3 ms·
> "Enhance pointer precision" (award for the most misleading title because it actually makes precision worse) I would argue that it does enhance the precision
by bscphil 6y ago
> "Enhance pointer precision" (award for the most misleading title because it actually makes precision worse)
I would argue that it does enhance the precision if it's correctly implemented. (I haven't used Windows in a decade, so I can't comment on that point.)
Example: on a laptop, move the cursor to the bottom left corner of the screen. In one very slow continuous swipe, drag your finger from the bottom left to the top right of your touchpad. How far across your screen do you get? In my case, I get only about 1/3 of the way across the diagonal.
Assume I have no acceleration feature on my touchpad driver. This means I have two options to make the touchpad usable. Either (a) I can get used to dragging across the entire touchpad 3+ times to get the cursor across the screen, or (b) I can turn the touchpad speed way up. Suppose I do the latter.
Now suppose my cursor is 10px away from some target and I want to hit that target with a quick movement on the touchpad. Because of the very high speed required by the previous change, my accuracy is greatly reduced. I have trouble hitting small targets with tiny movements on the touchpad.
On the contrary, acceleration gets me the best of both worlds. With one quick swipe, I can get the cursor all the way across the screen. This is the "expected" behavior most people have for a laptop the first time they pick it up. On the other hand, when I'm trying to hit a small target with a slow cursor movement, I have a much easier time doing that. This feels like "enhanced precision" to your average user - the cursor moves more slowly and accurately when I need it to.
- barrkel 6y agoMind that you're replying to someone talking about using a mouse, and you're talking about using a trackpad. Different input modalities deserve different affordances.
- maccard 6y agoThey aboslutely do. I've never really thought about it but this is obviously why a Mac trackpad feels smooth as butter but even booting into windows on the same hardware makes it feel awful.
- Someone 6y agoI think that applies to mice, too. The ‘natural’ range of mouse motion is larger than for a trackpad, but not that much larger. The width of a typical mouse pad is about 8-10 inch, so if you use one, the range of motion is a bit smaller. Apple’s Magic Trackpad is over 6 inch, the latest MacBooks have a trackpad of over 5 inch.
- barrkel 6y agoMice don't have boundaries, trackpads do. The most awkward thing on a trackpad is initiating a drag and hitting an edge. I think mousepads are mostly an artifact of pre optical & laser mice, if someone uses one today it's either because they have a glass desktop or they want wrist support.
- clarry 6y ago> if someone uses one today it's either because they have a glass desktop or they want wrist support. Or they just want a good surface where the mouse glides smoothly, without any rubbing or scraping or pits that affect tracking.. I've never had a desk that felt good without a pad. I imagine glass would be smooth as long as it's clean.
- Someone 6y agoYour desk may have plenty of space, but arms do have boundaries. If you have to move your mouse a foot to move the mouse pointer to its destination, you’ll lift the mouse halfway through that motion, and if, on modern displays, you don’t have to move a foot, pointing at specific pixels becomes hard for lots of people. Even the original Mac, with its 512 pixel screen width, had a setting that enabled mouse acceleration (fairly rudimentary. It doubled distance travelled when the sum of horizontal and vertical displacement exceeded 6 pixels). I think the discussion is more about tuning the acceleration curve than about whether to have one or not, for both mice and trackpads. There probably isn’t a single answer that suits everybody, either.