some observations

[Dave Liebreich]

8.0.7 + I/O stuff from beta page + code refresh many times, win2k

1) what is the keyboard shortcut to expand an item in the buddy list?  I
   tried <CR>, ALT-O RET, F2, SPACE - nothing other than double-clicking the
   buddy line.  Oddly enough, once a "buddy" is expanded to an outline,
   expand-all-subheads and collapse work just fine.

2) CTL-I on a link item in the buddies window produces an error >>Can't do
   "wp.getselect" because the target window is not in edit mode, or does not
   contain editable text.<<

3) I can't cut-n-paste parts of a line - I have to select the entire item
   (what is the preferred term?), copy (CTL-C), go to the notepad (CTL-Y),
   paste (CTL-V), then select the text.

4) radio crashed 5 or 6 times during the paste-to-notepad part.  I'm a
   horrible person, and I did not save the crash info.  If you investigate
   and can't reproduce, let me know what I need to send in.

6) I did not know that the right-click menu in a radio outline had a "post
   to weblog" option.  Wow.

7) Even though I'm using an iBook (running OS X 10.1.3) and a win2k box for
   most of my work, I still have not yet gotten the hang of this mouse
   thingy.  Maybe it's because I grew up with teletypes and computers with
   keyboards only, or maybe its because I learned to type with WordPerfect
   and Emacs . . . enough rambling.  There's a trend to the above
   "observations" and it's all about being a user who is not used to
   thinking in terms of windows.

What *I* would really like to see is "A Day in the Life of an Expert Radio
User" - so that I could notice all the tricks of the trade.  How do you open
a new outline?  What do you use for a multi-entry clipboard?  How do you use
it?  What combination of keystrokes and mousings do you use?  What interrupt
mechanisms do you let through?  What special macros do you have in your
toolbox?

I found unix fairly easy to learn, since each component was written by one
person, or a very small team.  It's easy to "get into the head" of such a
designer.  VMS was horrible, 'cause I just can't "get into the head" of a
committee.

I guess I'm just falling back to my old NPI role - trying to find the pieces
of information necessary for new users to really "get" the product.  If I
can gather such stuff up, then I can walk into whatever new job I find and
be ready to "deploy" radio, rcs, and i/o and make my life easier.

-Dave
(reading email using emacs - that should tell you a lot :-)

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100102/