[PD] left mouse click abuse

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Chris McCormick hat gesagt: // Chris McCormick wrote:

> I'm really digging the direction this is going. If I could just chip my
> 2c into the fray: I have to agree with Frank that being able to select a
> tower of object boxes and then click a key combination to connect them
> by patch cords would be useful, as would a keystroke to auto-space
> things horizontally or vertically. I also agree with Tim that Blender's
> same-key select/deselect toggle feels very natural. I would vote for
> ctrl-A both selecting all and deselecting all.

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.

Autoplacement and autoconnections maybe should be more stupid in this
regard: Instead of trying to make them figure out on their own when they
should be applied, they could be explict operations that a user has to
start actively. 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. ;)

So instead of doing auto-placements and connections as default,
user-initiated operations should be preferred, i.e. a better "Tidy up"
and a "Connect all selected objects" as proposed.

Additionally placing objects is such a natural operation for mouse
actions and that overriding the mouse actions with an automatism should
be approached very carefully.

That's just my opinion of course and open to debate.

Ciao
-- 
Frank