Knowing .NET

There has been a fair amount of discussion about key bindings in VS.NET, and the fact that they seem to be changing yet again in VS.NET 2005....But the thing that bugs me most about the current set of bindings is the amount of arbitrary stuff you have to remember. via [IanG on Tap]

In the glory days of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, the key-bindings were what we now call accelerators -  so you used to be able to trouble-shoot your sister's computer by saying "/-F-O-S-K-X-Y-Z. Okay, so you just printed out the report, right?" And you could even embed those strings in macros and put them in a loop and that was, essentially, a pretty-darn-complete programming system. It was wonderful. By the time you're debating what chords to use to activate obscure functions, I think you've gone too far. Gimme' 10 (okay, 12) function keys and menu-based accelerators.

4:21:14 PM    comment []   trackback []

Richard Callaby's favorite geek movies are:

1. Sneakers
2. War Games
3. Hackers
4. Anti-Trust
5. Startup.com
6. Triumph of the Nerds

Mine are:

1. Minority Report (I loved that pre-crime interface! Oh, and you must check this probably-not-intended-for-public-consumption page at Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/~dcr/minority/functionality_01.htm)
2. Blade Runner
3. War Games
4. Matrix
5. Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Hmmm... Several of mine aren't about geeks per se, but blissed out my inner geek (I wish I didn't look for matchup errors, rendering artifacts, and kinematic mistakes during movies, but I read Starlog far too much as a youth...)

11:44:50 AM    comment []   trackback []