logoalt Hacker News

jonhohleyesterday at 2:29 PM0 repliesview on HN

That was the point of Tog's conclusion: edges of the screen have infinite target size in one cardinal direction, corners have infinite target size in two cardinal directions. Any click target that's not infinite in comparison, has infinitely smaller area, which I suppose you could conclude is infinitely worse if clickable area is your primary metric.

This wasn't just the menu bar either. The first Windows 95-style interfaces didn't extend the start menu click box to the lower left corner of the screen. Not only did you have to get the mouse down there, you had to back off a few pixels in either direction to open the menu. Same with the applications in the task bar.

The concept was similar to NEXTSTEP's dock (that was even licensed by Microsoft for Windows 95), but missed the infinite area aspect that putting it on the screen edge allowed.