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Comment by hkuo | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully, as touch screen devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and upcoming palm or windows touch devices come out, hover states will be forced to fade away as it becomes cumbersome to design interfaces for both touch and non-touch computers.

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I don't know an answer but I actually miss hover states on my iPad.

This site in particular I tend to end up hitting the wrong link (usually when trying to go to comments) because I have no visual cue prior to hitting the link of what I'm hitting.

I think designers will just have to compensate going forward with the understanding that touch controls should have a bigger hit area than pixel-precision mouse controls. We're likely far from figuring how and how long this will play out, but I often make the same mistake as you, hitting the wrong link because they are too small or too close together.

I still worry that one day apple devices will start tracking where your eyes are looking...

There are companies already doing this. With the front facing camera on the iPhone4, you could track eye movements and even have a cost-per-glance model.

If anyone from GazeHawk is reading this, they totally should be using iPhone 4 owners to generate heatmaps of mobile sites like they do already with desktop users.

That is quite scary. And to dig even deeper would be the ability to predict what a user is just thinking in his or her head. Or reacting or showing customized options based on a user's mood, which could be used for both good and bad purposes. Good if it's a system that's intention is to be purely helpful to a user, such as in that computer in the movie Moon. But bad if it's system meant to manipulate users into doing things they won't necessarily want, such as convincing people that they "need" to have a McDonald's Big Mac.

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