In the IDE, I think moving away from the "Mickey hand" and to a more common and "traditional" pointer was probably a good move. I suspect it makes Revolution look a little less like a toy to some professional coders. The problem I have with the way it's been implemented in 2.5 is two-fold.
First, it forces me to swap my thinking. The plain arrow, which was the selection tool until now, suddenly has a completely different job to do. This makes me think about what "mode" I'm in and, as Jeanne has already properly pointed out, if I have to stop and think about what I'm doing, what tool I'm using, then there is a definite and serious usability problem. If the switch had been to something different from the old selection arrow, I think it would have been much less jarring and generated less commentary.
Second, the difference between the arrow cursor and the selection arrow -- the inclusion of a small cross in the latter -- is just not obvious to old eyes like mine. Because the most obvious portion of the selection tool -- at least for me -- is the arrow point, it is not immediately obvious at a glance which tool I'm using.
In my standalone applications, there are two situations in which the cursor choice plays a role and I'm always going to come down on the side of design that says: (a) the default should make sense to most people; and (b) the developer can override the default without jumping through a bunch of hoops. I've spent a lot of time with various apps today and my conclusion is that most applications don't change cursors very often at all. In fact, I'm starting to think this is an area of UI design that could benefit from overall improvement. But, whereas most apps use the arrow most of the time, it seems that most apps that use the notion of hyperlinks generally change the cursor to a pointing finger when it's over linkable text. If that is indeed the convention, then Rev should make it as easy as possible for me as a developer to create standalones that conform to that convention. That means, I think, that we need two default cursors for each app, one for regular interaction and one for link connection.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dan Shafer, Revolutionary Author of "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought" http://www.revolutionpros.com for more info Available at Runtime Revolution Store (http://www.runrev.com/RevPress)
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