[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is suppo

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <199709272012.NAA22923 at user1.inficad.com>, on 09/27/97 
   at 01:19 PM, Adam Wiggins <nightfall at user1.inficad.com> said:

>[Jon A:]

>Well, it's not so much that, it's *switching* "modes".  I use a mouse
>quite a bit at work, doing character animations in 3D Studio Max,
>pixel art in Animator Studio, touch-up work in Photoshop, and editing
>maps in our game itself.  In all these cases I use the normal
>mouse-pose of one hand on the keyboard to activate tools and the
>other on the mouse to actually do the manipulations.  

You are in desperate need of a graphics tablet.  Get one of the nicer
Summagraphics (table sized is good, smaller than 24" quare is almost
useless) with at least a 16 button puck.  You can pick up one of the
toy 18" jobs for pretty small money, but they're useless for anything
serious.  Unless you need to do text entry, you'll never need to type
again.  You also won't need menus, toolbars, or control areas as they
are now merely areas on the tablet accessed by different puck buttons. 
It makes a world of difference.  I've long been convinced that for
anything more than trivial graphics and GUI work there is nothing
better.

Now a MUD interface designed against a tablet as its default user
interface could be interesting.  For the non-table users, the tablet
layers could be exported to other windows (HUGE screen needed of
course) to be directly clicked on.  The interactive display itself
could be also hot (ie reactive to click as permuted against click
button).  Hurm.  Could be *very interesting.  Gotta think about this.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
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