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sounds like a good idea but......... the FPS player in me wants to call you a noob and tell you to learn to aim
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Mate! I'll 1v1 you at HL2Dm any day of the week - but I don't spend 8 hours a day doing that!
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_Maxxx_ wrote: but I don't spend 8 hours a day doing that!
you dont have to lie here, you're amogst friends 
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I'm not lying.
It's more like 10 
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here is[^] a similar concept, but with a mechanism in the mouse that causes you to feel the attraction to clickable areas.
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killabyte didn't do it, so I WILL.
YOU NOOB!! I could sweep your head with the mouse and >click< BOOM!
Killed _Maxx_ +100
Headshot! +50
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A similar idea exist in computer aided drafting called "snap points". In that case if you are close to something like say the end of a line it will act as if you clicked on the end of the line.
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Yes, PShop and WinAmp have used employed snap points for almost 20 years.
/ravi
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I like the idea. Dunno if you can patent its implementation - I believe there's prior art (see my reply re: PShop and WinAmp).
/ravi
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_Maxxx_ wrote: In a windowed working environment, one thing that, i think, slows me down a bit, is mouse accuracy.
When I am clicking on, say, the Big X to close a window, in Windows - or the equivalent in any other OS, the X is small, my screen is large - so my mouse has to move a long way, then slow and stop accurately on the X.
So how about this for an idea?
Allow buttons (such as the X) to have a 'depth' and, possibly, a radius. Give
the mouse pointer a property (call it 'weight')
I think you're just too old to use a computer any more, hand it ovet to your son who has the physical coordination to use it.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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You're a cruel and heartless man, Mr. Martin. However, I should point out that we live in an aging population, so the inventor of technology to aid the elderly computer user is likely to be the winner in the long run.
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_Maxxx_ wrote: You're a cruel and heartless man, Mr. Martin. However, I should point out that we live in an aging population, so the inventor of technology to aid the elderly computer user is likely to be the winner in the long run.
Yes, but I have plans to fix this in about 17 months time, when I neck Julia and smash any other Labor leader wannabe. Once I become Supremem Lifetime Leader of Australia, I'll fix this old people problem right prompt.
Michael Martin
Australia
"I controlled my laughter and simple said "No,I am very busy,so I can't write any code for you". The moment they heard this all the smiling face turned into a sad looking face and one of them farted. So I had to leave the place as soon as possible."
- Mr.Prakash One Fine Saturday. 24/04/2004
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Michael Martin wrote: I neck Julia
eww 
Michael Martin wrote: I'll fix this old people problem right prompt.
Cool - so you're going to write the OS front end I was talking about 
Ohh.. wait - I think I see what you mean.
elephanting hell - erm, I'm actually quite youthful, you know. Not as old as I look. Honest.
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Neat idea, though I'm not sure I'd like my mouse sinking into places and conflicing with my movements. I like mouse movement to be predictable according to my movements rather than invisible environmental variables.
Instead, I'd like window elements to be attracted to the mouse. So as you approach the X button, it grows in size and gravitates toward the mouse pointer.
Alternatively, you could create something like a magnifying glass effect. However, instead of a simple magnification within a circle, you create a logorithmic drop off, so the magnification slowly reduces the further away from the mouse cursor you see (instead of a constant 2x magnification). And rather than a simple magnification that overlays and covers up the adjacent parts of the screen, the rest of the view space could compress slightly to make room for the expanded/magnified area around the mouse. Think of it as a toned-down curvy circus mirror.
To visualize this, this would be the bad version (with the magnification overlapping the normal space): bad (notice that you can't read some of the words)
Here is the good version: good (some things shrink, others expand, nothing is hidden by something expanded).
Also, this could be based on individual controls, rather than smoothly mangifying pixels. So the button might grow by 2x evenly (so the button doesn't look all curvy) and a label might grow by 1.5x evenly (so the text isn't all curvy). For controls that are very large (e.g., big labels), maybe those do have curves (or maybe just the individual words expand at different rates).
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You've just reminded me of a piece of what we would probably now consider malware, but back then it was a load of fun to inflict on noobs. In the age of dinosaurs and Win95 (or maybe even 3.1?) there was a program that would intermittently pop up a kitten on screen and change the mouse cursor to an animated mouse. The kitten would then chase the mouse as you moved it. When it got bored (coffee break or think time) it would make the mouse cursor move just so the cat had something to chase.
Listening in on the helpdesk was fun when a victim called and the helpdesk erk hadn't seen it.
Cheers,
Peter
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994.
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You're thinking of Neko[^] right? We had it on one of the family computers when I was a kid. It originally appeared on the NEC PC-9801[^] in the 80's and was ported to Mac and then Windows.
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not sure if you're aware of this already.. on a maximized window you can pretty much close a *maximized* window blindly by moving to the top-right edge of the screen. I think this was introduced in Vista, or maybe 7... the concept of 'infinite height' buttons.
Your idea might work well though. Although I think mouse gestures are already quite popular..
"For fifty bucks I'd put my face in their soup and blow." - George Costanza
CP article: SmartPager - a Flickr-style pager control with go-to-page popup layer.
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Not sure what you are puffing on this morning.
What happens if the "x" is not the only thing on the screen and you have to move the mouse past these other things.
Peter Wasser
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa
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we're talking 'slight indentations' not friggin' black holes, here.
If your mouse had force-feedback, you'd feel it bumping over the other controls, but they wouldn't be toooooo sticky.
In fact, a clever programmer would probably decide not to even look at close-by objects when the mouse velocity was over a certain limit - so the gravitational pull wouldn't come into effect until you started to slow the mouse down.
pwasser wrote: Not sure what you are puffing on this morning.
Prime ganja
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Just use the keyboard (alt+f4, in this case)
- S
50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
Code, follow, or get out of the way.
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My idea was a generic one with a specific example.
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Yeah, and I think it's a good idea. I was just implying the keyboard is more precise and already implemented. I would call your feature "gravity". The only problem I see is that moving your mouse around the screen would be like trying to avoid black holes (or those sites that popup ads on keywords - I call them "Ad Mines").
Anyway, go for it!
- S
50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
Code, follow, or get out of the way.
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So you have several windows on top of each other. Which one gets the black hole experience? Oh, the top one. But what if I don't want to close the top one, but the window just behind it, whose "X" is right above the "X" of the active window?
Or, I don't want to close the window at all, just drag the mouse to another part of the screen, but all the black hole buttons keep sucking my mouse off track like it's a stumbling drunk.
In other words, it would suck 
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Joe Woodbury wrote: Which one gets the black hole experience? Oh, the top one. But what if I don't want to close the top one, but the window just behind it, whose "X" is right above the "X" of the active window?
Well, if you mean the X is sitting 'in front of' the X below (on the Z axis) - then no difference, you can't see it, you can't interact with it.
If you mean it is aligned slightly higher on the Y axis, then the 'attraction' to the two should form a sort of w whape, so the mouse pointer would be attracted to whichever it is closest to.
Joe Woodbury wrote: Or, I don't want to close the window at all, just drag the mouse to another part of the screen, but all the black hole buttons keep sucking my mouse off track like it's a stumbling drunk.
not a black hole, but a gentle gravitational attraction, probably affecting the mouse only when it is moving below a certain velocity.
Joe Woodbury wrote: In other words, it would suck
Yes, it would suck the pointer into the required position with more accuracy.
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