aside or put away.
|
| 8<------------------------------------------------
| bluGill wrote:
| Pointing with the mouse is discoverable though. If you
| start moving it - which odds are you will do sometime (even
| by accident) you will see the pointer moving and eventually
| figure it out.
|
| You are very unlikely to discover the double click by
| accident.
| layer8 wrote:
| I think it's a spectrum. Unless the double-click delay is
| ultra short, I'm pretty sure you would discover it sooner
| or later. My point was that you couldn't expect someone
| to learn how to use a computer without any training or
| instructions, so if you need that anyway, you can also
| include less discoverable features in it.
|
| There is a trade-off between feature sets that are useful
| if you know them and super discoverable feature sets, in
| the sense that the reason some feature is more efficient
| can also make it less discoverable.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| "I'd ran of the mouse pad" and pointing _at the screen_
| are not the anecdotes.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Less familiar users are often also confused whether something
| requires double-click or not, double-clicking web links for
| example. What's worse is that is often not immediately
| noticeable, leading to opening same program multiple times or
| breaking some submission form.
| II2II wrote:
| I don't know what the ideal number of mouse buttons, but agree
| that it is more than one. The odd thing is it's appearance in
| the Macintosh: a computer where the user was supposed to orient
| most of their actions around the mouse.
|
| That said, I'm pretty sure the double click came about because
| certain operations were costly. There is no particular reason
| why would couldn't use a single click to launch and application
| or load a document, except an accidental click would force the
| user to wait for the process to complete (and it could take an
| unreasonably long period of time on older systems). Assigning
| that function to a secondary button would potentially make the
| problem worse since the user would have to keep the functions
| straight while learning the system, while accidentally clicking
| the wrong button would be more frequent than accidentally
| clicking a button.
| bluGill wrote:
| Apple wanted to advertise you couldn't press the wrong
| button, which meant they couldn't have more than one button.
| layer8 wrote:
| You could still press it at the wrong time. ;)
| bluGill wrote:
| At the wrong time, for the wrong amount of time, in the
| wrong place... Lots of ways to go wrong, but they can all
| be hidden in advertising.
| chongli wrote:
| I used a (OS 7/8/9) Mac for years with a one button mouse. I
| was very productive with it! I remember seeing Windows 95
| with its right-click context menus but I wasn't very
| interested at the time. I was happy using keyboard shortcuts
| and the like.
|
| I believe Steve Jobs was pretty adamant about keeping the one
| button mouse on the Mac for years and it was absolutely the
| right call. The Mac was way easier to use back then!
| bluGill wrote:
| I am not doubting you were productive with it. However that
| does not make it better, it just makes it what you know.
| User experience experts have studied this for a long time,
| and they all conclude that you need more than one button.
| (there isn't agreement on the best number as there are some
| trade offs, but one is clearly not enough)
|
| The world has a real problem with people arguing what they
| know is best without any basis in reality. Even if there is
| a clear reason one choice is better, most arguments for the
| better choice end up being because they know it better not
| the clear reasons it is better (see most metric/imperial
| arguments)
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I don't think it was about him saying 'one button is
| optimal for all time always' I think a lot of it was
| 'this is a whole new paradigm for people who only know
| the typewriter, let's make it simple for them, down the
| road when people have adjusted to the simple case, we can
| make it more elaborate'
|
| Hell at the time when this happened most computer
| joysticks had only one button, or in the case of one of
| the popular joysticks at the time, three buttons that
| were all just wired to one input.
| chongli wrote:
| I have some older relatives who were actually able to use
| a computer back then, thanks to the simplicity and
| brilliant design of Classic Mac OS. Now they are
| essentially shut out of computing for the rest of their
| lives. They can just barely use their cell phones to make
| calls and send the odd text. They do all their banking
| over the phone.
|
| There are tons of people like this. Apple used to be the
| absolute market leader at making computing accessible for
| everyone. At some point they got big enough and powerful
| enough that they could ignore all that and just let their
| dev teams do whatever they want. They gave up on trying
| to make real computing accessible to the masses and just
| pushed all these users to the iPad.
| II2II wrote:
| While Apple's ability to create "simple and brilliant"
| designs in the past can be attributed to the motivation
| and talent of their staff, I don't think you can say
| their current failure to do so implies the opposite. We
| live in a very different world. Computers are expected to
| do more and, regardless of how much Apple despises it,
| computers are expected to interact with other systems.
|
| Just think of Hypercard. Many people here will talk about
| how great it was, and it was great. Yet the most talented
| developers and designers in the world couldn't recreate
| it in a form that is both simple and reflects the needs
| of the modern world. It would always end up lacking
| essential features or be burdened by an overabundance of
| functionality.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's the epitome of design over function. Destroying UX
| entirely so the mouse can look a tiny bit more sleek. Nothing
| more Apple than that I guess.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The Alto used a three-button mouse. It was Charles Irby and
| Dave Smith who decided it would be two for the Star. It was a
| bitter debate, but they won.
