I find waiting around is ONLY necessary with acceleration enabled. In my opinion at least, acceleration ruins trackpoints. With no acceleration, one simply applies the correct amount of pressure and the cursor will be wherever it needs to be within a second or so.
I can think of some Portal puzzles in particular where timing is important, and you need to hold your aim but wait to click until something happens somewhere else on the screen (so the place you're clicking is not the same as the place you're looking).
I think the same thing applies to e.g. recording network activity in Chrome dev tools. My eyes are on the page to see when the thing I'm interested in finishes loading; my mouse cursor is on the button to stop recording.
It's not a super common pattern, but probably common enough that it would be annoying not to be able to do it.
Yeah I had the same, I figured out it was more the acceleration that was the problem rather than the cursor movement itself...moving slower than usual meant I could use it without problems.
In my own implementation I've added a movement threshold, so it only starts moving the cursor after you've moved your finger a certain number of pixels (currently 44) from the point at which you originally put it down. I've found this avoids problems of accidental cursor movement.
You can always slow down the pointer movement itself to compensate for that loss in precision. With a well-chosen acceleration curve, that doesn't hinder you from covering even large, screen-wide distances with just a quick flick of the pointing device.
I was super excited about this feature. In practice, it's nice for moving the cursor a long way quickly, but the finer stuff isn't any faster. It also tends to shift as I left my finger so it makes being precise difficult.
Kinda cool that Chrome added pointer lock, but the responsiveness of moving the cursor around the screen is pretty shit. Maybe it's mac mouse acceleration's fault?
Bubble cursor worries me far less than sticky icons. The mapping between mouse and pointer displacement is currently a well defined linear relationship that humans can internalize trivially.
I've always felt that mouse "acceleration" undermined that relationship, but at least it was in a way that mapped to the motion of the mouse.
Changing that to include all possible targets en-route to your destination seems almost malicious: I know where I want to move the pointer but other GUI elements in between will try to thwart me!
The interface is clunky. I don't like how the format is "the farther you are away from the point you started on, the more you accelerate." I prefer to have my mouse cursor stuck to one location, which I can then move around.
Isn't that how legitimate mobile or even laptop trackpad users look ? If I don't intend to click anywhere, the "mouse" cursor never moves - the page loads, I scroll, and go back by keyboard.
With a mouse, you get slight movement even while scrolling or pressing buttons, but with a trackpad or on a mobile device you don't, there's "mouse movement" even if you explicitly do some aiming before a click.
I agree: this kind of thing is infuriating because it's such a slowdown to have to go touch the mouse and find the pointer on the screen. Really interrupts the workflow.
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