HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: Peter.Gorny@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de (Peter Gorny)
Subject: Re: Knobs are better than sliders
Organization: University of Oldenburg, Germany
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 18:00:57 GMT

guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum) writes:

>Peter.Gorny@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de (Peter Gorny) writes:

>[After a very reasonable explanation why sliders are better because
>they give a better indication of their current value than knobs:]

>>For this reason of direct visual feedback I prefer sliders also on
>>GUIs, inspite of the fact that their control with a mouse is more 
>>difficult because of the micromotoric control of the hand.

>Huh?  What makes you think that controlling a knob with a mouse is
>easier than sliders?  I find the opposite to be true, since you can't
>twist the mouse like you would a real knob...

Oooops - I missed a locial step in between: You cannot turn a knob which is only
an icon, but you can make the icon turn by any other mouseclick sensitive
button or by dragging:
   buttons labeled  with arrows "<" / ">"  or "up" / "down"
   the digital display of the value (changing one digit at a time)
   dragging a "handle" (or the knob pointer) in the direction to be turned,
     but NOT on a circular track
Sorry

Peter Gorny


      ________________________________________________________
      Prof. Dr. Peter Gorny
      Informatics Dept. - C. v. Ossietzky University Oldenburg
                 Computer Graphics & Software-Ergonomics Group
.     ________________________________________________________
      Snail-Mail:    P.O.Box 2503 - D-2900 Oldenburg - Germany 
      Voice:            +49-441-798-2901 or -4521 (Fax: -2155)
      E-Mail:     Peter.Gorny@arbi.Informatik.Uni-Oldenburg.DE 
                                         040003@DOLUNI1.bitnet 
                                              gorny@uniol.uucp
      ________________________________________________________


>--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@cwi.nl>
>"Hello, I would like to buy a fish licence, please."
Xref: sparky comp.human-factors:2038 comp.windows.misc:1310 comp.windows.x:16107
From: johnm@cajal.uoregon.edu (John Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Keywords: n
Date: 3 Sep 92 19:44:07 GMT
Article-I.D.: nntp.1992Sep3.194407.15771
Organization: Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon

In article <a1BHqB7w165w@mantis.co.uk>, mathew <mathew@mantis.co.uk> writes:

>root@kilowatt.uucp (Kilowatt admin) writes:
>>                                 I have to use my HANDS - I have a much 
>> clearer view IN MY HEAD of what I'm trying to accomplish than any GUI
>> programmer could provide me with.
>
>Well, all I can say is that you must have a strange head if the way you
>visualize things cannot be represented on a screen.  Personally I'm more of a
>visual thinker.

I am in the Killowatt admin's camp.  It isn't that what I am thinking cannot
be represented on a screen, it's that GUI designer's don't and can't know what
that representation is.  A CLI, once mastered, is invisible and doesn't
interfere with my internal representations of things.  GUI's cannot be
invisible, and very much force me to think in a manner that is usually
completely alien to me.

>> 	It's nice that GUI's have freed up many peoples time. It greatly
>> increases the productivity most computer-ignorant people get from their
>> computers.
>
>You make it sound as though you think *only* computer-ignorant people get
>increased productivity from GUIs.

I made a similar generalization in an earlier post, and I was wrong -- so
is Killowatt here. It is easy to forget the ALL generalizations are
inherently incorrect.

So I will restate my thesis here: In the majority of cases, when the GUIs
and CLIs are learned to the point of "mastery", CLIs are more productive.
You can accomplish tasks more quickly under CLIs in general, but this does
depend on which tasks we are talking about.


-- 
John Martin                                        johnm@cajal.uoregon.edu
Institute of Neuroscience,   University of Oregon,    Eugene, OR,    97402
From: S_TITZ@iravcl.ira.uka.de (Olaf Titz)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: Knobs are better than sliders
Date: 27 Aug 92 18:16:44 GMT
Organization: Fachschaft Informatik, Uni Karlsruhe
X-News-Reader: VMS NEWS 1.23

In <1992Aug27.163455.10241@arbi.Informatik.Uni-Oldenburg.DE> Peter.Gorny@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de writes:

