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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

I can't stand the Mac UI. In every way that it's better than Windows, there's some way that it's worse. The dock is a terrible interface element and having a menu at top the of screen may have made sense when screens where 512×342 pixels but makes little sense with giant resolution screens and multiple monitors.

I'd say the all user interfaces from all vendors suck, including Apple.

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There’s a reason it’s at the top of the screen, and it has nothing to do with screen resolution. Try looking up Fitt’s Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law).

Essentially, the menu items are infinitely tall hit targets… no matter how fast the mouse moves towards them, one can never overshoot them vertically. Menus in Windows and most *nix environments require both horizontal and vertical precision.

Furthermore, why are you bothering with the Dock when Exposé and Spotlight (or Quicksilver, Launchbar, etc.) offer great power user alternatives?

Personally, I still can’t stand how Windows and Linux make no distinction between applications and windows.

> There’s a reason it’s at the top of the screen, and it has nothing to do with screen resolution.

I understand the original reason for it. However, hitting the menu is an extremely large distance from what you might be working on now. I'm typing this on a multi-monitor machine -- this app is totally self-contained on one monitor. Why must I move my mouse across two monitors just use this app's menu?

> Personally, I still can’t stand how Windows and Linux make no distinction between applications and windows.

I can't stand how you can close all windows on a Mac and still have the process around with the only indication being a slightly difference in the menu bar. Amazingly confusing.

Now this may be personal preference but it still shows that the Mac GUI isn't some ultimate model of perfection that everyone agrees on.

It's only true that you can't overshoot them if your trajectory is perfectly vertical. With a diagonal trajectory (which is usually the case), you can still overshoot the item you were aiming for.

Also, Fitts' Law says that the time to select a target is proportional to the distance and the size of the target. Putting the menu on the edge of the screen makes the effective size of the targets bigger, but in some cases it also means that they are much further away.

As I type this, the menu bar is about 4x further away than the top of my browser window.

"Essentially, the menu items are infinitely tall hit targets…"

And they violated that rule in the dock, unless that's been fixed in the last couple of versions.

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