Re: CTS and Interleaf and rodents and...

[Laura Myott <lmyott -at- SVCDOC -dot- MC -dot- XEROX -dot- COM>]

On Tue, 2 Apr 1996, Jack Shaw said:

> It is my view that the menu-intensive orientation of Interleaf
> does, indeed, aggravate (if not downright cause) these problems.
> This, I base on the completely personal experience I have had
> that when I avoid conventional pointing device usage (mouse and
> trackball) and rely as much as possible on keyboard (so-called
> "shortcut") sequences such as Ctrl-x-i for italics, Ctrl-x-b for
> bold, etc., my hands are less sensitive at the end of a day. But
> Interleaf is *very* skimpy with keyboard shortcuts. What shortcuts
> it has (as you see above...) are convoluted and non-intuitive.

> Secondly, one of the most unfriendly setups for me was the optical
> mouse with the special mousepad that Sun workstations (the usual
> UNIX platform for Interleaf) use. I needed to make repetitive strafing
> runs with the mouse over the pad--and ONLY over the pad works--to get the
> cursor over long distances. True, there is an acceleration/speed
> macro control...but then the fine "brain surgery" operations like
> picking out an index tag (no keyboard shortcuts for this, like lots
> of other critically minute Interleaf actions...) to open its property
> sheet, are painstaking/ful.

> So all in all, I would put Interleaf V.5 in the most-suspect category
> for aggravating if not downright causing RSI problems for those of
> us that work with it long periods per day. But it's no secret that
> I've picked bones over Interleaf here before...so in fairness, I have
> to acknowledge Interleaf's recent claims to more "Windows-like" char-
> acteristics that they alledge for Version 6 (either true Windows for
> PC environnments or for UNIX). But I have no personal experience with
> either of their Version 6 platforms, so I'm only citing their hype.

I agree with Jack's statements regarding Interleaf and Sun workstations.
I can also attest to the fact that Interleaf 6 and 6.1 are no closer to
"Windows-like" platforms than Interleaf 5.  We had 6 and recently upgraded
to 6.1, and I see no improvement in the "shortcut" keys compared to what
Jack describes.  I also have a real problem with Sun's optical mouse.  I've
never had wrist problems before, but over the last 3 weeks when I was working
about 50+ hours a week (deadline time) my mouse hand got quite sore, and that
had never happened with any amount of use with a regular mouse.  I don't know
if the problem is with the optical mouse as much as it is with the less than
sensitive mouse buttons.  However, Sun does have a new trackball (not sure of
the terminology) mouse that looks and works like any regular mouse; I'm
looking forward to latching onto one in the near future.  Hopefully that will
help.  I also hope that Interleaf does achieve a more "Windows-like" feel.
I was so used to Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for copy and paste--Ctrl+Insert and
Shift+Insert just don't make sense in my book.  So far, those few special
keys on the left-hand side of a Sun keyboard are my only saving grace.

Laura Myott
Technical Writer
lmyott -at- svcdoc -dot- mc -dot- xerox -dot- com