A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts | Hacker News Reader

A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts

asktog.com

28 pointslatif6 comments

By that logic Chrome is easier to use than Safari because in full screen mode on Chrome the tabs are at the top of the screen. In Safari they are below the address bar and the bookmark toolbar.

> The industrial designers let loose on the Mac have screwed up most of the keyboards by cutting their function keys in half so the total depth of the keyboard was reduced by half a key. Why was this incredibly stupid?

It wasn't; Macs don't use function keys for anything (or, at least, anything touch-type-y.) They're there for compatibility with the few non-HIG apps that demand them (and now for Bootcamp), but mostly they've been repurposed into controls for very deliberate system actions (like summoning Expose or advancing a track on your music player) that you wish to trigger far less often than you want to type an @ symbol.

The actions are far from all that deliberate. Change contrast. Next track in iTunes. Increase volume. The definitely start feeling deliberate because these keys are almost impossible to hit without looking at them - they're small and offset differently from the rest of the keyboard. Tog's point stands - these keys present a horrible target. The one thing he doesn't mention is the staggering brainlessness of putting the 'Eject Disk' key at the top-right corner, above 'Delete'.

If I look at how I try to target these keys (on my MacBook Pro), I hit the top ridge of the keyboard, and then hit the top of the function key. The vertical size of these keys doesn't matter much then.

Same for the loose keyboard, I hit the edge of the keyboard, and then move down.

>The one thing he doesn't mention is the staggering brainlessness of putting the 'Eject Disk' key at the top-right corner, above 'Delete'.

You think that's stupid? On the HP keyboard I'm using, there's a similar key above Escape. What does it do? It sleeps the computer. At least on my Ubuntu, there's no confirmation, just immediate hibernation. (Nor, for that matter, can I find a way to turn it off. But then, configuring the keyboard in Ubuntu is quite frustrating -- alas, a separate issue).

I can't imagine this wouldn't've come up during testing. I mean, really.

this explains on eof the major annoyances of windows. between the taskbar and the window header, the GUI of any program is deprived of all four corners and two edges. edges and corners are your most effective places for important functions.

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