>  S_TITZ@iravcl.ira.uka.de (Olaf Titz) writes:
>  
>  >The success story of the mouse is that with a mouse, you make
>  >movements of the arm that are intuitively connected to the effect (to
>  >move the cursor upper left, you have to move your hand upper left).
>  >The mouse is like the knob in your example. And it is convenient to
>  >use, compared to even 'more intuitive' things like the ill-fated touch
>  >screen. To use a joystick for cursor positioning has been tried more
>  >than once, but proven that it is undesirable compared to a mouse.
>  
>  The problem of mapping the movement of the cursor onto your hand's movement
>  is not trivial at all. It corresponds to the problems you can observe when
>  (very) young children try to copy letters or figures from the vertical black-
>  board to the horizntal paper. Very often the copy is upsidedown or rotated...

Just what can happen when a mouse gets to confuse coordinates. See below.

>  Try to imagine the difficulties to control a cursor in a 3D viewing cube on
>  a stereoscopic display. We experiment with 2D- and 3D-mice for this purpose.

Controlling a 3D thing with 2D devices is comparable to controlling a
2D mouse cursor with 1D devices, such as two sliders. I can remember,
long ago, I had a toy that lets you draw on a screen (mechanical) by
moving the cursor via two turning knobs - left hand controls up-down
motion, right hand controls left-right motion. May be good for
children to learn motion coordination of the hands, but work with it
would be terrible.

>  (we have even found it difficult to decide how to present a menu in such a
>  (virtual) viewing cube - as a set of blocks, for instance??)

Sorry, I just see no useful application for that. Maybe you could
enlighten me about the purpose. 

>[3-D rotation]
>  That rises a trivial question: why didn't anybody think of that before in
>  regard to 2D-mice? It cannot be to difficult to build an optical mouse,
>  which can also be rotated on the mouse pad (though only in a limited degree 
>  of freedom because of the physiology of our hands) and thus gives us 
>  rotation control over the cursor.

For long the biggest difficulty I had with optical mice was that I was
not able to turn my hand even a little without losing control of the
cursor. I had to confine my hand position exactly to the grid on the
pad, or else (I would turn a little left) I would move my hand right,
and the cursor going upper-right. Therefore the mechanical mouse,
insensitive to rotation, suits my hand better than the optical thing.

MfG,
        Olaf
-- 
Olaf Titz - comp.sc.student - Univ of Karlsruhe - s_titz@iravcl.ira.uka.de -
uknf@dkauni2.bitnet - praetorius@irc - +49-721-60439 - did i forget something?
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors,alt.folklore.computers
From: zcookbruc@cc.curtin.edu.au
Subject: Re: Indentation
Organization: Curtin University of Technology
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 22:14:37 GMT

In article <9224102.2319@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>, fjh@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) writes:
> thinman@netcom.com (Technically Sweet) writes:
> 
>>Graphics computers have been shipping since 1976 (Apple II).
>>Why are you all still programming completely in text?
> 
> We're not!
> Many programs written for for operating systems like Windows, X,
> or the Mac include large portions that are devoted to bitmaps,
> icons, and other such things relating to the GUI interface.
> These are generally not written completely in text but are
> instead created with some sort of resource editor which itself will
> use a graphical interface.
> 

Bandwidth:	Generally takes less room to move text than
		(gooey) pictures
Portability:	Know of any machine incapable of displaying text ?
Availability:	My '11 doesn't have any graphics (yet) and there
		arn't too many languages I can use across multiple
		machines that work graphically.
Tradition:	When we moved from switches to text (on cards) and then
		text on screens (Oh wonder) many of us enjoyed the
		experiance, and have continued to do so.
Self respect:	I wouldn't be caught dead on a MAC!

...BRU

Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
From: Peter.Gorny@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de (Peter Gorny)
Subject: Re: Knobs are better than sliders
Organization: University of Oldenburg, Germany
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 13:38:55 GMT

"John Lacey" <johnl@spinner.cs.indiana.edu> writes:

>jimc@tau-ceti.isc-br.com (Jim Cathey) writes:

>>I disagree!  Rotary controls are easier to do fine tweaking with
>>because you have a built-in and somewhat stable frame of reference --
>>your wrist rotation or finger twist.  With a linear control, you have
>>no reference frame, since arm motions are so coarse.  

