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It amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually point to the person that did it.
by mark-r 2y ago
It amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually point to the person that did it.
- johannes1234321 2y agoIt's a good reminder, that everything had to be invented at some point in time. Even trivial stuff as boiling tea water ...
- account42 2y agoI'm not sure if invented is the right term in all cases. Discovered may be more appropriate in some.
- otras 2y agoI’m loosely reminded of that Roger Sterling quote from Mad Men: ”I'll tell you what brilliance in advertising is: 99 cents. Somebody thought of that."
- airstrike 2y agoIndeed! I'm writing an app that resizes and moves shapes on a canvas (among other things) and I'm amazed at how many trivial little things I had to write that everyone including me would take for granted, including copying and pasting, drawing the little handles to resize the shape, changing the cursor based on what's below it (the handles or the shapes), drawing a translucent version of the shape when it's being moved/resized, changing the position of the shape when it is resized from _some_ of the handles but not all (top left vs. bottom right)...
- escapecharacter 2y agojust wait until you get to the undo/redo stack! That's one of my favourite parts of a UI to program.
- mark-r 2y agoMy experience is that undo/redo isn't something you tack on at the end of the project, it has to be baked into the infrastructure. Every action you take has to be delegated to an object that has all the information it needs to both do the action and undo it. Then you can just keep a stack of those objects and call them as necessary.
- airstrike 2y agoFortunately I'm using iced which is an implementation of The Elm Architecture so undo/redo is just a matter of keeping track of which messages were sent and reversing them as needed.
- rqtwteye 2y agoThere will be a lot of obvious stuff invented in the future that we aren't thinking about now.
- bluGill 2y agoMy dad grew up on a farm, and latter regretted not inventing the large round baler that most farmers use - he already knew about small round bales, so the only thing missing was make them larger and then haul them on a tractor instead of lifting by hand as you did the small bales. Despite saying the above for years it never occurred to him to invent the large square baler which the same concept (haul with a tractor), but stack better. Everything was known and so obvious in hindsight.
- AlbertCory 2y ago> Everything was known and so obvious in hindsight. that's why "non-obvious" is so contentious in patent examinations. How do you KNOW it was obvious at the time?
- cubefox 2y agoOften the obvious stuff was invented decades ago, but some old people in power persistently refuse to implement into major products. Like the ability to copy multiple things without overwriting the previous entry. Who would ever need that?!
- bloopernova 2y agoBack before 2009, early iPhones didn't have cut/copy and paste. Folks had to figure out a good scheme that worked with touch screens.
- xattt 2y ago> Folks had to figure out a good scheme that worked with touch screens In Jonny Ives’ brilliance, the magnified view was done away with for several iOS versions. This man was Karl Pilkington of technology.
- layer8 2y agoWhich I found flabbergasting at the time, because it had been a standard feature on PDAs ten years prior. I only bought an iPhone once it gained cut&paste support.
- bee_rider 2y agoCut and paste is a sort of obvious miss, but in general, I think Smartphones benefitted from not taking for granted the features of PDAs. There was always something deeply niche about the things.
- layer8 2y agoThere are more misses. For example I found it surprising that they didn’t include a universal “context menu” equivalent (long press would have been obvious) and a universal menu bar equivalent (like Palm OS did). Stuff like this is why we still have an awfully complex and inconsistent UI landscape on mobile.
- qball 2y ago>and a universal menu bar equivalent webOS, the poster child for simple and consistent UI, did all of this. Much like the Amiga, this OS is always imitated, never copied, even though Android should have thrown out everything after Honeycomb to adopt what it brought to the table.
- sandworm101 2y ago>> something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Which is was. A few hundred years ago. Cut-and-paste began as a manual process. Arranging material for printed often involved very literal cutting and pasting of text and images. Entire trades (typesetters) were dedicated to the task. A more accurate description of Tesler's contribution was that he was the first to implement the concept in the digital realm. The person who "invented" the delete key did not invent the concept of deleting a character.
- namdnay 2y agoyes i think it was pretty obvious to anyone reading this article that Larry Tesler did not invent the physical action of cutting and pasting paper
- sandworm101 2y agoI'm not so sure. The art of typesetting something like a newspaper page doesn't exist for most people. They see oldschool wooden printing press ... big gap ... then bubblejet printers. I know people who think newspapers were somehow silkscreened. The idea that someone in the mid-20th would glue bits of text to a page, which was then transformed into a metal printing plate, is a process most do not appreciate.
- sleepybrett 2y agoYeah, in the early aughts I had to explain phototypesetting to some students, they just thought everyone used metal type or it's evolution, the typewriter, until the advent of the computer.
- readthenotes1 2y agoSliced bread was invented in the 20th century
- no_wizard 2y agoImportant to note: mechanically, uniformly and massively available sliced bread. Of course bread has been served sliced for centuries before
- kps 2y agoThe alternative, as used e.g. by the Xerox Star, was select-and-copy/move. The advantage over cut-and-paste is that you don't have invisible fragile state. However, the Star implementation had copy and move modes (select source, COPY, mouse to destination, CLICK) and Tesler hated modes. I don't know why Star didn't use the modeless version (select source, mouse to destination, COPY).
- Retric 2y agoTo be able to do copy (edit) paste (edit) paste you need independent storage of what’s copied. Move requires new UI sate where cut is just Copy (Edit:Delete). With Undo cut is safe enough and there’s likely something more critical to work on than a Move UI. Also, I’ve seen some terrible move UI. It may seem cool to have a big floating blob of text follow the curser but that doesn’t work well when you want to move multiple pages or across multiple pages.
- layer8 2y agoIf you want to replace by pasting, you'd lose the first selection by selecting what you want to have replaced. Which means you'd need different selection modes depending on whether you are selecting the source or the target of the copy/move. Furthermore, mainting the original (source) selection while preparing the insertion point (target) of the copy/move is also fraught with some fragility.
- kps 2y ago> If you want to replace by pasting, you'd lose the first selection by selecting what you want to have replaced. Yes, that's the tradeoff; you'd have to delete that separately. This would be quite close the X11 primary selection and middle-click paste. I think that works reasonably well on its own, but trying to provide both models as X11 does is a mess.
- detourdog 2y agoThe mother of all demos had a chorded keyboard, a mouse,a regular keyboard, and video conferencing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
- alexpotato 2y agoAlmost everything you see or use around you was invented at some point. e.g. the following things were all invented: - that a human dwelling has space between adjacent dwellings and/or eventually streets (straight streets came even later) - punctuation and spaces between words (looking at you Ancient Greek) - what word to use when answering the phone ("ahoy hoy" was one proposed option) It really is true what Steve Jobs said (apropos given Larry Tesler worked at Apple): "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.|
- AlbertCory 2y agoDemonstrably untrue, since humanity was made up of people who lived happily without those things and never even thought of them. Probably even laughed at them when they first appeared.