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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?

#81

Post by tessellated »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #3
eterm wrote: post #2

I remember windows 3.1 had a utility for drawing custom cursors. I had great fun making cursors (I was around 10 at the time I guess) and had completed forgotten about it until now! I think that utility was a 16x16 grid, and indeed the easiest to see arrows utilsed the vertical, although actually a cursor which uses the horizontal and diagonal isn't bad either.

The Commodore Amiga had something similar along with an early 'double 90 degree' cursor [1] and a 1/2 pixel ratio cursor in later versions if the OS [2]. Both are pretty delightful :) [1] http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1cplpointer.png [2] http://geekometry.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/amigaos204-...

Great! Now I want ye olde Amiga cursors for X11.

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

#82

Post by ryanmcbride »

eterm wrote: post #2

I remember windows 3.1 had a utility for drawing custom cursors. I had great fun making cursors (I was around 10 at the time I guess) and had completed forgotten about it until now! I think that utility was a 16x16 grid, and indeed the easiest to see arrows utilsed the vertical, although actually a cursor which uses the horizontal and diagonal isn't bad either.

My favorite custom cursor was a banana.

The loading animation was the banana peeling. It blew my 10 year old mind.

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

#83

Post by gojomo »

nollidge wrote: post #65
gojomo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the oldest, crudest mouse you can find. Place your right hand on it and position it to the right of your keyboard. Put your finger on its primary (or single) button. Look at that finger from your head's natural perspective. Your pointing/clicking finger will appear to be pointing in an upper-left direction, somewhere between 0' and 45' – exactly like the classic arrow-cursor. Even if a designer with contemporane…

OK? I'm not sure what that's supposed to do with the post I replied to.

Oops! Indeed, I mis-perceived your comment as being a response to lotharbot's comment, about the tilt of right-hand pointing being an influence. Sorry.

However, I do think there's something more than "just so" to the darkmighty post you replied to, as well.

Anything that's hand-manipulated, and especially English writing on paper, must face the risk a dominant right-hand will partially obscure it. Thus we've got longstanding design tendencies, echoed on pixel screens, that more primary labels and information tends to be above and/or to the left, and more-ignorable (or even just defer-able) information goes to the bottom/right.

If damaging the visibility of some information for another purpose – as with an overlaid pointing indicator – a designer will thus have good reasons for allocating that damage in the down-right direction. (That is, tend towards obscuring the later/lesser information.) People immersed in our culture's visual design will even make that tradeoff subconsciously. So a "this makes intuitive sense" story, when reasoning about long-ago design decisions, is perfectly worthy of mention alongside other "historical evidence".

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

#84

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

qwerty_asdf wrote: post #80
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm wrong. Turns out pointer and caret are subclasses of cursor, and "mouse cursor" is perfectly acceptable to refer to the former. You learn something by being a petty smartass :)

...besides, when I hear the word pointer mentioned within the context of computing, I'm more inclined to think of things like stack pointers and instruction pointers.

just wait for the DBAs to come back on this :)

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

#85

Post by jff »

cl8ton wrote: post #74

I was told a long time ago by someone who should know. The tilt had a symbolic hidden meaning... It is pointing to the North-West to MS headquarters in Redmond.

By someone who should know better, you mean? Because that's a really terrible explanation.

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

#86

Post by Someone »

cl8ton wrote: post #74

I was told a long time ago by someone who should know. The tilt had a symbolic hidden meaning... It is pointing to the North-West to MS headquarters in Redmond.

Yeah, that must have been the reason Xerox chose that pointing direction and that Apple copied it: Redmond is exactly North-West from Palo Alto and Cupertino (clearly, Apple didn't do maps yet in 1984)

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

#87

Post by memracom »

Júlio Turolla Ribeiro's answer is far better. I guess that young people have lost the ability to think outside the computer. Some of us still remember school classes, and business presentations in which presenters pointed at the board with their finger, or with a two meter long stick called a "pointer". The pointing was almost always in the same angle as the photo that Julio included, either from the left or the right. Of course, from the right is more natural for the right-handed majority.

The fact that some engineer tinkered with the computer representation of the pointer for code efficiency reasons, does not change the fact of hundreds of years of history in which teachers pointed at an angle from the right. I'm sure that if you hunt up old movies (black and white ones) where there is a school/university lesson being portrayed, you will see a pointer in use in this pose.

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

#89

Post by gertef »

memracom wrote: post #87

Júlio Turolla Ribeiro's answer is far better. I guess that young people have lost the ability to think outside the computer. Some of us still remember school classes, and business presentations in which presenters pointed at the board with their finger, or with a two meter long stick called a "pointer". The pointing was almost always in the same angle as the photo that Julio included, either from the left or the righ…

1. On my computer, the pointer arrow is asymmetric, and the left side of the arrow-head is vertical.

2. Forget pre-computers... If you draw an imaginary line from my mouse/hand to the cursor, it is approximately parallel/overlapping with the line of the arrow pointing.

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