Fitts's law: why the menu bar is at the top

milos.fyi

12 points·mmilanovic4··8 comments

A completely different explanation, which I think is the right one:

I always thought the Macintosh menu bar was copied from UCSD Pascal[1], an alternative operating system that ran on Apple II computers in the 1970s and early 1980s. Bill Atkinson was said to be familiar with it.

A machine running UCSD Pascal always had a menu running across the top of the screen, and the contents of the menu changed with the application -- just like the Lisa and the Macintosh -- which came years later. The menu was accessed from the keyboard. UCSD Pascal did not support a mouse, and the Apple II did not have one.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal

Isn't desktop software maximized most of the time anyway?

Not The way I use it, or since you're getting downloaded as soon as many others

tl;dr menu bar at the top of the screen is superior (to menu in each window) because pointer cursor can't miss it (thanks to screen edge).

the entire post could be one paragraph? also, can you claim copyright on llm generated work, i thought courts rejected that.

Also I don't think this explains "why it's at the top" specifically, since the same argument is true for all other edges, or at least the bottom edge.

valid. i feel doubly bamboozled now.

Triply bamboozled. The argument assumes one only ever wants to open the menu for the currently active application. With 2 or more applications there's a richer space of possibilities.

well i recall multiple application case was covered in the text... but don't want to read again

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