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A comment on Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog. Parent comment

Re:Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog by WorldMaker on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @05:21PM (#16226893)
> (Meanwhile, I can appreciate Microsoft Word's similar toolbar on highlight, which is especially useful in touch and pen-oriented workflows.)

I wonder if part of that observed difference is also in how the respective toolbars are engineered?

- The medium highlight toolbar is 100% opaque and directly next to the highlight, obscuring previous words in the paragraph.

- The Word highlight toolbar has mechanics whereby it doesn't always open directly above the highlighted region, very quickly becomes transparent if you don't interact with it, and dismisses itself entirely just as quickly if you move the mouse too far away or scroll the page.

That "Mario ghost shyness" built into the Word highlight toolbar I think makes a big difference in the feel of those popups.

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Re:Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog by nxc18 on Wednesday January 24, 2018 @10:00PM (#16228411)
The Word hover toolbar was one of the innovations in office 2007 (along with the Ribbon, live preview, and contextual grammar) and it’s one of my favorite features for the reasons you specify. A truly awesome feature that does not get nearly enough attention and is missing in places like google docs.

Often, I find that I have no need to actually use the ribbon, because what I need pops up near my cursor when I select the text I want to edit.

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