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A screen hotspot, in

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

, provides a special area on the display screen of a computer for

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...

ing or for other GUI-based activity (such as re-direction, pop-up display, macro execution, etc.). Hotspots may not look visually distinct; however, a

mouseover In the field of computing and web design, a mouseover, is an event occurring when the user moves the Cursor (user interface), cursor over a specified point on a computer monitor using a computer mouse. Also called a hover effect, mouseovers are g ...

operation over elements such as hyperlinks, buttons or idle windows will often reveal them by changing the shape of the pointer. The corners and edges of the whole screen may also act as hotspots. Some screen savers under

DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...

and older versions of Windows can be configured to be activated immediately (that is, without waiting for some period of inactivity to time out) or to never activate the screen saver mode at all (even after timeout) when the mouse is moved into a particular (often configurable) corner of the screen. Hotspots are used extensively in

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...

, where they are referred to as "hot corners". According to Fitts's law, which predicts the time it takes to reach a target area, moving mouse and trackball pointers to those spots is easy and fast. As the pointer usually stops when reaching a screen edge, the size of those spots can be considered of virtual infinite size, so the hot corners and edges can be reached quickly by throwing the pointer toward the edges.

References

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See also

References