Anti sniping and mouse mileage in general

Sniping is something apps force users to do unwillingly, maybe because app developers are ignorant, maybe because app developers never actually use their own software, maybe because they are evil... Maybe just because they didn't know there was a problem in the first place. Often times sniping is forced upon the users because the devs think their app should be neat and "professional looking" but not actually optimized for efficiency and ease of use.

Examples of sniping:

1: Things to click that are very small.

• every program has this. Most at least. Blender has this here and there. Small arrows to bring out menus in the viewport. Small buttons littered all over the crowded interface.

2: Things that are easy to choose with a marquee, but is disrupted by a close edge, preventing said marquee to be fully effective. -Blender has a couple of these here and there. One place in particular is the timeline. You want keys/tangents to be easily selectable, you want points in time to be easily accessible without too many hotkeys. Like first frame of animation... And last frame. Same in the graph editor. Auto zooming that makes curves almost flush with the boundaries of the graph editor viewport. Which in turn makes it hard to choose keys to manipulate. Or worse forces us to navigate/manipulate the graph editor view every time a curve has been focused upon.

3: "Grabbing" a tool, action is cancelled by out of bounds. -this one is one of the worst, and is only here for context. Blender either has 0 or at least very few of these. But we all know it. Best example is a slider that loses focus because the mouse leaves the slider. A variation is one which not only loses focus but also resets what the tool had done since the start of the touch. Many programs has a radius where within that radius while having grabbed the tool we are allowed to manipulate it. But that is a misunderstanding. There is no excuse to not make that radius infinite.

4: Mouse mileage. -the distance the mouse has to travel to achieve x. -cough... the distance YOUR HAND AND WRIST needs to travel to achieve x. Users can mitigate this alot by them selves by rearranging the layout.

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Alright. Where do we have great examples of this being implemented(eradicated) either on purpose or unknowingly? Best and most efficiency minded implementation of this is the middle mouse button manipulation feature in 3d apps like blender. Select something with left mouse button, manipulate with middle. Left can never manipulate unless it snipes, but it can select. Middle mouse button can never select at all, but only manipulate. The fact that one is able to manipulate something without carefully sniping a gizmo somewhere is mind blowing. The fact that we can manipulate something with middle mouse button hovering over whatever is even more mindblowing. This makes for massive effected boosts in the animation departments around the globe. And no one talks about it or really knows why.

Big buttons are not especially desirable in complicated applications. Maybe there is an add-on that sort of makes a toolbox where users can drag every possible feature into it, we can arrange them and the buttons are nice and big so we don't have to spend hard earned milliseconds on sniping.

Philosophies to keep in mind for future features and user interface fix-ups:

Interface buttons should never be too small. Keep a good healthy standard size so when users scales the entire interface up to better be able to spot small buttons the big buttons isn't becoming too big!

Things that people never want to snipe, like vertecies or keys and tangents in the graph editor, should always be easily selectable with a marquee. Risk of out of bounds or miss selection should be mitigated at all costs.

Keep left mouse button manipulation to a minimum. Let it be the main organ for selection.

Aspire to keep the middle mouse button confined to manipulation. Avoid to ever be able to select with it.

Mileage. The more we have to move our hands and wrist to achieve something the worse. Rotation in blender is a good example. The way users rotate objects in blender is how rotation should work when precision (shift) has been pressed. For normal use it is bonkers to force users to move their hands as much as it does right now. Some "gears" are needed under the hood to speed up this. No reason to have TWO precision rotate options.

Philosophy suggestion. And something app devs should start to think and talk more about. 😅🙏🙏