In Bruce Tognazzini's quiz on Fitt's Law, the question discussing the bottleneck in the hierarchical menu (as used in almost every modern desktop UI), talks about his design for the original Mac:
The bottleneck is the passage between the first-level menu and the second-level menu. Users first slide the mouse pointer down to the category menu item. Then, they must carefully slide the mouse directly across (horizontally) in order to move the pointer into the secondary menu.
The engineer who originally designed hierarchicals apparently had his forearm mounted on a track so that he could move it perfectly in a horizontal direction without any vertical component. Most of us, however, have our forarms mounted on a pivot we like to call our elbow. That means that moving our hand describes an arc, rather than a straight line. Demanding that pivoted people move a mouse pointer along in a straight line horizontally is just wrong. We are naturally going to slip downward even as we try to slide sideways. When we are not allowed to slip downward, the menu we're after is going to slam shut just before we get there.
The Windows folks tried to overcome the pivot problem with a hack: If they see the user move down into range of the next item on the primary menu, they don't instantly close the second-level menu. Instead, they leave it open for around a half second, so, if users are really quick, they can be inaccurate but still get into the second-level menu before it slams shut. Unfortunately, people's reactions to heightened chance of error is to slow down, rather than speed up, a well-established phenomenon. Therefore, few users will ever figure out that moving faster could solve their problem. Microsoft's solution is exactly wrong.
When I specified the Mac hierarchical menu algorthm in the mid-'80s, I called for a buffer zone shaped like a <, so that users could make an increasingly-greater error as they neared the hierarchical without fear of jumping to an unwanted menu. As long as the user's pointer was moving a few pixels over for every one down, on average, the menu stayed open, no matter how slow they moved. (Cancelling was still really easy; just deliberately move up or down.)
This just blew me away! Such a simple idea which would result in a huge improvement in usability. I'm sure I'm not the only one who regularly has the next level of a menu slam shut because I don't move the mouse pointer in a perfectly horizontal line.
So my question is: Are there any modern UI toolkits which implement this brilliant idea of a < shaped buffer zone in hierarchical menus? And if not, why not?!