{"id":78,"date":"2008-02-10T19:31:36","date_gmt":"2008-02-11T00:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.manytricks.net\/newblog\/?p=78"},"modified":"2015-09-06T08:32:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T15:32:09","slug":"user-interface-101-snap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/?p=78","title":{"rendered":"User Interface 101: Snap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of applications have little overlay windows that control the application&#8217;s behavior when in fullscreen mode. Take, for instance, QuickTime Player&#8217;s fullscreen playback controls or the Finder&#8217;s slideshow controls. By default, they pop up at the lower center of your screen, but you can move them with your mouse.<\/p>\n<p>The odd thing is: Once you&#8217;ve moved them (e.g., by accident), there&#8217;s virtually no way to re-center them. And you can move them off screen, at least partially. Sure, there are a lot of reasons that justify moving a standard window partially off screen, and I won&#8217;t even discuss them here, because I&#8217;m lazy. But I don&#8217;t think these reasons apply to little overlay windows with just a few controls \u2014 windows that are typically the only visible window of their kind, displayed in front of some kind of fullscreen content.<\/p>\n<p>I may be more obsessive than most users in this respect, but if I want to center a window, I want it centered, not just approximately centered. So to me, it has always been obvious that said overlay windows should snap to the screen&#8217;s center (or at least the center of the screen&#8217;s abscissa) when moved near there. And it&#8217;s equally obvious that they should snap to the screen&#8217;s edges. If you do it that way, there&#8217;s an additonal benefit: Most of these overlay windows have rounded corners; and if you snap them to the screen edges (or corners, for that matter), you can adjust the window&#8217;s corners according to the window&#8217;s position, because a rounded lower right window corner doesn&#8217;t make much sense if it&#8217;s snug against the screen&#8217;s lower right corner.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s how <a href=\"\/yflicks\">yFlicks<\/a> behaves. And <a href=\"\/butler\">Butler<\/a>&#8216;s little status window \u2014 the one you see when pressing a hot key, for instance \u2014 has been snapping to certain screen positions for years as well. But the thought that I may be overlooking the elephant in the room keeps haunting me, because I can&#8217;t find the answer to one simple question:<\/p>\n<p>Why doesn&#8217;t Apple do it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot of applications have little overlay windows that control the application&#8217;s behavior when in fullscreen mode. Take, for instance, QuickTime Player&#8217;s fullscreen playback controls or the Finder&#8217;s slideshow controls. By default, they pop up at the lower center of your screen, but you can move them with your mouse. The odd thing is: Once [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"coauthors":[22],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-developer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3705,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/3705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}