Not nearly as nasty as scroll hijacking so the page moves at a different speed than what I've instructed it to move at. Or pastejacking - when you're trying to copy a piece of text and the page makes you grab an entirely different string to what you'd highlighted and selected.
Focus-stealing, too! Especially bad with Microsoft products. I can picture exactly what happened: a thousand complaints of "I lost a window in the heaping mess of open work on my desktop" each turned into a ticket to add Just One More focus steal until the first minute of a Microsoft-powered desktop's existence is various projects fighting in a brawl to repeatedly steal focus from one another.
It was a major win for the internet that it took this power away from the application layer.
> For example, making it slightly tilted because it was easier to draw on old screens.
No. Some older systems actually had straight pointers. The slightly tilted design is, I assume, a result of wanting to point to something while still being able to see what is to the immediate left of the pointer; useful for left-to-right text.
I like it how the author says how busy he is and how he finally snatched a few minutes out of this busy life to bring us this edict: don't hijack mouse pointers, or else!
What next, don't use blink or marquee elements?
Or else!
Standard issue cursors are not that great in all environments, sometimes making the cursor massively big or doing other daft things to it make sense. It is all about context and golden rules don't help.
It was a major win for the internet that it took this power away from the application layer.
No. Some older systems actually had straight pointers. The slightly tilted design is, I assume, a result of wanting to point to something while still being able to see what is to the immediate left of the pointer; useful for left-to-right text.
I can't see any difference between these in terms of UX - I got annoyed just looking at them.
What next, don't use blink or marquee elements?
Or else!
Standard issue cursors are not that great in all environments, sometimes making the cursor massively big or doing other daft things to it make sense. It is all about context and golden rules don't help.