One of the things I do in my profession is to design user interfaces for software. Most people probably don’t give much thought to how buttons, windows, menus and other elements come together to make your software experience understandable and enjoyable, but software professionals spend alot of time figuring those things out. Today a collegue sent me an excellent article called Visualizing Fitts’ Law, which describes a basic principle for deciding where user interface elements are placed on the screen and how big they should be. Although most of them probably don’t know it, one of the reasons that Mac people hate Windows is because the placement of menus doesn’t take advantage of infinite width.