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Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

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Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#21

Post by euroderf »

"When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a tilted arrow. It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of arrow) and a line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor."

Well there ya go right there. The left side of the arrowhead is a nice clean straight line, and the right side of the arrowhead is as close as possible to 45 degrees, cutting down its "jaggedness".

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#22

Post by jusuhi »

raverbashing wrote: post #14

Xerox Park and display reasons aside, I think that the 2nd answer, with the picture of the hand is the best answer apart from historical and technical reasons.

The "best answer" perhaps from the POV of your own intuition. But the question is about a historical fact, and those don't work that way.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#23

Post by rgj »

weinzierl wrote: post #7

I have no idea, but a wild guess is that with old hardware the "hot" pixel that could trigger the collision interrupt was fixed to the upper left corner of the hardware sprite. EDIT: Another thought that crossed my mind is that with very lo-res screens a corner is the only way to get a well defined and sharp (yet fairly wide) arrowhead. The trade-off would be the shaft being pixelated, but the tip is more important.

That was debunked 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253841

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#24

Post by [deleted] »

p-e-w wrote: post #9
simondotau wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web page which that image is sourced from[0] and the reddit page it is in turn sourced from[1] makes a lot of hand-wavey analogies to optical balancing (which is a real phenomenon[2]) but doesn't make any compelling arguments for why they apply in this specific case. An alternative explanation is that this intentional imperfection exists to match the unavoidable imperfection which occurred when the cursor graphic…

I'm honestly not sure any explanation is needed here. Early UX design wasn't always done with as much thought and sophistication as today's software designers (are claiming to) apply. The first Windows systems had plenty of UI blunders that make the cursor thing look insignificant by comparison, and I can promise you they weren't all about "visual balance" or similar. Lots of them have carried over to later versions.

[deleted]

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#27

Post by mcmoor »

jusuhi wrote: post #22
raverbashing wrote: post #14

Xerox Park and display reasons aside, I think that the 2nd answer, with the picture of the hand is the best answer apart from historical and technical reasons.

The "best answer" perhaps from the POV of your own intuition. But the question is about a historical fact, and those don't work that way.

I guess first is the reason why it's initially and second is why it stay that way.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#28

Post by eastbound »

account-5 wrote: post #6
behnamoh wrote: post #2

The real question is: Why does Windows cursor look "imperfect"? https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/windows-c...

[flagged]

There was no patent about rounded rectangles. Please stop spreading fake news; News are sensationalized by journalists to the point the reader has an impression they said something that journalists didn’t; Do not repeat them.

It’s just that Samsung was the Concordski of the Concorde, it was copying Apple’s designs to the letter, from the unboxing experience to the charger even to the home button. It was an obvious copyright infringement.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/apples-case-that...

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#29

Post by wolpoli »

behnamoh wrote: post #2

The real question is: Why does Windows cursor look "imperfect"? https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/windows-c...

The current high-resolution cursor seems like a scaled-up version of the original cursor. Perhaps it's that way for compatibility reason since there are tons of monitors using 100% scaling.
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