|
| When it was three, every Alto program had its own set of
| conventions for them. There was no way that could have been
| unified for a multi-purpose computer.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Just as others have pointed out that cut-and-paste was a term
| around a long time before this reference, so too was WYSIWYG. The
| Dramatics had a top popular song in 1971[0] using the same phrase
| as its title (albeit spelled slightly differently).
|
| I hope we don't hear next about the computer hero who "invented"
| the term "desktop", or "folder".
|
| [0]https://www.discogs.com/master/185397-The-Dramatics-
| Whatcha-...
| layer8 wrote:
| "Cut and paste" was of course a term used with paper before
| computers, but arguably the computer version of it is not quite
| the same, because you have that hidden buffer ("clipboard") and
| can usually paste the same cut item multiple times. Adapting
| the physical-world cut-and-paste process to the computer realm
| can count as an invention.
| qup wrote:
| What you see is what I get
| fsckboy wrote:
| What they said is what I don't get
| themacguffinman wrote:
| His Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous
| "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was
| described less amicably:
|
| > Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every
| single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler,
| Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and
| respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world,
| and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years
| until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do
| these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of
| doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos
| just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of
| semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like
| millions of his own precious children. So they're all still
| there, and Larry is not.
|
| The true reason for his departure is just a subject for gossip,
| but even today I agree that the Amazon store UI is confusingly
| dense and complicated, surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech
| consumer-facing company.
|
| [1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
| hulitu wrote:
| > surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.
|
| surprisingly bad ? Ever saw a Microsoft product ? A Google
| product ? I already set my preferencies. I don't want to set
| them a hundred times. No, i don't want a 1 px border, no title
| bar and no scrollbar.
| dmoy wrote:
| Keep in mind that was written like 12 years ago, when things
| looked differently than they do now. (Notably that's pre
| material design and pre kennedy (the precursor to material))
| kimixa wrote:
| Or an apple product? :P
|
| Good luck trying to find a thunderbolt cable unless you
| already know they categorize it as a "Mac Accessory -
| Charging Essentials". Lots of big carousels showing a sum
| total of 3 items at a time, and you better know the what a
| thunderbolt cable looks like, and don't mistake it for
| "merely" a usb3 charging cable. Or the 0.5m vs 1m.
|
| Or using a mac - window management issues aside (it seems to
| encourage wasting screen space and peer at a tiny window in
| the middle of a massive screen....) - the "settings" app is a
| joke. A huge list of sections on the left, grouped seemingly
| arbitrarily, with a "Search" that only really works is you
| already know the exact wording of the option you're looking
| for. But hey, it's got fancy icons, so I guess that's nice.
|
| This is all a bit tongue in cheek - using a mac to write
| this. All UX is "bad" in different ways IMHO. "Objectively
| best" UX is a pipe dream.
| gymbeaux wrote:
| My main gripe with Amazon is how slow it is. It takes me like
| 30 seconds to change my shipping address and payment method
| before placing an order. I always assume it's because they're
| using Glacier on AWS to drive that functionality.
| strangemonad wrote:
| I literally chortled reading that. Thank you for making my
| day
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I'm an absolute nobody compared to Tesler, but I remember a
| hack week we did at Amazon probably in 2009 or so - the SVP
| (reporting directly to Jeff) was giving a little intro speech
| to what they hoped to see out of the hack week, and he ended
| with an admonition: "Whatever you do, DO. NOT. ATTEMPT. TO.
| REDESIGN. THE. SITE. UI.", and then later was told by him that
| Jeff will literally rip your head off if he caught wind of it.
| shortformblog wrote:
| I wrote a remembrance when he died a few years back. The timing
| of this story (2005) is a little unfortunate, because the genius
| of the Newton investment only showed itself later, even with its
| failure: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdgw/larry-tesler-the-
| inve...
|
| See, Apple invested in ARM because of the Newton, which means
| they held Newton stock. And on top of the fact that this gave
| Apple an inside line/competitive advantage with ARM that we're
| still seeing today, it also meant that Apple owned ARM stock--and
| could sell it. When the company was near its nadir in the late
| 1990s, it nursed itself back to health by selling shares of ARM.
|
| So even Tesler's biggest failure was a stroke of genius.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I have an old messagepad (110) and ran across it a few months
| back when I was going through some of my storage boxes. Plopped
| some AA batteries in it and it booted right up.
|
| Still a great user interface and the handwriting recognition
| still works great (though it is a little slow).
|
| Very much ahead of it's time, the early palm era was such a
| massive backslide (aside from size and price).
