Hover is dead, long live Hover.

Seriously, stop using mouse hover to do things already. I just found out that xkcd isn’t the only comic I read that uses mouse-hover text to continue the joke. AFBlues does it too?! Argh!

Sorry that I use an iPad. Or an RSS reader. Why must you punish me? Abusing your fans isn’t usually considered to be good form, but if you feel you must then I guess I can’t stop you. And don’t even get me started on websites that make use of it. (Pointing at you FaceBook, even though I don’t use you anymore.)

Hover was never a good metaphor, and in this era of feed readers, touch interfaces, and ? super-smart mobile devices, it just isn’t viable at ALL.

2 Replies to “Hover is dead, long live Hover.”

  1. Maybe touch technology needs to add an additional feature for hover detection. I remember reading an article about it at some point. A quick Google search shows a company called Cypress which has one, and something indicating that Apple has a patent for such a thing.

  2. Well, that’s sort of the point. Hover was never that great an idea to begin with. It’s a bit of a mystery-meat navigation technique (non-obvious to user), plus there are the accessibility issues. Add in the devices of the modern era, and it just needs to stop.

    You certainly /could/ add hover detection to touch-based interfaces, although it would be horrible and stupid. And it would still leave smartphones and RSS readers out in the cold. “My devices doesn’t support this” really wasn’t the point though. 🙂