Hints for Writing Unix Tools

https://monkey.org/~marius/unix-tools-hints.html

Worth re-reading every few months.

Trying to be a Mac User--Decision to Give Up

In November I went all-in on switching from Linux to the Mac. Linux quality is ever-declining, and I had a laptop on which Linux Mint was almost completely unusable. But Mac usability is surprisingly poor, and I expect to return to Linux, mostly completely.

This is the first of a series of short articles on Mac usability deficiencies. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_and_click#Fitts.27s_Law:

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Fitts's Law

Fitts's law can be used to quantify the time required to perform a point-and-click action.
where:

• is the average time taken to complete the movement.
• represents the start/stop time of the device and stands for the inherent speed of the device. These constants can be determined experimentally by fitting a straight line to measured data.
• is the distance from the starting point to the center of the target.
• is the width of the target measured along the axis of motion. can also be thought of as the allowed error tolerance in the final position, since the final point of the motion must fall within of the target's centre.

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Why is this important? Regardless of where a window is on the screen, OS X places the menu in the far upper left. Mousing to the menu is more time-consuming than if the menu were attached to the window itself, putting OS X at a disadvantage compared to other popular desktop operating systems, especially those with large screens.