Your Apple IIGS came with two important devices: a keyboard and a mouse. The keyboard is for typing documents and for sending typed instructions to applications. The mouse is for drawing pictures and for pointing to choices on the screen—another way of sending instructions to applications. The mouse and the keyboard are input devices; that is , they send information into the computer.
How these devices work depends on the application—so it's up to the manual provided with the application to tell you what you need to know to use the mouse and the keyboard with the application. But the application may assume some familiarity with the special keys on the Apple IIGS keyboard and with mouse terms like clicking, cutting, pasting, dragging, selecting, and choosing from pull-down menus. If you have questions that aren't answered in the manual provided with your application, come back to this chapter for clarification.
Application written before the mouse came along accept only keyboard commands. More recent applications usually give you a choice of using the mouse or the keyboard. These applications are called mouse-based applications.
The first part of this chapter defines mouse terms and describes the standard user interface for mouse-based applications. The second part of this chapter introduces the special keys on the Apple IIGS keyboard and describes the standard user interface for keyboard-based applications.
Some applications don't conform to the standard Apple II user interface described in this chapter. This is especially true of older applications because they were written before a standard existed. If you find yourself faced with an application that does things a little differently, rely on the manual that came with the application for instructions on how to use it.
You can change the responsiveness of the mouse by using the Control Panel Program, which is explained in Appendix A.
Figure 3-1
Pointing