>In thinking about this, I realized some motor habits I never had
>before.  When I adjust a knob or rotating control, I touch just the
>control itself.  But with sliders, I grab the control with a couple of
>fingers, and use a couple others to measure distance and to nudge for
>finer control.

That is an observation which I made, too. When adjusting the slider controls
for the heating in my car I grip the slider with thumb and 1st finger 
while supporting the hand on the other three (bent) fingers on the panel.
This allows me to adjust the slider very precisely inspite of its mechanical
resistance (friction) and the small shocks and vibrations coming from the 
car running over the road.
I only got aware of this habit, because it results in an unwanted side effect.
Beneath the slider the ashtray is integrated into the panel and it opens when
you press on the lid.


Peter Gorny


.     ________________________________________________________
      Snail-Mail:    P.O.Box 2503 - D-2900 Oldenburg - Germany 
      Voice:            +49-441-798-2901 or -4521 (Fax: -2155)
      E-Mail:     Peter.Gorny@arbi.Informatik.Uni-Oldenburg.DE 
                                         040003@DOLUNI1.bitnet 
                                              gorny@uniol.uucp
      ________________________________________________________
From: tomf@cs.man.ac.uk (Tom Franklin)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Subject: monitors vs paper
Date: 26 Aug 92 11:33:43 GMT

Can anyone provide me with information or references about the comparative
ease and speed of reading text from monitors and paper.

Thanks in advance.

Tom.

Tom Franklin
Centre for Novel Computing		Phone	+44 61 275 6134
Department of Computer Science 		Fax	+44 61 275 6204
University of Manchester
Manchester				email	tomf@cs.man.ac.uk
M13 9PL

=================================================================

--
Tom.

Tom Franklin
Centre for Novel Computing		Phone	+44 61 275 6134
Department of Computer Science 		Fax	+44 61 275 6204
University of Manchester
Manchester				email	tomf@cs.man.ac.uk
M13 9PL

=================================================================
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
From: Jakob Nielsen <do.not.reply.to.this.address@bellcore.com>
Subject: Re: Info needed for Interchi 93
X-Xxdate: Thu, 3 Sep 92 18:15:14 GMT
Organization: Bellcore - Bell Communications Research
X-Useragent: Nuntius v1.1.1d7
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 92 17:15:23 GMT

In article <1992Sep2.075752.3928@u.washington.edu> Robert Jacobson,
cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu writes:
>If you have an announcement or poster handy, can you please email
>to me the email address for getting information on the Overviews?

Information about INTERCHI submission is available in one of the following
three ways: anonymous FTP, email to automated server, paper mail from
conference office.
Do *not* contact me for INTERCHI information or with any questions about
the conference - I will not reply unless you have read every word in the
guides first!

The following files are available for anonymous FTP from wind.bellcore.com
(IP 192.4.13.8):

/pub/ic93-submission-guides.txt (all the submission guides in ASCII)
/pub/ic93-submission-guides.rtf (all the submission guides, MS Word rich
text)
/pub/ic93-papers-guide.txt (the guide to papers submission in ASCII)
/pub/ic93-papers-guide.rtf (the guide to papers submission, MS Word rich
text)
/pub/ic93-latest-news.txt (any recent changes, additions, or new info)

Note that the papers guide is included in the file with all the submission
guides, but it is also made available as a separate file in case you only
want the papers guide.

The preferred way to access these files is by anonymous FTP (type the
command
ftp wind.bellcore.com and when asked for a userid simply type anonymous -
enter your actual userid on your home machine when asked for a password).
You can also get the files by sending an email message to one of the
following email addresses:
ic93-submission-guides@bellcore.com (both ASCII and RTF files are sent)
ic93-papers-guide@bellcore.com      (both ASCII and RTF files are sent)
ic93-latest-news@bellcore.com

Some of these files are fairly large and thus may not cross all network
gateways gracefully. Please do *not* contact us if you do not receive the
file or if you receive a corrupted file. We do not have the resources to
debug the entire world's email systems, so if this automated server does
not succeed in getting through to you, you simply cannot get these files by
email.

