Why Your Mouse Cursor Is Slanted Instead of Straight?

Have you ever wondered why your mouse cursor rests ever so slightly to the left? Chances are, that little arrow on an incline is so ubiquitous that you’ve never even thought twice about its 45-degree lean. As it turns out, there’s a very good reason for it. Or was, anyway, back in a more pixelated age.

Over on Stack Exchange, computer software developer Bart Gijssens revealed the following explanation of the slanted cursor’s origins in response to this question on its design.

This is the historical reason:

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(concept drawing taken from document: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/parc…)

The mouse, and therefore the mouse cursor, was invented by Douglas Englebart, and was initially an arrow pointing up.

When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a tilted arrow. It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in those days, drawing a straight line and a line in the 45 degrees angle was easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor.

As you can see below, the original, straight cursor was indeed much more difficult to pick out amongst the blocks of basic text.

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And as Gijssens points out in a later edit, after Englebart created the left-leaning cursor, Steve Jobs borrowed it for his software followed by Bill Gates who borrowed it after him. At this point, we’ve just become so accustomed to our leaning (and still highly functional!) arrow that anything else would seem too bizarre. Besides, why mess with perfection?

Kiss Your Keyboard and Mouse Goodbye With: The Leap

Since Steven Spielberg expertly crafted it a decade ago, the world has been clamoring for a user interface similar to what was found in sci-fi thriller Minority Report. Even the inkling of flipping through applications and swiping screens in mid-air made geeks tingle all over, but aside from expertly developed hacks on the Xbox Kinect, nothing definitive seemed to break through and truly give the public that enticing functionality of the future.

That is, until now. After more than five years of development, a proprietary technology has emerged that synthesizes the shape and movement of the human hand to produce movement onto a computer. It’s called The Leap — and for an astonishingly low price of $70, you can begin to control a computer with nothing more than your hands, as early as next February.

“We really wanted to build a device that would actually be leaps and bounds better at doing a lot of things that most people want to do with their computers,” says Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald. “And in order to do that, you need to be able to track fingers, and you need to be able to do that at a deep, centimeter level.”

Mashable spoke with Buckwald about the journey his company took to develop The Leap and bring it to market, as well as an inside look on how it works and what we can expect come February.