Rubygame 3: Day 30

By John Croisant | Published: 2008-03-01 | Comments: 2 | Filed under: Development

Well, ippa has convinced me that :mouse1 etc. are just a bit too cryptic, and people would need to look at the docs if they forget which number means which button. 4 and 5 are especially confusing; even I have a hard time remembering which one is wheel-up, and which is wheel-down. I also realized that the 'advantage' of allowing an arbitrary number of mouse buttons is rather tenuous, given that the vast majority of mice fit the 3-button-plus-wheel (or less) schema.

So, I've changed over to :mouse_left, :mouse_middle, :mouse_right, :mouse_wheel_up, and :mouse_wheel_down. Other mouse buttons, if they should occur, will generate :mouse_N symbols (where N is the button number). No reason to exclude them altogether (although I suspect the current SDL doesn't even recognize buttons above 5).

Another topic that came up in the comments yesterday was compatibility with Ruby 1.9. It bears repeating here (with a lovely diagram for emphasis), that it would be helpful for the Ruby 1.9-eager folks to submit a Rubygame bug report for anything in Rubygame (either svn trunk or the latest release) that doesn't work with Ruby 1.9 (including/especially compile errors). Please be sure to select the "Ruby 1.9" group, as illustrated below:

Comments

ippa submitted a comment on 2008-03-01 #

While it’s nice having an influence , I cant help to feel like you just switched your names from one shorthandnaming to another.

If someone pointed with their finger to your left mousebutton and asked “What do you call this button?” what would you answer?

Would you say “it’s the mouse left” or “it’s the left mouse button”?

That’s what I mean with natural names.

John Croisant submitted a comment on 2008-03-01 #

@ippa: True, :mouse_left etc. don’t match up exactly with what we’d say in natural English, but there are other considerations. They are meaningful, memorable, consistent with each other… and short without being cryptic.

Really, I feel :left_mouse_button etc. are just rather unwieldy due to their length. My opinion there is not set in stone, though.