::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Alaric Snell]

On Tuesday 05 February 2002 15:52, you wrote:

> > Looking is one of those things. Consider a signpost at a
> > crossroads. Far away, it's quite small. As it gets more important
> > [you're closer to the crossroads], it gets bigger! What's more, the
> > longer you look at it, the more detailed information you see,
> > information you can neglect next time you encounter it because it'll
> > be the same (you can tell because if it was different, the signpost
> > would look new). Wouldn't that be great with dialogue boxes?
>
> Mmm... gaze tracking. We know we want it. We know that MS is going to
> fuck it up...

This is a useful thing, but ONLY in the case when you're in a car going 
towards the sign. In fact, the signs are placed so you get closer to them as 
they get more relevant, a UI decision based upon the properties of the 
geometry of the universe.

We can do better with computers - tooltips and their brethren! Particularly 
in focus-follows-mouse models, you can have a display widget sprout an entire 
control panel when mouse-overed, which I have seen used to good effect 
(somewhere or other). Of course, you can do it wrong and have a screenful of 
things that pop up and overlap what you're looking for and so on, and 
disappear when you accidentally move the mouse too far to click on what you 
want (I hate how menus in Windows are too easy to dismiss by accident!)

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software