

A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts - latif
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

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keltex
By that logic Chrome is easier to use than Safari because in full screen mode
on Chrome the tabs are at the top of the screen. In Safari they are below the
address bar and the bookmark toolbar.

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derefr
> The industrial designers let loose on the Mac have screwed up most of the
> keyboards by cutting their function keys in half so the total depth of the
> keyboard was reduced by half a key. Why was this incredibly stupid?

It wasn't; Macs don't _use_ function keys for anything (or, at least, anything
touch-type-y.) They're there for compatibility with the few non-HIG apps that
demand them (and now for Bootcamp), but mostly they've been repurposed into
controls for very deliberate system actions (like summoning Expose or
advancing a track on your music player) that you wish to trigger far _less_
often than you want to type an @ symbol.

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pvg
The actions are far from all that deliberate. Change contrast. Next track in
iTunes. Increase volume. The definitely start feeling deliberate because these
keys are almost impossible to hit without looking at them - they're small and
offset differently from the rest of the keyboard. Tog's point stands - these
keys present a horrible target. The one thing he doesn't mention is the
staggering brainlessness of putting the 'Eject Disk' key at the top-right
corner, above 'Delete'.

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zck
>The one thing he doesn't mention is the staggering brainlessness of putting
the 'Eject Disk' key at the top-right corner, above 'Delete'.

You think that's stupid? On the HP keyboard I'm using, there's a similar key
above Escape. What does it do? It _sleeps the computer_. At least on my
Ubuntu, there's no confirmation, just immediate hibernation. (Nor, for that
matter, can I find a way to turn it off. But then, configuring the keyboard in
Ubuntu is quite frustrating -- alas, a separate issue).

I can't imagine this wouldn't've come up during testing. I mean, really.

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nazgulnarsil
this explains on eof the major annoyances of windows. between the taskbar and
the window header, the GUI of any program is deprived of all four corners and
two edges. edges and corners are your most effective places for important
functions.

