Chapter 25 - The Microsoft Whammy - How Bill Dust-in-the-Sky Gates messed up editing for humanity.

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete

"Hi Del, are you ready for more exciting adventures in text editing?"

"You are the sunshine of my life!"

"I'll take that to mean yes. Yesterday you said something spot on!"

"I did?"

"Yes sir... You said:

"We humans end the selection where we do to CONNECT to the sense of what is being written."

Absolutely true! Sometimes the words even seem to call each other:

Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox Christmas

"Thinking things through last night I discovered how Bill Dust-in-the-Sky Gates put a whammy on text editing.

To be polite I called it the 'Microsoft Anomaly'. Are you ready for it?"

"Fire away!"

The Microsoft Anomaly

God is in the details

(And so is Bill Gates)

Why does one go through the trouble of highlighting text? Principally for 4 reasons (of course I'm generalizing).

1. To format - that is, to prettify deserving text that will live on in the final document.

2. To copy and paste - that is, to repeat deserving text that will live on in the final document.

3. To cut and paste - that is, to better position deserving text that will live on in the final document.

and then

4. To destroy undeserving text that obviously will NOT live on in the final document. Notice the anomaly? We are forced to lavish the same attention on the garbage as the deserving words - the gems

Let's polish these, or copy them or maybe move them

Let keen eye maneuver pudgy finger to drag small handle over tiny text until the selection glow is just right and then... destroy!!! (kinda like polishing a vase before smashing it with a sledgehammer)

Comments

Chapter 1 - From Keyboard Reject to Action Hero

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Once upon a half-life ago, there was a guy called Del. That was his nickname, short for Delete. And he was a reliable, hard-working key on most of the world's computers. A straight-forward and regular sort of guy, he was never more prominent than any of the letters he had been charged to kill, no fatter than an 'i', no skinnier than a capital 'W' - unlike Backspace who was super-sized and flaunted a Nike-style arrow pointing hard-left ←. Some hardware companies, like Lord Macintosh, had refused Del right from the get-go, preferring to farm out his tasks to a combination of other workers like 'Function-Delete,' with 'Delete' on Sir Mac actually being Backspace ←. But then one day, for Del - the original Del - things took a bad turn, real bad! And it happened at the speed of a toilet flush vortex! Millions upon BILLIONS of small handheld flatscreen devices suddenly began to spill from the heavens - the 'STPs' - smartph...

Chapter 28 - A 1-touch text editor for phones and tablets. Exercise 1) - zapping words

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete Guten morgen, Schatz! Danke, meine Liebe! What have you got for me today? Well, I wanted to show you how one single Connective Editing button obeying a simple instruction, has got all the other editing apps for handhelds beat - and as a matter of fact it's even snappier than what's normal on a regular sit-on-your butt computer. Wow... I'm all in. Actually, you ARE! Because this new single instruction will be the new DEL. And any app would be foolish to ignore the wonderful ease and power it offers. But then... But then... ? I want to be on a keyboard too! You do? Yes, I want to marry you and live on an extra keyboard row with you. Have you been smoking something, Juula? Absolutely not. I never do that stuff. Right, sorry... I didn't mean it that way. I want to join you and be a second button that completes the new DEL. Then if we have children, the DEL and JUULA family can revol...

Chapter 26 - For scribes and writers, the biggest design fail came from the best designer of all time!

THE STORY OF DEL - Delete "Hi Del, how are you feeling today?" "Still kicking, Juula." "Where were we?" "You were talking about the 4 main reasons for bothering to select text, which on handhelds, is mostly done by dragging mini-handles - a real bummer." "Right. For writers and scribes, it represents the biggest design fail of all times. Sadly foisted on humanity by the greatest design genius of all times." Minihandles! - Yecch! "All right, let's focus on deletion. Remember this?" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox Christmas "Yes." In the preparatory "selection" phase, before effectuating the obvious deletion, it becomes this:" Merry splinter Kleenex guardrail whippersnapper tear Boeing shoebox →Christmas "What do you notice?! "For deletion, the only text I'm interested in is the one just beyond the end of the selected words!...

AN EDITING REVOLUTION FOR PHONES & TABLETS

Search This Blog