[sugar] perceived sugar performance

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:02 AM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> On 2 May 2008, at 10:57, Samuel Klein wrote:
>
>
> > SJ,
> > who still wants the "hand" buttons to be mapped to the right and left
> > mouse-clicks in addition to any other keymapping.
> >
>
>  Sorry, not me – I **really** want the hand keys implemented with the
> original intended scrolling behaviour. Perhaps once the Sugar GUI control
> panel is fully implemented you could submit a patch for this as an alternate
> behaviour.

Agreed; the intended behavior is sorely missed, I feel.  I don't feel
comfortable using them for other purposes (with entirely different
semantics) in the interim though.  Here's hoping we can resolve the
scrolling behavior sooner than later.

>  ** what was the decision behind having 2 buttons considering the available
> physical space and additional UI complexity? It's not like there are legacy
> educational applications that require 2 buttons.

That was a decision made by the hardware team before the software team
was even formed to request otherwise (we did).  When we asked for one
button, it was too late to revert.  In the end, I don't think it will
be all bad.  We also considered making both function the same on this
hardware, with the option to go back to one button on future hardware,
but we felt it would be more confusing to have buttons which couldn't
be differentiated in purpose.

The right button is going to be used solely to invoke palettes on
objects/buttons (immediately, rather than on delay like rollover),
which is nearly consistent with its use for contextual menus on other
OSes, and should indeed be a time saver for more advanced users.  I
don't believe this actually works yet, unfortunately.

- Eben