Chapter 22
Know Your Platform
Keywords
Touch isn’t touch, abstraction is dead, the cursor was a crutch, sensing capabilities
The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.
—Gabriel Marcel
Description
The traditional mouse-based user interface, the WIMP (Windows Icons Menus Pointers), has as perhaps its most essential component an abstraction of the logical target of user actions. This abstraction has gone by many names. The inventors of the mouse, Engelbart and English, named it the bug, but later referred to it as the telepointer. In Windows, it is the pointer. In OSX, it is the alternately the pointer and the cursor. But by whatever name, it remains ...
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