If necessary, you can get the submission guides by paper mail from the
INTERCHI'93 conference office:

Elly Lammers or Charlotte White
INTERCHI'93 European Office
University of Twente
P.O. Box 217
NL-7500 AE Enschede
The Netherlands
Tel: + 31 74 50 40 44
Fax: + 31 74 50 40 44
E-mail: ic93-office.chi@xerox.com

Express mail address:
INTERCHI'93 Office
Dolf Nijhoffstraat 7
NL-7552 GP Hengelo
The Netherlands

or

Carol Klyver
INTERCHI'93 North-American Office
P.O. Box 1279
Pacifica, CA 94044
USA
Tel: +1 415 738 1200
Fax: +1 415 738 1280
E-mail: ic93-office-na.chi@xerox.com

Express Mail Address:
INTERCHI'93 Office
1355 Redwood Way
Pacifica, CA 94044
USA
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
From: Peter.Gorny@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de (Peter Gorny)
Subject: Re: Knobs are better than sliders
Organization: University of Oldenburg, Germany
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 16:15:13 GMT

S_TITZ@iravcl.ira.uka.de (Olaf Titz) writes:

>In <1hZ33V#82f0tg2jvsRT1BGbkM9jBSCw=esr@snark.thyrsus.com> esr@snark.thyrsus.com writes:

>>  Proposed: Knobs are better than sliders
>...
>>  Evidence: human being routinely perform and remember rotary motions down to
>>  a degree or so of precision *without looking at the knob*.  Corresponding
>>  linear motions (on a scale of a millimeter or less) don't seem to be
>>  repeatable without visual feedback.

>The success story of the mouse is that with a mouse, you make
>movements of the arm that are intuitively connected to the effect (to
>move the cursor upper left, you have to move your hand upper left).
>The mouse is like the knob in your example. And it is convenient to
>use, compared to even 'more intuitive' things like the ill-fated touch
>screen. To use a joystick for cursor positioning has been tried more
>than once, but proven that it is undesirable compared to a mouse.

The problem of mapping the movement of the cursor onto your hand's movement
is not trivial at all. It corresponds to the problems you can observe when
(very) young children try to copy letters or figures from the vertical black-
board to the horizntal paper. Very often the copy is upsidedown or rotated...

Try to imagine the difficulties to control a cursor in a 3D viewing cube on
a stereoscopic display. We experiment with 2D- and 3D-mice for this purpose.
(we have even found it difficult to decide how to present a menu in such a
(virtual) viewing cube - as a set of blocks, for instance??)
The best possibilities are given with a 3-D mouse, which makes the cursor 
follow exactly the movement of your hand in space (but see, that you have a 
table to rest your elbow on while working!)
And you can even use this mouse to control 3D-rotation at the same time.
Then you have the possibility to map knob control to the mouse.

That rises a trivial question: why didn't anybody think of that before in
regard to 2D-mice? It cannot be to difficult to build an optical mouse,
which can also be rotated on the mouse pad (though only in a limited degree 
of freedom because of the physiology of our hands) and thus gives us 
rotation control over the cursor.

Peter Gorny



      ________________________________________________________
      Prof. Dr. Peter Gorny
      Informatics Dept. - C. v. Ossietzky University Oldenburg
                 Computer Graphics & Software-Ergonomics Group
.     ________________________________________________________
      Snail-Mail:    P.O.Box 2503 - D-2900 Oldenburg - Germany 
      Voice:            +49-441-798-2901 or -4521 (Fax: -2155)
      E-Mail:     Peter.Gorny@arbi.Informatik.Uni-Oldenburg.DE 
                                         040003@DOLUNI1.bitnet 
                                              gorny@uniol.uucp
      ________________________________________________________

Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
From: max@alias.com (Max Stevens-Guille)
Subject: Re: Knobs are better than sliders
Reply-To: max@alias.com (Max Stevens-Guille)
Organization: Alias Research, Inc. Toronto Canada
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 14:35:25 GMT

In article <1992Aug27.170222.550@advtech.uswest.com>, glw@io.uswest.com (Glenn Williams) writes:
> >It's called a 'pie menu'.  I've seen it demoed on SUN's NeWS system;
> >the author won't implement it for X because X sucks.  Calling Don Hopkins!
> 
> 
You'd have to meet Don to appreciate why this isn't merely a statement
but rather is a religious tenet.  Don is, after all, one of the
first persons for whom PostScript is a "first-class object".

