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I am building a gaming site that is javascript/jQuery heavy to enhance maximize UI/UX. To achieve the best UI/UX possible, I have made use of not only JS and jQuery, but also jQuery UI, the Dojo Toolkit, my own coding inventions, and various GitHub plugins.

One event I cannot seem to wrap my mind around is "mousestop" (for plugin details click here). These are some of my conceptual difficulties:

  1. If a user is curious about an element on the page, mouseover/mouseenter is sufficient (e.g., tooltip appears)
  2. When using the jQuery UI draggable() function, stopping drag is captured with the "dragstop" event...no need for mousestop
  3. A user's "mousestop" may only have mundane motives, such as the mouse stopping on a matched element by chance as the user goes to get a snack, etc.

Two examples of scenarios where it seems possible to make use of this event:

  1. A user stops on an element, unsure of what to do next. The designer is aware of this UI/UX issue with the site, and as a stopgap solution, uses "mousestop" to help prompt the user on what to do next
  2. A user is playing a game which requires mouse movements. A "mousestop" event occurs as the user/gameplayer pauses to plan his/her next movement/strategy. If the user is close to a personal best or high score, the mousestop informs the user with a modal dialog box that he/she is approaching his/her high score.

Though I think these latter 2 scenarios are not silly, I wonder if they would be deemed valuable enough to even produce code for, or if yes, some other event wouldn't be just as plausible of a trigger. In scenario 2 for example, on the event that triggers scoring (say a "drop" event of a draggable() element):

if (high_score - current_score < 100) alert('You are less than 100 points from your high score!');

Does anyone have any suggestions about how mousestop could be useful? Thanks!

1 Answer 1

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Basically, mousestop would be used the same way as mouseover, but with one major difference. It only triggers if the mouse stops over the element. Or to say it more usefully it does not trigger useless events when the cursor enters the element accidentally because the user is just moving the cursor over the element or scrolling the page under the cursor. The normal way to avoid useless events is to have a delay (think tooltips), but that forces the user to wait for the delay. Mousestop needs no delay.

Pretty neat, actually.

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