[Etoys] Jiggling the mouse

[Scott Wallace]

On Jul 24, 2008, at 1:15 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
> At Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:37:39 +0530,
> K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
>>
>> ...BTW, I made a one-liner fix to use simple drag (instead of shift- 
>> drag) for
>> moving direction handles. If others can try this out and find it  
>> useful, I
>> will file a ticket for its inclusion in Etoys.
>
>  Yes, I am still often caught for not pressing the shift-key so it
> would be useful.  But there may be some reasons for it to be in that
> way that I'm not aware of...  Scott?



The decision to require the shift-key was in response to a real and  
constant classroom issue at the time, arising out of two critical  
differences in halo policy in force back then:

(a)  "Mouse-over-halos" were used.  So just moving the mouse pointer  
over a Sketch automatically brought up a halo around the Sketch.

(b)  Halos on Sketches always included the center-of-rotation handle  
-- no need to operate the blue rotation handle first (the  
showDirectionForSketches preference was set to true.)

Therefore, when a child wanted to drag a Sketch, just moving the mouse  
pointer over it brought up a halo, and that halo always included the  
"center of rotation" handle, typically right at the center of Sketch,  
right where the child was likely to grab it if intending to "pick it  
up."

So it happened, very often and very annoyingly, that the child ended  
up dragging the center of rotation when she had no intention of doing  
so.  And the result was often very mystifying.

Thus the guard.


Nowadays, however, we operate with mouse-over-halos turned off, and  
with the showDirectionForSketches preference turned off as well.

Thus, inadvertent operation of the center-of-rotation handle in a  
modern etoys system would be very unlikely.

So I would support removing the shift-key requirement.


   -- Scott