> lots of people are literally afraid of the right mouse button
...c'mon, when will people grow out of this? and by people I mean GUI designers! One of the reasons I hate the guts of Unity for example is that I can't simply 'right click' -> 'customize/properties/setting' on anything I want to change in the UI. I don't want to go to a 'control/settings panel' (that may not even have the options I care about) to change settings, I just want to go around and right click on things I want to tweak. Or if I want to invoke one of the alternate actions for an UI element. I know nowadays we are designing UIs for retards (pardon, 'cognitively overloaded busy people' is the term) and not power users, but this kind of hidden 'power user' functionality doesn't hinder 'average joe' in any way. This is one of those things that old-school Microsoft UI design guys got right, but nobody gets it nowadays! (it can also be long-tap on touch screens or ctr-click on macs, but you need a universally known way of showing a menu connected to any UI element, a menu that also includes a shortcut to the particular preferences for it)
I think perhaps there is an increasing tendency to design one UI for every platform (touch screen tablets, desktops etc.) and to favour consistency across platforms rather than proper integration within each platform. So if right-click is difficult to emulate on a touch screen, then often the desktop version of a program available for touch-screen devices won't make good use of right-click either.
It is perhaps part of a larger trend to try and solve UI problems for tablets and phones, then push the solutions back to the desktop, despite the fact the desktop didn't suffer from the problem they attempted to solve.
> lots of people are literally afraid of the right mouse button
...c'mon, when will people grow out of this? and by people I mean GUI designers! One of the reasons I hate the guts of Unity for example is that I can't simply 'right click' -> 'customize/properties/setting' on anything I want to change in the UI. I don't want to go to a 'control/settings panel' (that may not even have the options I care about) to change settings, I just want to go around and right click on things I want to tweak. Or if I want to invoke one of the alternate actions for an UI element. I know nowadays we are designing UIs for retards (pardon, 'cognitively overloaded busy people' is the term) and not power users, but this kind of hidden 'power user' functionality doesn't hinder 'average joe' in any way. This is one of those things that old-school Microsoft UI design guys got right, but nobody gets it nowadays! (it can also be long-tap on touch screens or ctr-click on macs, but you need a universally known way of showing a menu connected to any UI element, a menu that also includes a shortcut to the particular preferences for it)