Hacker News Reader

Comment by simulate | Hacker News Reader

Joel Spolsky wrote about something similar with Microsoft missing its Start button placement by two pixels:

> the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it's about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally "snatches defeat from the jaws of victory", Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063....

(edited link to point to second article in Spolsky's series)

View on HN

This was also the case with minimized applications in Windows 95 and as such you could click below the box.

In Windows 98 they realized the mistake - but in a typical Microsoft way of solving things, instead of simply making the area clickable below they instead forced the mouse up by 2-3 pixels every time you decided to be so silly as to try and click below the box.

I believe there is a technical reason for that 2 pixel move. If I remember correctly, old 16 bits applications can receive mouse messages from minimized windows. They didn't want to break compatibility by posting out of bounds messages.

You've got an off by one error in your link!

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063....

Thanks! I have edited and corrected the problem.

Is it not a bit ironic this happened on a post ranting about the misplacement of buttons by a pixel or 2?

Don't encourage this way of thinking too much. The gnome folks seem to think "hot corners" are awesome because they are easy to hit with a mouse. The problems is that they are also making something that looks like a touch interface, where the corners are awkward if at all possible to hit. Not to mention they lack visual ques. That said, the w95 start button probably should have extended to the corner.

Was it GOMS back in the early 80s which was the first to teach putting the most important and frequently accessed buttons in the corners so they are easy to click by over-reaching with the mouse?

Fitts's Law goes back to the 50's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

I never noticed, because I always used the keyboard to get at the start menu. Come to think of it, when I learned all the keyboard commands to manipulate windows, I only ever used the mouse in rare circumstances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com