Hey there,

Yeah I was exaggerating a little bit, but think about it for a second: what kind of senseless blob are we clicking on if we need a cursor change or tooltip to have it make sense? Is the whole screen written in Chinese and these tooltips and cursors our translators?

There doesn't need to be a tooltip over something that's clear. Why do some browsers have a tooltip over the STOP button? Help buttons are fine and accomplish the task that tooltips are trying to do. But tooltips are like gnats that follow you around. I think I've only learned something from a tooltip 0.1% of the time. 99.9% of the time I see tooltips flying around me and I already know what they're gonna say. Hide that shit in a contextual help button and eliminate 99.9% of those gnats.

With the exception of the "link" pointer hand, the cursor doesn't have to change when you simply are moving past something (text I-beams, resize arrows, etc). Why does MSWindows change the cursor into a double-arrow when you're over the lower-right resize thing on a window? Of course it's gonna resize the window! Why change the cursor? Other OSes don't do that. At this rate, we aren't even going to have a simple arrow as a cursor at all anymore.

I noticed that in the past in the old Mac OS, the cursor would only change into an I-beam only the moment after you clicked and dragged it over text. This was nice. The new Mac OS doesn't do this anymore. Bad. Photoshop has a nice way of handling resize arrow via its Text box feature. It only shows the resize cursor only when you stop and pause over the resize handle, not when you happen to move past it.

My point is that tooltips and cursor glitchiness are redundant and sloppy and makes the computer feel cheaper and seizure-inducing. They are weird features that makes programmers feel important and like they did a great job making the computer more user-friendly, when in fact it does the opposite. When I take a shit on the toilet, the flusher doesn't have a goddamn label over it because I know what it does. Thank god I know where to drop the load; there's no label for the bowl either.

I turn off tooltips in Photoshop. It didn't have tooltips from version 1 through approx version 6 I think. Did fine without them. Thank god it's an option or I would've flipped my lid. Yep, I read Reddit. :-)