On Sun, 4 Jan 2009, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Here's Chun and Matju's pd~conv paper: "Keyboard-only Interface For Pure Data" http://artengine.ca/~catalogue-pd/18-Lee-Bouchard.pdf In general I think, Pd should not try to outsmart the user. Finding the most "stupid" solutions to problems has been a good guideline in the past IMO.
Exactly, that's why dd used Ctrl+6 for doing what Ctrl+1 does but with an auto-connection. However, it doesn't extend to messageboxes. This could be extended either by Ctrl+7 for messagebox if we just want to fill most of the remaining hole, or switch to Ctrl+Shift+1/2/3/4/5 if we want to fill more of the hole and can handle the keyboard layout, or have a hotkey for toggling a "Auto-Connect Mode".
This transfers the obligation to be smart from the program to the user, who in general is smarter than software anyway. Personally I don't like software that tries to be smarter than me, that's why I don't run OS-X or Windows. ;)
Software that second-guesses the user cause the user to NEED to third-guess the software... especially if the rules are undocumented, or too complex to remember, and/or keep changing from version to version, or in the worst case, depend much on the history of user interaction. I mean, a menu section for "5 last documents loaded" is fine, but normal users would go nuts if menus kept on sorting their items in decreasing frequency of use. ;)
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