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I used a (OS 7/8/9) Mac for years with a one button mouse. I was very productive with it! I remember seeing Windows 95 with its right-click context menus but I

I used a (OS 7/8/9) Mac for years with a one button mouse. I was very productive with it! I remember seeing Windows 95 with its right-click context menus but I wasn’t very interested at the time. I was happy using keyboard shortcuts and the like. I believe Steve Jobs was pretty adamant about keeping the one button mouse on the Mac for years and it was absolutely the right call. The Mac was way easier to use back then!

bluGill 2y ago
I am not doubting you were productive with it. However that does not make it better, it just makes it what you know. User experience experts have studied this for a long time, and they all conclude that you need more than one button. (there isn't agreement on the best number as there are some trade offs, but one is clearly not enough) The world has a real problem with people arguing what they know is best without any basis in reality. Even if there is a clear reason one choice is better, most arguments for the better choice end up being because they know it better not the clear reasons it is better (see most metric/imperial arguments)
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  I don't think it was about him saying 'one button is optimal for all time always' I think a lot of it was 'this is a whole new paradigm for people who only know the typewriter, let's make it simple for them, down the road when people have adjusted to the simple case, we can make it more elaborate' Hell at the time when this happened most computer joysticks had only one button, or in the case of one of the popular joysticks at the time, three buttons that were all just wired to one input.
- chongli 2y ago
  I have some older relatives who were actually able to use a computer back then, thanks to the simplicity and brilliant design of Classic Mac OS. Now they are essentially shut out of computing for the rest of their lives. They can just barely use their cell phones to make calls and send the odd text. They do all their banking over the phone. There are tons of people like this. Apple used to be the absolute market leader at making computing accessible for everyone. At some point they got big enough and powerful enough that they could ignore all that and just let their dev teams do whatever they want. They gave up on trying to make real computing accessible to the masses and just pushed all these users to the iPad.
  - II2II 2y ago
    While Apple's ability to create "simple and brilliant" designs in the past can be attributed to the motivation and talent of their staff, I don't think you can say their current failure to do so implies the opposite. We live in a very different world. Computers are expected to do more and, regardless of how much Apple despises it, computers are expected to interact with other systems. Just think of Hypercard. Many people here will talk about how great it was, and it was great. Yet the most talented developers and designers in the world couldn't recreate it in a form that is both simple and reflects the needs of the modern world. It would always end up lacking essential features or be burdened by an overabundance of functionality.
  - leptons 2y ago
    What about having 2 buttons vs 1 button makes something "inaccessible"? If anything having 2 buttons makes the options that are in the context of the current application more accessible. But people are incurious, stupid, and just dull-witted, I guess? So you really want the rest of us to have to suffer with 1 button because the lower end of the bell-curve can't handle 2 buttons for reasons related to stupidity?
    - chongli 2y ago
      People who don't come to use a computer for the first time until middle age or later tend to struggle mightily. I'm not sure why, but they seem to have a strong aversion to experimenting with the system. I face this issue almost every day with my 74-year-old father and his iPhone. He can only do the tasks which I explicitly teach him and anything new (like changing a setting he's never changed before) requires me to show him the steps. The fact that changing a different setting in the Settings app is an almost-identical process never occurs to him. He just asks for help every time. Back in the Classic Mac OS days he did just fine with a 1-button mouse. He was able to click on and interact with everything and got what he needed out of the computer. A 2-button mouse is just utterly baffling to him. It turns every single thing on the screen into a fork in the road: do I left-click this or right-click it?
      - 2y ago
degauss 2y ago
"... keyboard shortcuts ..." is a common response to defend Mac design choices. The single shared menu is also something that made sense on the original 9" 512x384 Mac screen to save but it really is nonsensical in the days of 32" 6k displays, so much mousing to get up to that menu but of course "... keyboard shortcuts ..." comes the refrain.
- chongli 2y ago
  The single shared menu bar has one huge advantage over per-window menu bars: infinite mouse target size along the vertical axis. When moving the mouse to a narrow strip menu bar at the top of a window you need to accelerate the mouse towards the target and then decelerate in time to stop on the target without overshoot. With a menu bar at the top of the screen you can skip the decelerate part and just slam the mouse to the top of the screen without worrying about overshoot. You’re right about giant displays though. The best menu system for those is pie menus [1]. Although I would still dispute the advantages of the second mouse button for activating those. The F1-F12 function keys would be much better since you could have instant access to 12 different pie menus instead of a single one with right click. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

