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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit off-topic, but I have always been wondering why cursors in operating systems or games always seem to wear white gloves. Am I just too young? Have gloves been a thing in the eighties?

Edit: Thinking further, is this related to Mickey Mouse? Why does he wear gloves too, anyway? So many questions.

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Do they? Apple's seem to be the only common ones obviously wearing gloves. Windows' cursors as well as most of the common cursor sets on Linux just use a hand shape with no glove details. I assume this comes from Apple's skeumorphic phase where they may have felt the abstract 'white hand' was not good enough as a metaphor; it goes back at least as far as classic MacOS IIRC.

Not using lifelike colouring has hopefully obvious reasons: inclusivity, contrast, display compatibility

There are at least three reasons Mickey wears gloves:

   1. To make his hands stand out. [1]
   2. To make him seem more human. [1] [2]
   3. To make it easier to draw him (gloves are simpler than hands). [2]

   1. https://www.southernliving.com/news/why-disney-cartoons-wear-gloves
   2. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1495,00.html

URLs won't be link-ified if they're in a code block.

https://www.southernliving.com/news/why-disney-cartoons-wear... https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-14...

Thanks! How did you get those to present as separate lines, without putting a blank line between them?

I didn't. I meant to put a blank line between them so they would be in different paragraphs, but it only wraps to a second line on small screens. On the desktop they show on one line.

There may be something visually off-putting about the sight of a disembodied hand floating across a computer screen.

The glove also prevents the need for a multi-ethnic skin tone package that likely would have picked up steam around the year 2017.

You want an image that is visible on top of all kinds of backgrounds, including full white and full black ones.

Historically, you have 16×16 monochrome pixels to do it.

Now, draw a recognizable arrow or a hand under those limitations.

I would assume that the reason mickey mouse wears gloves is to make his hand movements more clear, since his body is pitch black

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