[dredmorbius]

There's still a lot of desktop systems out there. And anything you trigger on hover can be triggered on other pseudo selectors (active, selected).

I've found hover effects to be really useful on a client-side basis -- I do a lot of restyling of websites to improve readability and usability. One modification I've made is an asymmetrically timed resizing of edit dialogs in the case of Diaspora. One second after entry, the dialog expands in size and gets a subtle border. The border will fade after 20s, indicating that the dialog will shrink shortly, the dialog itself after 30s.

This gives a responsive but not jittery design with a bit of hysteresis and signaling.

Others are the emphasis given to tabs and other controls on this subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius (hover over the post and comment controls), or submit button.

Excessive animation can be annoying, but with the right touch, it's a nice usability enhancement.

[jrochkind1]

I like the dialog expanding thing -- but that's not on hover over the text box, it's on click/touch/select/entry into the text box, right? Or you really mean hover? It seems to me it'd be annoying on hover, but maybe I'd have to see it.

[dredmorbius]

On hover, with a 1s delay to expand. In practice that means the window usually expands as you start writing into it. And it's hard to trigger by accident.

I haven't tried on active yet, but suspect that that would not persist after I released the mouse button. With hover. so long as the mouse stays over the textarea and surrounding frame, it remains expanded.

I've posted code:

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1spr7a/asymmetr...

(see the last code sample there).