It's such a small detail that I wouldn't have otherwise noticed (because I don't build animations, so it doesn't cross my mind), but now that I know about it, I think about it all the time.
I think there was also an article about it on The Old New Thing, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
Find modern examples by Googling "menu safe triangle." Here's one from 5 days ago https://www.framer.com/blog/cursor-trajectory/
> I asked the Framer Agent to fix it, and within minutes it had built and applied what I now call trajectory-based menu aim
How is this different from the observation that, say, a non-magnetic iron ball may have more than one possible velocity in a given gravitional field, depending on whether it was recently thrown upward or dropped from above?
(These days I would have included more comments.)
Naturally, there was a fallback to pure CSS menus, because we weren't barbarians.
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My three most-hated modern trends
- Disappearing scroll bar with content that you have to scroll for
- Pills going across the top of the screen that are "most-used" filters instead of a real filtering menu
- Clickable text and non-clickable text appearing the same. I mean come on. Who the fuck is designing these things? That's the one I can't wrap my mind around. How can a self-respecting programmer put out a UI where the display and clickable elements look exactly the same? What are we doing man
Browsers are different. They don't really benefit from being written for, or from being used. This seems like enough to explain the difference. They provide some functionality, and giving your users a good experience is your problem, not theirs.
I feel like I've seen complaints that Apple has forgotten things it already knew about how to design a usable interface; that wouldn't be explained by this model.
I like predictable, consistent, and fast.
Why on earth do we need this thing here?
Oh, that's why.