mccThere *has* been a lot of talk about the problems with so-called "AI" but one I don't feel gets enough attention is that "AI" products are surveillance products. "AI" is inevitably run in a cloud service, and in order for the AI to know what to generate some amount of the context within your application— usually it's not clear to the user what context, or how much— has to get sent to the cloud. The more of my local app state that gets transmitted over the Internet, the less comfortable I am.
So consider the "Copilot button". I cannot imagine a way this could get implemented that doesn't come down to "there's a trap button on your keyboard that every time you press it, some nonobvious chunk of local/personal information gets sent over the Internet and bounces between multiple corporations". The privacy policy will claim the information is not "retained", but the moment this centralized data pipe exists every intelligence service on earth will have a high incentive to get a tap on it.
Tom Forsyth@mcc I only just learned a few things the "Windows" button does. I have no idea what the other one does - or what it's even called. It seems to bring up the right-click menu?
@TomF By "the other one" do you mean the rectangle button? I've never understood what that does.
The Windows key serves a very important purpose: Being remapped to WinCompose
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial@mcc @TomF one example is if you have a neurological issue that results in hand shaking, using a mouse to click things can be very difficult, but Windows has an accessibility option called Filter Keys which ignores brief key presses and repeated key presses, making it much easier to use a keyboard. you can then navigate apps by using the Win key, tab, Alt (opens main menu), the context key, arrow keys, and enter.
@mcc @TomF I learned how to use all this stuff when I was doing kiosk breakout assessments. pretty much everything you can do on Windows* with a mouse has an equivalent keyboard access path for accessibility reasons. it's pretty neat.
(*although this does not necessarily apply to 3rd party software, may render custom controls without keyboard access support)
Jernej Simončič �@gsuberland @mcc @TomF Well, you can do that with classic programs. Keyboard navigation's really crippled in "modern" Windows apps (eg. there's basically no accelerators at all [accelerators = Alt+letter combinations that let you directly activate a control without having to Tab to it first], you have to navigate using both Tab and arrow keys, and there's a bunch of tab stops that do nothing at all).
@jernej__s @gsuberland @TomF I like navigating UIs by keyboard. A "right click keyboard focus" button sounds nice.
@mcc @gsuberland @TomF On Windows you can use Shift+F10 to get the right-click menu if your keyboard doesn't have a dedicated menu key.
@jernej__s @mcc @TomF ooh, I forgot about that one! clearly getting rusty on kiosk breakout tricks - I haven't done them in years.
Mary Branscombe@mcc @jernej__s @gsuberland @TomF it's very useful: it often behaves slightly differently from Shift F10, and gives you the context menu where your text cursor is not where your mouse cursor is - and it's right where your hand is likely to be, not over there were the mouse is
@jernej__s @mcc @TomF yeah, the coverage and QC on keyboard accessibility has gone downhill as of late for sure.
the lack of default accelerators on common tasks has been getting worse, but the one good thing is that all of Microsoft's GUI development tooling at least makes it so every control has a tabstop by default, even if it ends up being out of order or slow to get to. if you're working with MFC, WinForms, XAML, etc. it's all set by default so devs don't even need to know about it.
@gsuberland @mcc @TomF A very typical example of how usability has gone down with modern UIs:
- in the classic Windows login dialog box (eg. when establishing a RDP connection, but the same dialog is used elsewhere), if you wanted to change username, you just had to press ↓ on the keyboard
- in the modern version of the same dialog box it's easier to use mouse, because to achieve the same thing with keyboard, you have to press: Tab, Tab, spacebar, Tab (multiple times; how many depends on the number of smartcard readers/tokens you have connected; if you're really fast, you might be able to get away with just one Tab, because the list fills dynamically), spacebar
But don't worry, at least OK and Cancel button in the new dialog have accelerators!
Leszek KarlikWell, I navigate Windows by keyboard and mouse and I still use the Context Menu button a lot (I have remapped my capslock button to be the Context Menu), because keyboard shortcuts are fast and efficient if software supports them. :-)