bluGill 2y ago

I am not doubting you were productive with it. However that does not make it better, it just makes it what you know. User experience experts have studied this for a long time, and they all conclude that you need more than one button. (there isn't agreement on the best number as there are some trade offs, but one is clearly not enough) The world has a real problem with people arguing what they know is best without any basis in reality. Even if there is a clear reason one choice is better, most arguments for the better choice end up being because they know it better not the clear reasons it is better (see most metric/imperial arguments)

sleepybrett 2y ago
I don't think it was about him saying 'one button is optimal for all time always' I think a lot of it was 'this is a whole new paradigm for people who only know the typewriter, let's make it simple for them, down the road when people have adjusted to the simple case, we can make it more elaborate' Hell at the time when this happened most computer joysticks had only one button, or in the case of one of the popular joysticks at the time, three buttons that were all just wired to one input.
chongli 2y ago
I have some older relatives who were actually able to use a computer back then, thanks to the simplicity and brilliant design of Classic Mac OS. Now they are essentially shut out of computing for the rest of their lives. They can just barely use their cell phones to make calls and send the odd text. They do all their banking over the phone. There are tons of people like this. Apple used to be the absolute market leader at making computing accessible for everyone. At some point they got big enough and powerful enough that they could ignore all that and just let their dev teams do whatever they want. They gave up on trying to make real computing accessible to the masses and just pushed all these users to the iPad.
- II2II 2y ago
  While Apple's ability to create "simple and brilliant" designs in the past can be attributed to the motivation and talent of their staff, I don't think you can say their current failure to do so implies the opposite. We live in a very different world. Computers are expected to do more and, regardless of how much Apple despises it, computers are expected to interact with other systems. Just think of Hypercard. Many people here will talk about how great it was, and it was great. Yet the most talented developers and designers in the world couldn't recreate it in a form that is both simple and reflects the needs of the modern world. It would always end up lacking essential features or be burdened by an overabundance of functionality.
- leptons 2y ago
  What about having 2 buttons vs 1 button makes something "inaccessible"? If anything having 2 buttons makes the options that are in the context of the current application more accessible. But people are incurious, stupid, and just dull-witted, I guess? So you really want the rest of us to have to suffer with 1 button because the lower end of the bell-curve can't handle 2 buttons for reasons related to stupidity?
  - chongli 2y ago
    People who don't come to use a computer for the first time until middle age or later tend to struggle mightily. I'm not sure why, but they seem to have a strong aversion to experimenting with the system. I face this issue almost every day with my 74-year-old father and his iPhone. He can only do the tasks which I explicitly teach him and anything new (like changing a setting he's never changed before) requires me to show him the steps. The fact that changing a different setting in the Settings app is an almost-identical process never occurs to him. He just asks for help every time. Back in the Classic Mac OS days he did just fine with a 1-button mouse. He was able to click on and interact with everything and got what he needed out of the computer. A 2-button mouse is just utterly baffling to him. It turns every single thing on the screen into a fork in the road: do I left-click this or right-click it?
    - 2y ago

degauss 2y ago

"... keyboard shortcuts ..." is a common response to defend Mac design choices. The single shared menu is also something that made sense on the original 9" 512x384 Mac screen to save but it really is nonsensical in the days of 32" 6k displays, so much mousing to get up to that menu but of course "... keyboard shortcuts ..." comes the refrain.

chongli 2y ago
The single shared menu bar has one huge advantage over per-window menu bars: infinite mouse target size along the vertical axis. When moving the mouse to a narrow strip menu bar at the top of a window you need to accelerate the mouse towards the target and then decelerate in time to stop on the target without overshoot. With a menu bar at the top of the screen you can skip the decelerate part and just slam the mouse to the top of the screen without worrying about overshoot. You’re right about giant displays though. The best menu system for those is pie menus [1]. Although I would still dispute the advantages of the second mouse button for activating those. The F1-F12 function keys would be much better since you could have instant access to 12 different pie menus instead of a single one with right click. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu