Originally penned Friday, January 21st, 2005 9:06 pm
Arrrrrrrrrr!
I was thinking about use-specific items the other day, such as this little gem and I got to thinking about the future of equipment design. We have a number of ergonomic keyboards and other accessories. A pirate with a hooked hand would not be capable of using a standard mouse, track ball, or other pointing stylus, but what about a cap for the tip of his hook?
Take the nib of a writing stylus, attach it to the tip of the hook (or the point at which the curve most comfortably lies tangentally to the stylus surface) and use on a sensitive pad. Or simply put a laser pointer on it, much like modern laser mice (my earliest required a specially gridded pad). If the pointing device is on the curve of the hook, we could add clickable buttons in rocker postion; either above and below the point of contact on the curve, or side to side, like the wings of a butterfly (with its ‘body’ the motion-sensitive area).
But I suppose there isn’t a large call for pirate and hooked-pirate-friendly computing equipment. But it’s fun and refreshing to think outside the box a bit.
Such as on one of my first really fun assignments as a writer. Hooray for me! I was given a snip of a suggestion from my boss – screenshot this, have them kill that, and while you’re in there, take a look and see if we can fix that oddball little item, too.
So I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to screenshot my victim. Installed the software and navigated my way to the proper areas. Took half a dozen screenshots, dumped them into a document, and started writing. I knew I was missing a few items, so I turned back to the help system we shipped with a prior release of the product. Culled the screenshots, scraping away piles of uneeded text and exposition, and came out with what I think is a much cleaner desgin. And it felt really good to make those changes.
Most of the time I’ve spent as a writer has been un-obfuscating the insane. Much like most of the software I’ve worked with, there are a number of odd pairings of functions, requiring some creative wording. This bit is no exception – choose what you want to do from a number of options, or click another button to do something almost entirely unrelatedly different.
But I managed, and it was fun. I hope I have more days like this – makes up for the years I spent, eyeballs bleeding, slaving over API references that ran to a near thousand pages in length.