Slightly Remarkable

However, one flaw that has caused much inconvenience is the incredibly tiny “Empty” link that deletes spam from the Bulk folder. Almost half of the time, when I go to click the “Empty” link, I end up clicking the area that surrounds it, and wind up viewing the Bulk folder instead of emptying it. This is exceedingly frustrating. Here’s how Yahoo’s interface currently looks:

Yahoo should at the very least add some padding to the “Empty” link. It may be desirable to have it small to avoid accidental clicking, but their confirmation message serves to prevent that, so there is no need to keep the link smaller. My suggestion would be to take the Bulk folder’s link and cut its width in half, and use the other half of the space that the Bulk folder’s link normally consumes for the “Empty” link, so the two links would be alongside each other and both would be easy to click.

My reasons are simple, but important. I think these are the same reasons which will affect others’ decisions greatly as well.

While the window is out of focus, I can browse the Internet while doing other things (for example, typing into an instant messaging window). This is both good and bad. Good because it makes multitasking a bit easier; bad because when I move my mouse pointer to another location on the screen (for example, if I’m writing an email and run over to hit the “Start” button, or if I want to go down to the taskbar to check how much battery is remaining on my laptop), I accidentally “click” a multitude of links. This is very undesirable and ends up costing me more time than the multitasking enhancement provides. It’s an unfair trade here.

I have an addiction problem: I love looking at CSS designs. I mean, I absolutely love it. I can’t get enough. Naturally, my Bloglines subscriptions include such places as CSSBeauty, Unmatched <Style>, CSSVault, CSS Drive, Style Gala, and more. As I visit the beautiful CSS designs that people have created, I have a tendency to forget to hold the Shift key (which tells Don’t Click It to halt functioning until the key is released) when hovering over menu items and such. As a result, I end up rapidly visiting many pages (often not even from the same site) that I didn’t want to see. The ability to change things on-mouse-over provides a nice feeling of interactivity with a site, and that interactivity is eliminated with Don’t Click It. I know I can hold Shift to avoid this problem, but it gets tiring after awhile…

It’s not difficult to get used to, though. I disabled the extension, but I keep putting my mouse over links and thinking “Why isn’t it going anywhere?” I’ll have to get used to clicking again now, but while it lasted, being click-free wasn’t the most uncomfortable experience — deciding when to go somewhere on my own is better for me, though.

So, what about you? Have you made the switch, or at least tried it? What did you decide to use and why?

What’s new?

• Hold the Shift key to halt all functionality; you can click or right-click objects during this time. As long as you hold down the Shift key, putting your mouse over an item won’t invoke its action.
• Hold the Ctrl key to open links in new windows/tabs. Note that this only works if your popup blocker is disabled, due to the use of the window.open() command.

You can still grab the script at the same location as before.

Here’s a list of the changes.

• Hold Shift key to halt functionality — links will only be “clicked” on mouse over when you are not holding the shift key.
• Form field select — instead of just focusing on a field, Don’t Click It now automatically selects text within text fields.
• I was thinking about adding a timeout-function for buttons, but then I decided otherwise. Advanced uses can uncomment that part of the code in the script to enable the timeout functionality.

You can still access and install the script at the same location as before. There are going to be even more major enhancements coming soon, but I thought I should release what I worked so far.

There’s this site called DontClick.it — basically it’s a Flash-powered user-interface approach that avoids the necessity of clicking for navigation and other functionality. The web site claims that there is a small gap of time between clicking that can be eliminated by omitting the clicking process altogether. While this may be the case, I don’t think that the omission of clicking would be beneficial to many users who are often uncertain whether they want to select a particular item (be it a link, input field, or something else). However, for advanced users of the Web, clicking may actually be a hindrance to productivity — I can’t confirm this, though, because I’m much more experienced with clicking than with hovering. In order to decide which is truly more efficient, I have to evaluate which is better after I’ve acquired a good deal of experience with them both. This means I’ll have to have some way to evaluate both of them; clicking I’m already experienced in — I do this every day, all the time — but how do I avoid clicking on every site I visit?

Introducing Don’t Click It!, a Greasemonkey script for Firefox power-users. Install this little bugger and your clicking is over, unless you decide that you’re more productive with clicking (but like I said, you should evaluate the usefulness of a click-free interface objectively rather than assume it’s too difficult because you’re “not used to it”). I’d look into giving it a try — there are some things that may not work (e.g., file inputs that can’t be accessed by JavaScript and I noticed a problem with a Yahoo! Mail drop down menu), but it’s a good start, anyway. Enjoy, and don’t forget to tell me what you think or suggest improvements! There’s always room for that!

Update: it seems that I have troubles controlling my mouse (especially when I’m using my laptop’s mousepad), so perhaps clicking would be better just if everything (including very small links) were easier to click. Hmm, I feel yet another Greasemonkey script coming on…

Update 2: something really cool that I noticed earlier was that I could be talking on instant messaging (on a seperate monitor on the same computer) and browsing the Internet at the same time because the instant messaging window would stay focused, but I could still browse the Internet at the same time. Pretty cool, huh? The 19th (or 20th) I should be releasing a much better version of this Greasemonkey script, so hang tight for that!

Update 3: I’ve updated the script. What do you think of the updates?

Update 4: More updates…