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having
| WYSIWYG in the article.
|
| Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was
| early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily
| implies the need (although, doesn't technically demand it) to
| have user input produce only local changes, so we've been cursed
| with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also
| ruins our ability to actually communicate with the computer, or
| describe things on an abstract level. People just poke their
| documents around until they get something reasonably sensible
| looking in their current editor.
|
| Is the text reflowed around the figure or did the user just
| manually add a bunch of line breaks and then manually paste in
| the figure (anchored to what?). We'll out later if somebody
| changes the font.
|
| Maybe WYSIWIG almost works, actually. What you see is... whatever
| I got. Except it only works if we have the same version of the
| same office suite.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree, WYSIWYG is not a good idea, and a one button mouse is
| not a good idea.
|
| You can have print preview if you want to preview the page
| layout. This is also faster and more efficient than reflowing
| the text as it is being typed, anyways.
|
| (I don't know why the spelling is different)
| ilaksh wrote:
| Fascinating.. you are aware of the context of how WYSIWYG came
| about?
|
| So presumably you don't want to return to that state, where you
| literally would have no idea what it would look like until
| several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?
|
| Can you explain a little bit further what your ideal paradigm
| is?
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > where you literally would have no idea what it would look
| like until several minutes later when it finally came out on
| the printer?
|
| That is why print preview is a good idea (which is possible
| with most modern computers; this can be done independently of
| WYSIWYG editing). For example, if you write a TeX file and
| then make the DVI file and use xdvi or another previewer to
| display it on the computer before you print it on paper.
|
| Reveal Codes would be another possibility, perhaps in
| combination with a "partial WYSIWYG" editor which does not
| display reflowing etc in the editor and only in the preview;
| if you use Reveal Codes then formatting codes are displayed
| (e.g. bold, italics, etc), but you can also display the bold,
| italics, etc directly during editing. This can be a in
| between way, which gives you some of the benefits of WYSIWYG
| and some of the benefits of non-WYSIWYG.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ideally people would write mark-up in text editors. If you
| want to be very nice, I guess it would be OK to have drag-
| and-drop WYSWYG environments that spit out the markup code,
| but there should be a very high priority on making sure the
| code produced is human-readable.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Mark-up is something that ordinary users will _never_
| understand. "Good enough" is what they want. Printing it
| to check that it came out right is just fine with them. It
| is simply not worth it for the software to try to make
| everything perfect.
|
| Case in point: my book was edited in Vellum, and it can
| generate PDF and EPUB. The PDF had a widow (one line at the
| top of the last page of the chapter), and Vellum just
| omitted that one-line page. To the reader it seemed like a
| typo (which it was, in a sense).
|
| I "fixed" it by removing a few words up above it, so
| everything fit on the last full page. But it was only that
| I knew about widow/orphan control that I could figure that
| out. Just imagine how much trouble it would be to make
| things perfectly WYSIWYG on every printer and every type of
| document.
| toyg wrote:
| WYSIWYG democratised computerised printing and other areas,
| arguably providing the backbone of the PC revolution.
|
| You're mistaking Microsoft's specific implementation fumbles
| with an interaction mode that helps billions of people every
| day. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are
| plenty of good WYSIWYG implementations out there.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| WYSIWIG was revolutionary in its time. Even the Alto didn't
| really use it, although you could turn it on if you were
| masochistic.
|
| > describe things on an abstract level
|
| That's exactly what ordinary users do NOT want.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Different people's brains work differently, essentially innately.
| And skilled trained brains work differently than the same brain
| did green. It doesn't seem that Tesler's work ever reflected
| these important details about the world.
|
| I expect if tasked, Larry Tesler would have "invented" the one-
| button game controller: fuuuuuunnnnnn (Joe Biden can't get enough
| of his!)
| creeble wrote:
| My favorite Larry Tesler contribution is Tesler's Law or the Law
| of Conservation of Complexity[1].
|
| It answers the question "why does this have to be so
| complicated?", which I have found to be useful in countless
| numbers of UI discussions.
|
| "We need it to do this, that, and this other thing, but in an
| uncomplicated way."
|
| Well, it can't be less complicated than any one of those things
| then.
|
| https://medium.com/kubo/teslers-law-designing-for-inevitable...
| FjordWarden wrote:
| I've always missed is this X.org behaviour on OSX where you copy
| just by selecting text and past text by pressing the middle mouse
| button.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Which makes it impossible to replace a selection by pasting.
| Also, except for terminals, it typically pastes at the pointer
| location, so you need precise aim (emacs thankfully lets you
| customize this, but UI toolkit widgets usually don't)
| ropejumper wrote:
| > Which makes it impossible to replace a selection by
| pasting.
