Rediscovering the Mouse
Sun, Nov 16, 2014 (Things I Did and Learned Today 10)
Obviously I point and click all the time, browsing the web, reading emails, social networking, blah blah, but for serious heads-down work I’m much more keyboard focused.
One of the things I did this week was spend an evening stitching together a video from my nephew’s wedding, using the Final Cut Pro X video editing software on my iMac.
I first selected and imported video clips and photos from my phone into Final Cut. Point and click. Then roughed out the timing and sequence — Intro, Procession, Wedding vows, Reception, Closing image, by dragging and dropping them into the timeline. Then I detached the audio from the main videos so I could splice in shorter video clips, still images, transitions, and titles. Click and drag.
I adopted a few keyboard shortcut commands, but it’s mostly a point and click and drag and drop user interface. Mousing is critical to getting the job done.
In contrast, my daily software development work is much more keyboard-centric. Like many professional programmers, I work in a command-line terminal window and a text editor. I’m not hardcore like some programmers who even disable the arrow-keys on their keyboard so they‘re forced to use control-keys to navigate around a document and not fall-back on bad habits! Using the mouse is considered a bad habit, because it’s inefficient and indirect, especially when working with text.
Also this week I’ve been following tutorials in a book on the Unity 3D game development system. Fun!
Unity, too, is a very mouse-centric interactive application. Point, click, drag, drop. But there’s a lot of scripting too, so you also spend ample time in a text editor.
This means you frequently move in and out of mouse versus keyboard mode.
Mouse versus keyboard? Not better or worse, I don’t think. But definitely uses different parts of my brain. Feels like a lot of shifting gears. And my wrist gets tired. What’s your opinion?
