8 things about windows 8: the mouse and the corners of your screen

One of my all time favorite Dilbert cartoons appeared on December 29, 1996.  It started with “Dogbert’s Tech Support” and a call asking for assistance because a user had reached the edge of their mousepad (the advice includes rebooting without your files and moving the desk).  The solution to the problem is a $800 mousepad upgrade.  Classic Dilbert humor.  In searching the site for this cartoon, I discovered some other classic mouse related cartoons (mouse support and mouse training yielded the best results for me). 

In Windows 8, the corners of your screen will become very important.  If you have ever “lost” your mouse cursor on a laptop or desktop, one of the advanced techniques to find it is to move the pointer to the upper left hand corner because once it is there it won’t move further and can then be followed from there to where you want it on the screen.  Because any of the four corners are easy to quickly navigate to (and require very little precision because you can’t over shoot moving the mouse pointer to a corner) all 4 are used heavily in Windows 8.  This is really reimaging Windows, the mouse and the user interface.

Multiple Monitors

The corners are used, but what about multiple monitor configurations? The Windows 8 team figured out an ingenious way to deal with this situation, too. Shared corners mean the corner still functions on a monitor but anywhere else on that shared edge allows the user to move from one monitor to another (see this post for more information).

I can hardly wait for the RTM and general availability of Windows 8. These bring the final version of Windows 8 that I will upgrade my work and personal devices to (as well as purchase new equipment to run Windows 8 on).