On 5/17/06, Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> wrote:
Let's not go down the Adobe Illustrator path which has a separate "tool" for each single kind of action.
It isn't perfect but think about it a bit more and you might realise they must have had some reason for doing it that way.
Alan, you have recently linked from our wiki an excellent critique of Illustrator which summarizes most of my own sentiment:
http://adventisti.lv/blog/?page_id=19
And I could add much, much more. In my view, AI is an example of an atrocious usability design in most of its aspects. Unfortunately, the majority of users care very little about usability and are happy to use what they were taught to use.
To dimiss it so quickly is stupid. For one thing serperate tool approach only requires one hand, holding down a modifier can be very inconvenient.
A professional who works with only one hand is seriously disadvanatged, to put it mildly. And a newbie will have no problem pressing just one modifier key, if it's documented well. I'm not inventing Emacs-like 10-key combos here.