Once you’re on the icon, small movements of your finger jiggle the icon so you know you’re still there. Predictive math is applied to get you to where you’re going without you having to land precisely there, then a bit of inertia is applied to keep you where you need to be without over shooting it.
#Cursor change windows
When you’re close to an object on the screen, it changes its rate of travel to get where you want to go quicker, but it does it contextually, rather than linearly, the way that macOS or Windows does. The idea of variable cursor velocity is pushed further here too. As you approach an interactive element, the circle reaches out, smoothly touching then embracing and encapsulating the button. Honestly, the thinking could have stopped there and that would have been perfectly adequate. The cursor as your finger’s avatar has the same impact wherever it lands. So much so that when an app is not properly optimized for that modality it feels awkward, clumsy.
It was designed from the ground up as a touch-first experience. Its size and shape is also a nod to the nature of iPad’s user interface. It brings that idea of placing you inside the machine to the next level, blending the physical nature of touch with the one-step-removed trackpad experience. The iPad cursor takes on the shape of a small circle, a normalized version of the way that the screen’s touch sensors read the tip of your finger. First, let’s talk about some of the things that make the cursor so different from what came before…and yet strangely familiar. In order to dive a bit deeper on the brand new cursor and its interaction models, I spoke to Apple SVP Craig Federighi about its development and some of the choices by the teams at Apple that made it. It’s a seminal bit of remixing from one of the most closely watched idea factories on the planet. The iPad’s cursor, I think, deserves closer examination. Then, a few weeks ago, Apple dropped a new kind of pointer - a hybrid between these two worlds of pixels and pushes. This, finally, was human-centric computing. If you dragged your finger, the content came with it. If you touched a thing, it did something. Touch interactions brought with them “stickiness” - the 1:1 mating of intent and action. Replacing your digital ghost in the machine with your physical meatspace fingertip. The iPhone and later the iPad didn’t immediately re-invent the cursor. But for the past few years, thanks to touch devices, we’ve had a new, fleshier, sprinter: our finger. There are many self-assured conjectures about the change, but few actual answers - all we know for sure is that, like a ready athlete, the arrow pointer has been there, waiting to leap towards our goal for decades. We don’t know exactly why the original ‘ straight up arrow’ envisioned by Doug Engelbart took on the precise angled stance we know today. For the first time, we saw ourselves awkwardly in a screen. * Unlike the text entry models of before, which placed character after character in a facsimile of a typewriter, this was a tether that connected us, embryonic, to the aleph.
It was hominem in machina - humanity in the machine. The star of the show, though, was the small line of pixels that made up the mouse cursor. It was demonstrated in the ‘ Mother of all demos’ - a presentation roughly an hour-and-a-half long that contained not only the world’s first look at the mouse but also hyper linking, document collaboration, video conferencing and more. The original cursor was a dot, then a line pointing straight upwards. It’s an instrument of precision, of tiny click targets on a screen feet away. Slightly angled, with a straight edge and a 45 degree slope leading to a sharp pixel-by-pixel point. Its everyday utility, pioneered at SRI and Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic * work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years. Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use.
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