[mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #1635: LiveTV uses UP to go up the channel list, Guide uses DOWN.

[f-myth-users at media.mit.edu]

This entire discussion has reminded me of an incident a long time ago,
when I introduced a guy who'd been running a milling machine for 30
years to a then-new Mac Classic or equivalent.

I gave him the mouse, he rolled it a bit, and said, "Whoa!" and
stopped.  Then he thought a moment, -rotated the mouse 180 degrees-
so the cord pointed towards him, rolled it again, and said, "Ah,
that's much better."

See, he was used to moving the -workpiece-, and not the -tool-...

Similar problems wrt whether you think you're moving a "desktop"
in a virtual window, or sliding the window around over a stationary
desktop.  They're both perfectly valid ways of thinking about the
interaction.

I have no particular opinion on the up/down issue here, except to say
that it'd probably be nice if the buttons could be decoupled in the
various modes so Greg could at least reconfigure his version to work
the way he expects.

There are certainly plenty of other similarly confusing areas in
Myth's UI.  One that gets me every time is trying to do a manual
schedule through the frontend (not MythWeb) where the cursor keys seem
to work totally wrong half the time.  After all, every field has an
arrow pointing DOWN, just like any reasonable pulldown menu would, but
DOWN goes to the NEXT menu item instead of changing the current one.

Even worse, the hour-of-day and duration "pulldowns" are laid out
ACROSS the screen.  So I look at a menu item, think "down" to increase
the number, and wind up sliding across.  And because I'm alternately
sliding across or down just to get to the next item, the sense of what
to do changes back and then back -again- as I navigate through the
screen.  So half the time I try to recover, I wind up changing the
next item while trying to get back to where I was ("whoops, I'm on
the wrong item, gotta slide left---oops").  I've been using this
for months and I -still- blow it a substantial fraction of the time.