🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5034@june.cs.washington.edu> roper@june.cs.washington.edu (Michael Roper) writes:
>John Diamant writes:
>>
>> Also, moving the mouse sprite over the dialog box is generally considered
>> to have poor human factors.
>
>Could you elaborate?  Seems to me to be a pretty good way of doing things.
>Especially if the dialog box is modal.
>
>Mike Roper

I think the reference is not to moving the cursor over the box per se, but
rather to the concept of the application changing the mouse position
independent of user control.  Both Sun's and Apple's documentation
discourage this, since apparently much of mouse control is tied to
kinesthesia ("muscle memory"), which having the cursor bop all over the
place interferes with.

One example of an interface that does tend to move the cursor around a lot
is Interleaf's [WT]PS system.  If you drop down into a folder hierarchy,
selecting and opening folders/cabinets/drawers/refrigerators/closets,
the cursor is moved to the newly opened window.  Similarly, closing a window
moves the cursor back to the parent window.  I still haven't decided if I
really like this style: it's convenient, sure, but rather confusing when
first encountered ("where did my cursor go?  It was down here a second ago!")

I suspect this is one of those style issues that needs to very well
disciplined to succeed, otherwise it'll just make things less consistent
across applications.

Anybody heard of any definitive investigation into this?

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Pete Halverson                       ARPA: halverson@ge-crd.ARPA
GE Corporate R&D Center	             UUCP: uunet!steinmetz!iraq!halvers
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