Comment by jwecker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwecker | Hacker News Reader

Not only is this a violation of Fitt's law- it's practically the canonical example of how to violate it. That is, when an application is maximized the exact upper corners of the screen become incredibly valuable because a user can get there without aiming but just by flicking the mouse in the general direction. Flick it to the upper left and click for all window controls, flick it to the upper right and click to close.

I remember when Microsoft made it so that you had to go to the corner but then pull it back several pixels, thus destroying forcing you to aim the mouse cursor. It may sound like a silly little thing, but I thought at the time that it was a good metaphor for how they could get something to _look_ similar (to, say, a mac) and yet still get it completely wrong. When I switched to linux around the same time I thought it was so refreshing that the UIs of the time (minus some skins people had made) didn't violate this example of Fitt's law, and also that if anyone were dumb enough to change that in the future, we could all just fix it.

I usually disregard comments about linux desktops copying window's mistakes, but this is just very irritating to me, mostly because it's elective- it's like you actually have to _try_ to get it wrong.

I'd love to see some modern testing results on that, honestly. The idea of "flicking" the mouse to the corner of the screen made sense on a 512x348 Mac Plus desktop. It doesn't seem as appropriate on a 1920x1080 monster, where generally nothing is maximized anyway. And with a touchpad you can't do it at all.

You're neglecting pointer acceleration, which applies for touchpads too.

If yours is anything like mine, try this: position your mouse to the far left of the screen; quickly swipe across the touch pad from left to right. Your pointer should reach the far right hand side of the screen. Now swipe ever so slowly from right to left, your pointer might get about a quarter of the way across the screen.

Once you consider acceleration (eg, the further you try to move, the faster you are moving when you get there), Fitt's law is more, not less, important on a big screen.

i disabled acceleration, and i suspect many others do.

i tried several times to get used to it. it's just not predictable enough for me. hitting or missing a target just because i was too fast or slow, sounds useless to me.

The acceleration curve on macs is horribly horribly broken. There's a bunch of utilities to fix it or turn it off because strangely you can't do it yourself.

I may have confused the issue. It's not about the flick of the mouse- it's about not having to aim (e.g., can you perform this action using your peripheral vision?). It sounds like you've become accustomed to aiming at everything and therefore don't see what the big deal is. Obviously the designers in question feel as you do, so it's certainly widespread.

As for the research, just to further clarify- they rigged a mac so that there was a second monitor above the first monitor (and above the main mac menu) that the mouse pointer could move to. When mac users sat down to use it, even knowing exactly what was going on, they consistently overshot the menu by an average of half a screen. I'd be highly surprised if resolution was even minimally relevant.

You appear to be making assumptions based on the Windows OS which don't apply here, which confuses me as you seem to be saying you use Linux.

Both Ubuntu and Mac OS X have a top "bar" which has functions in both the top-left and top-right corners, easily accessed according to Fitt's Law.

In Ubuntu top-left and right are Applications and Logout/Sleep etc. respectively and in Mac OS X it's the "Apple" system menu and Spotlight search. Maximised windows in both these OS's don't expand to the top corners and in Mac OS X windows don't even "maximise" to the full size of the screen, rather optimising for the correct size which will often not be full screen.

Whoops, assumptions about linux actually. When using ubuntu I always turn off the top bar first thing. Most of the people I know that use ubuntu do the same, but I have no idea if it's representative. I turn it off specifically because the quick window actions are far more valuable to me. In any case I run crunch-bang, which is ubuntu based but doesn't have the top bar, so I forgot about it when posting.

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