|
| In principle this is false with a Plan9-like model of mouse
| chording. Holding left click over a selection and tapping
| middle click is a reasonable solution.
| morsch wrote:
| Yeah, and I keep pasting the wrong thing because the terminal
| emulator tries to simulate the X behavior (which is very
| useful) but doesn't maintain a separate buffer like X does.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Tesler registered a strange combination of sensitivity to
| people and fascination with math. The best career choice the
| counselor could suggest was working as an architect or maybe
| becoming a certified public accountant.
|
| A CPA??
|
| Im glad to see that counselors have always been terrible?
| outlore wrote:
| "no modes", i've always considered that to be a bit of a mantra
| worth following. but now i seem to be breaking that rule while
| learning Vim (normal mode, insert mode, and so on).
|
| yesterday i was test driving a car with eco mode, sport mode..the
| Larry in me was yelling "no modes"!!!
| ilaksh wrote:
| I also use vim (or neovim). But that doesn't mean that I
| believe in modes or that neovim/vim is a good editor.
|
| I think there is some kind of psychological thing driving this.
| Like subconsciously, I came to the conclusion many years ago
| that "real programmers" use vim or Emacs, and then consciously
| decided that the default keybindings for Emacs were slightly
| worse.
|
| So for decades I have been trying to learn just enough vim to
| get by. But practically every day I miss my PC keys for things
| like selecting text.
|
| At least three times I have got my keybindings the way I wanted
| and then after a new install or something just decided to deal
| with the outdated way that vim does it.
|
| You have to realize the context that vim was invented. There
| was no WYSIWYG. People were used to things like 'ed' where
| everything was a command. Just being able to stay in a mode and
| move around freely on the screen was a big deal. The terminal
| hardware didn't even have a way to hold a key combination.
| norir wrote:
| Vim modes allow you to keep your hands on the home row most
| of the time and make a mouse unnecessary for editing. That
| keeps my hands, wrists and forearms healthy and for that I am
| grateful. Of course a great programmer is not defined by
| their tools. What matters is what you create, not how you
| create it.
| norir wrote:
| The nice thing about a mantra like no modes is that you're
| right 9/10 times. But I won't go back to non-modal text
| editing.
| dang wrote:
| Related - with a top comment by alankay:
|
| _Larry Tesler Has Died_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 - Feb 2020 (149
| comments)
| klelatti wrote:
| > He even convinced Apple to invest in a newly created company,
| Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., also in Cambridge, that would
| produce them.
|
| And that stake was quite possibly crucial in helping Apple
| survive.
|
| > Plus it's on record that Apple made a total of $1.1 billion out
| of selling those shares, which represented a profit of 366 times
| its original investment. That money helped Apple survive, and
| Jobs decision to cut the Newton -- with its ARM processor -- was
| also part of the surgery needed to keep Apple alive.[1]
|
| [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-
| be...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > So why haven't you heard of him?
|
| Because you've had your head under a rock? It was headline news
| when he died (which was after this was published).
|
| > "And the question I remember most was from Steve Jobs. He said,
| 'You guys are sitting on a gold mine here. Why aren't you making
| this a product?'"
|
| Xerox WAS making it into a product (the Star). Of course Larry
| couldn't tell him about that. It failed, just like the Lisa did.
|
| > As one of Tesler's first tasks at PARC, he and a co-worker
| wrote a paper on the future of interactive computing, which for
| the first time talked about cut-and-paste as a way of moving
| blocks of text, images, and the like. It also described
| representing documents and other office objects stored on the
| computer as tiny images--icons--instead of as a list of names
| [see photo, ].
|
| The "co-worker" was David Canfield Smith, who was directly
| involved in the Star, unlike Larry.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt_zpqlgN0M. (he IS a little
| stiff in this)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw
| Animats wrote:
| The Mac effectively had a multi-button mouse. It's just that the
| mode shift buttons were on the keyboard.
| jecel wrote:
| The comments show a lot of confusion about what Tesler invented.
| Other industries did indeed use cut/copy/paste and older editors
| had ways to do these functions. But the cursor in these editors
| normally indicated a character. Larry figured out that if instead
| the cursor indicated the space between characters and he
| sometimes had a second such cursor to indicate all characters
| between them then he could do what previous editors needed
| various commands with a single operation: replace the selection
| with what has just been typed and move the cursor to right after
| that. "paste" would the just the equivalent of retyping a
| previous selection that had been either "cut" or "copied".
|
| If the two cursors were at the same spot (just a blinking
| vertical bar) then you are inserting text as you type it. If
| there was some selected text then you are replacing it and then
| inserting anything more you type. And so on.
|
| Both at Xerox Parc and at Apple he actually tested his ideas on
| potential users and often found he guessed wrong about what would
| work and what wouldn't. He would then try something else.
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