> What a narrow view, it may 'suck' but it's sure available on a lot more systems than NeWS.
>
Sometimes societies need people with narrow views to challenge the
beliefs that the rest of us have. 8-)
 
> 
> Has anyone else implemented this?
>

Don's implementation relied heavily on NeWS's ability to manipulate
round windows.  I don't know for sure, but perhaps some implementations
of X with PostScript extensions could manage this.  Certainly, with
a good graphics model (i.e. X-GL on SGIs) one could implement it within
an application.
 
> 
> 
> glenn williams
> US WEST
> 
> "Your spookin' the cattle." - Curly

-- 
Max Stevens-Guille      Research & Development      __
Alias Research Inc.     110 Richmond St. East,     /
Toronto, Ontario,       CANADA  M5C 1P1           /         Alias 
max@alias.com                                    /   \      Research
vox: (416) 362-9181     fax: (416) 362-0630     /     \_    Incorporated
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
From: jon@afs.com (Jonathan Hendry)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Distribution: USA
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 20:13:12 GMT

In article <1992Aug28.233524.20252@uwm.edu> jgd@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (John G  
Dobnick) writes:
>From article <1992Aug28.113502.24092@walter.cray.com>, by  
toma@romulus.cray.com (Thomas Arneberg):
>> 
>> 
>> For a beginner, what good does a man page do if you don't remember whether
>> the command is "rename," "change_name," "move," etc.
>
>That's what the "apropos" command is for.  Of course, it helps if the
>manpages have _useful_ header lines.  :-)
>
>-- 
>John G Dobnick                          ATTnet: (414) 229-5727
>Computing Services Division             INTERNET: jgd@uwm.edu
>University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee     UUCP: uunet!uwm!jgd
>
>"Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation,
>and is thus a source of civilized delight."  -- William Safire

Yep. apropos. Just the kind of thing I'm likely to type into any given computer  
I'm unfamiliar with. And yet there's no help command. (At least not on my  
Next's CLI)


--
Jonathan Hendry  Anderson Financial Systems
jon@afs.com  (Nextmail Welcome!) or hendryjw@duvm.ocs.drexel.edu
From: ccb@macbeth.umd.edu (Phoenix)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: I can't take this anymore
Date: 3 Sep 92 03:56:43 GMT
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park

<sigh>

Welcome to Usenet, folks. In any unmoderated newsgroup you're going to have
a low signal to noise ratio. Complaining about it further increases the
amount of non-topical noise. Most newsreaders have the ability to "kill"
threads, posts from specific accounts, etc. Grok your newsreader; your
killfile is your friend -- it will keep you sane.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled banality...

"Seeing much, suffering much            -Blake Sobiloff (ccb@umd5.umd.edu)
and studying much, are the               Human-Computer Interaction Lab
three pillars of learning."              Department of Psychology
         -Disraeli                       University of Maryland
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
From: ghm@ccadfa.cc.adfa.oz.au (Geoff Miller)
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Keywords: n
Organization: Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, Australia
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1992 23:42:16 GMT

toma@romulus.cray.com (Thomas Arneberg) writes:

>Try looking at the menus. It's easier to select from a list of multiple 
>choices than to pick a command from out of the air. If you want to do
>things FASTER, then you can start using keyboard shortcuts.

You mean, typing in commands like "mv *.txt ...."?
Surely the  point is that there are some things which are amenable to 
a point-and-shoot approach, and some things which aren't.  The GUI
is a supplement to the CLI, not a complete replacement, unless it
also incorporates the CLI functionality.

>Another thing that long-time users forget is that many new users cannot 
>type very well, but everyone can point and click. 

Agreed.  With our local systems we are using, wherever possible, an 
approach in which the users select from a "menu" of choices rather
than having to type in something which the program then has to check.
(Menu is a rather loose term  -  in general, this is a scrollable list.
User moves cursor to required line and presses Return.)  However,
"wherever possible" does not mean "everywhere", and using this
approach has increased my own appreciation of the needs of some users
(the "power" users) to get behind the user-friendly menu.

>  - Tom A.  	(die-hard Unix fan who still recommends the Mac 
>		to 98% of my friends & relatives...)

I recommend the Mac to people who want to use a computer without having
to understand what they are doing.  Unfortunately, you sometimes find
a Mac "expert" who then has all sorts of problems trying to migrate to
other systems.  (I nearly wrote "real computers", but thought better
of it.:-)