The point of Fitt's law is that it's easier to hit a larger target than a smaller one. When applied to clicking on something with a mouse, though, you have to also bear in mind that when the mouse pointer hits the edge of the screen, it stops. So the small 40-odd pixel high menu bar at the top of the screen may well be hundreds or thousands of pixels high; you could aim at any point at or above the menu bar, and your mouse pointer would end up over it, no matter how accurate or inaccurate you were.
It's the same reason the Windows Start button is in a corner of the screen: it's very, very easy to hit.
And when I was talking about multiple levels of windows, parent and child windows, I meant multiple levels of windows: one large window which contains the menu, and in turns contains document windows (see Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface), criticism (http://www.pixelcentric.net/article.php?art=docs)). Like, say, this screenshot I randomly grabbed off the Web (http://www.datacad.com/products/Whats_New_files/MDI.jpg). In this case, closing each individual document shouldn't (and doesn't) quit the main application; only closing the enclosing window, or choosing the Quit or Exit menu option, closes the application.
But however you present it, I think that on a desktop operating system, where you start up and quit applications, the consequences of closing a document window should be consistent, simple and painless. Why should the application quit I close a window if that was the last one, but not if I had another open? Why should there be a difference between a) opening a new window and then closing the previous window (that works), and b) closing the old window (the application quits), restarting the application, remembering not to close the random untitled empty document it's just opened, opening a new window, and closing the untitled document?
Oh, and the annoying magnification effect in the Dock was always something you could turn off, and is no longer the default option, if it ever was. I think the latest versions of Mac OS also make running applications clearer.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-16 09:24 pm (UTC)The point of Fitt's law is that it's easier to hit a larger target than a smaller one. When applied to clicking on something with a mouse, though, you have to also bear in mind that when the mouse pointer hits the edge of the screen, it stops. So the small 40-odd pixel high menu bar at the top of the screen may well be hundreds or thousands of pixels high; you could aim at any point at or above the menu bar, and your mouse pointer would end up over it, no matter how accurate or inaccurate you were.
It's the same reason the Windows Start button is in a corner of the screen: it's very, very easy to hit.
And when I was talking about multiple levels of windows, parent and child windows, I meant multiple levels of windows: one large window which contains the menu, and in turns contains document windows (see Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface), criticism (http://www.pixelcentric.net/article.php?art=docs)). Like, say, this screenshot I randomly grabbed off the Web (http://www.datacad.com/products/Whats_New_files/MDI.jpg). In this case, closing each individual document shouldn't (and doesn't) quit the main application; only closing the enclosing window, or choosing the Quit or Exit menu option, closes the application.
But however you present it, I think that on a desktop operating system, where you start up and quit applications, the consequences of closing a document window should be consistent, simple and painless. Why should the application quit I close a window if that was the last one, but not if I had another open? Why should there be a difference between a) opening a new window and then closing the previous window (that works), and b) closing the old window (the application quits), restarting the application, remembering not to close the random untitled empty document it's just opened, opening a new window, and closing the untitled document?
Oh, and the annoying magnification effect in the Dock was always something you could turn off, and is no longer the default option, if it ever was. I think the latest versions of Mac OS also make running applications clearer.