[haiku] Re: the new link cursor, and mouse cursors in general.

  • From: Justin Stressman <jstressman@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:57:14 -0400

> 1) Outline glow or color change  - Why would we need these
> > things if we just did a subtle change like we've been discussing?
>
> I don't find tilting of the hand or the superimposing of a
> pointer on the back of the hand any more subtle.
>
> I'm of the mind of preserving the integrity of the hand,
> which leaves outline, color and badges as possible options,
> which I think could be made both subtle and effective.
>
>
Well, you go on in the next point to talk about unnatural, but you don't
think glowing inverse colored hands are unnatural? You kind of defeat your
own point for me.


>  ...
> > 4) Religiously motivated discomfort at the sight of a
> > triangle on a hand - stay away from wacky religions.
> > They're bad for your brain. :)
>
> Holes in one's hand are generally unnatural and painful,
> regardless of religious and cultural connotations.
>
> If it's brain-damage to see a hole in the hand instead of an
> abstract black triangle (or some triangular physical object,
> balanced on the back of the hand) then I very well may be.
>
>
More the particular associations. And I doubt that anyone else associates a
pointing triangle to a hole like you do... maybe if it were a circle... but
a triangle hardly evokes stigmata. ;)  Not to mention that were it a large
triangular hole, you'd see the color of the page behind it... not an
unchanging black triangle etc.

Anyway... silly point to be arguing about. ;)


> > 5) Visual feedback - We've just discussed at length why
> > the cursor staying almost entirely the same is a BAD thing.
>
> If when moving the pointer around makes it flicker between all
> the differents shapes a pointer can have in a rich interface,
> I find my attention being pulled away from my task at hand.
>
> I also feel that unwanted tooltips or hover-effects steal
> attention from what I'm doing, when I simply wanted to move
> the mouse somewhere else (anywhere else, away from where I'm
> working) and accidentally leave it on some verbose GUI component.
>
> In short: a -busy- interface which while designed to be helpful
> is, a lot of the time, quite the opposite. Granted, one can
> learn to live with it.
>
>
This may simply be a personal preference. I know how much it would bother me
and many others to suddenly lose all such feedback and have to go around
clicking on things to see if for instance we could resize column headers, or
resize a window.... when by your standards we'd just have to randomly click
around the entire GUI forever constantly trying to guess whether or not we
could interact with parts of it... or watching one point somewhere else
entirely on the screen from where we're actually looking, forcing us to try
to focus on two places at once peripherally, or constantly look back and
forth... Who knows... maybe that's the way you like it? :(


>  ...
> > 6) Text in the status bar instead of a changing cursor -
> > Again, we've discussed this already. The point is to see visual
> > feedback where you're actually looking, where you're currently
> > navigating with the mouse. Not to have some text appearing
> > somewhere else entirely on the screen
>
> IIRC, someone argued for shape-changing the pointer e.g. on links
> in a web browser so that use of one's -peripheral vision- could be
> more effective when discovering the links of a web page.
>
> I'm not opposed to visual feedback in the pointer itself. I'm just
> saying that from a peripheral vision perspective nothing beats the
> status bar, which sadly appears to be out of fashion these days.
>
>
That was in fact ME that was talking about peripheral vision (and one person
responding about how they move the mouse around the page looking for links
by watching for the cursor change, which again makes you solution a bit
worthless as instead of generally following the cursor itself to see where
IT changed, you'd be looking somewhere else on the screen and then having to
change your focus to the mouse itself to see where it actually was when the
change occurred and then try to match those two things up, forcing you to
continue trying to split your focus between 2 points instead of just
focusing on where you were generally looking anyway)... and when I was
talking about it, I was specifically stating that I meant close to where you
were navigating. I even gave the example of a long link in a paragraph you
were reading where you could just move the mouse up to the link without
having to worry to much or stare DIRECTLY at the cursor because you'd more
easily notice the change as you moused over it etc.

On my 22" 1600x1200 screen, the status bar can literally be 16" away across
my screen.

That renders the whole "status bar notification" think, as I said, pretty
useless.

Maybe you live on a tiny tiny screen still at some tiny resolution where the
status bar is always only an inch or two away from what you're doing. I and
many, if not most others today no longer do.


Aside from all that there is another facet to this issue that we haven't
really addressed. Namely that of different kinds of highlights common in the
"big 3" on UI widgets today. Menus, buttons, etc... all highlight or "pop
up" etc to show that they can be interacted with.

Personally I kind of like that in Haiku we just follow a simpler standard
for the interface that makes it pretty obvious where to click. It was so
transparent to me that I wasn't sure whether or not it actually did such
highlighting and had to double check just now. ;)

I think following a good HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) should probably
keep this from becoming an issue. (I haven't finished reading the Haiku HIG
yet... so much to do, so little time!)

-- 
"You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become
right." --xkcd

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