Menubar, Spotlight, Active Corners and Fitts's Law in action

About the attitude of Apple to user interfaces, we have already mentioned more than once. Here we consider a few examples of how minor, seemingly interface changes affect the usability of the system.

Take for example the menu bar on OS X, has migrated decades ago in the upper part of the screen. As we know, Mac OS menu displays the current application there, as opposed to the Windows / Linux and other desktop operating systems. Such an approach, at first seeming to wild switcher has a huge advantage, namely, significantly increase the speed of access to the menu items in comparison with the embodiment, the proposed Microsoft. Why? say "Fitts' law"Can treat yourself chocolate. In fact, thanks to the infinite height (displacement of the mouse as much as necessary "higher" when the edge of the screen will not affect the position of cursor) to an item Apple menyubara much easier to hit the mouse, than placed closer to the center of the Windows menu screen, in which it is necessary aim.

Moreover, Apple cleverly taken advantage of this and other objects located within the menu bar. For example, despite the fact that the icon  menu and icon bar situated spotlight away from the corners of the screen, in fact areas responsible for processing tapping them are in the upper left and right corners of the screen respectively. Thus, even a rapidly moving his mouse up and to the right and clicking we activate the spotlight. Icons on menyubare have the same property: in spite of the small size of the visual they have "infinite height", which reduces access time.

Similarly with Dock, which, however, differs large size objects (icons) and does not use all of the available horizontal width (Doc constructive criticism can be read at Bruce Tonyazini).

For comparison, the Windows task bar for a long time had a one-pixel "dead zone" on either side buttons, bringing to nothing of the benefits from its bottom position, and icons for notification area (system tray) still require more precise guidance due to the fact that the clickable area is less than the height panel.

But that's not all. In the arsenal of OS X have a wonderful thing, calling Active Screen Corners, allows you to assign each of the 4 corners of the screen a certain action. For example, the upper right corner may be used to involve Exposé, and the left lower to prevent the activation of a screen saver.

P.S.: think I listed all of the examples of successful use of Fitts's Law by Apple? Certainly not... particularly observant can be noted in the comments :)