I feel like the quality of TechCrunch has really gone down as a whole over the years, and this article is a great example. It is essentially a fluff and marketing piece for Apple that can be summarised in three dotpoints:

* Apple invented the cursor (untrue)

* On iPad, the cursor is a round circle

* They bought over the same Apple TV effect on iPad

Most of the words and sentences in this article are meaningless, and if there's anything reading this has made me feel, it's that I'll never subscribe to their subscription service.

I'm not sure why TC is submitted so much - over often times better articles like: https://www.wired.com/story/ipad-trackpad-cursor/

> Most of the words and sentences in this article are meaningless

I feel like this has been happening to a lot of online publications because they’re focusing on SEO over quality content.

Care to share a couple examples of the meaningless sentences in this piece? I found it more interesting and engaging than the Wired piece, precisely because it dived deeper into the theory behind the interaction design choices that Apple made here.

Not the person you are responding to, but:

> Honestly, the thinking could have stopped there and that would have been perfectly adequate. A rough finger facsimile as pointer. But the concept is pushed further. As you approach an interactive element, the circle reaches out, smoothly touching then embracing and encapsulating the button.

> The idea of variable cursor velocity is pushed further here too. When you’re close to an object on the screen, it changes its rate of travel to get where you want to go quicker, but it does it contextually, rather than linearly, the way that macOS or Windows does.

Could be shortened significantly. The passage repeats each point twice, including the main point, and is mostly flowery language that doesn’t add anything.

> The thinking could have stopped there, but instead of being a rough finger facsimile, the circle accelerates, then reaches out to elements as you approach them, embracing and encapsulating the button. This is unlike macOS and Windows, which vary velocity linearly.

The entire article is like this. I think the author was padding for word count or seo or something. I didn’t read the wired piece.

I don't read much of this language as "flowery" at all, and I think removing almost any of the words that you're decrying as not adding anything change the meaning and tone.

For example, your rewritten version is not an accurate representation of what the author was trying to convey, and mangles the two separate points into one. The contextual acceleration the author is describing is not the same thing as the circle "reaching out" as it approaches buttons.

> Unlike the text entry models of before, which placed character after character in a facsimile of a typewriter, this was a tether that connected us, embryonic, to the aleph.

I literally don’t understand what this means

Not understanding something doesn't make it meaningless.

Did I say anything about it being meaningless?

They never say that Apple invented the cursor. What they do say is that Apple brought the mouse-controlled cursor to the mass market, which is true. They are actually careful to explain its origins at Xerox PARC, and they even show a video from that time.

And they got that completely wrong! The video at the top of the page, and the two linked in the text, had nothing to do with PARC.

The videos are from The Mother of All Demos with Douglas Engelbart and Bill English at Stanford Research Institute on December 9, 1968.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

https://www.wired.com/story/how-doug-engelbart-pulled-off-th...

PARC was founded in 1970.

https://www.parc.com/about-parc/parc-history/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

(The Wikipedia article says 1969 in one place and 1970 in another, but 1970 is what PARC's site says.)

I found it an exceptionally well written piece that illustrated some of the minute thinking that goes into designing a small UI element like this.

The quality of many things has gone down in my opinion. It’s many of my favorite publishers now posting garbage. What gives?

Anyway, thanks for your link.

I lived with a journalist for a while. Basically it can be summed up as "now they pay freelancers to write for basically nothing except ~exposure~". Typically there's a word count and a monthly article minimum, and if you don't hit your monthly minimum you get nothing for any of the articles you wrote that month. Like just $0 for all your work. This isn't just blogs like TC BTW, my roomate worked for Forbes and I think Bloomberg, but the second one might have been a real job, idk. Forbes was definatly freelance, though. And this was business news, not some BS side column. If you are following the industry he wrote about closely, there's a good chance you have read at least one of his articles

Fwiw the writers (at least, the one I knew) hate it too because it floods the job market with ultra low paid competition, and since it's "just the way things are", a lot of those underpaid people are very talented and are glad to accept very little pay

Forbes is one of the saddest cases. Under Malcolm Forbes the biweekly print magazine was arguably the real class of the business periodicals. But, at some point, the online version just sold its soul for page views with all the "influencer" blogs, many of them written by people with conflicts of interest a mile long. Overall, their "native advertising" was/is as egregious as anyone's.

And that's not even getting into just how annoying it is to try to read anything on Forbes because of all the pop-ups etc.

Yeah, it's fairly simple to crudely replicate the effect in CSS. It gets rid of the possibility that your cursor is blocking a portion of the button label, but creates uncertainty in the position of the cursor -- jiggling the mouse lightly won't let you locate it anymore. What iPadOS 'invented' was to transition the effect in a smoother and snappier way.