Fading Launcher: hard to open with stylus/pen at (0,0)

The Launcher uses an activation target of the very top-left pixel on the screen. This is normally activated by throwing the mouse pointer in north-westwards and having it "funneled" on to the correct pixel.

Using a Wacom pad or stylus on a X61 Thinkpad Tablet and absolute mapping (rather than relative mapping) the top-left pixel can be very hard to hit. It is possible to open the click the distro button but this also opens the dash.

It would probably be possible to make the active pixel be a little larger, or be based on a certain distance*time threshold (so both a deep movement into the distro button, or a long but shallow movement would cause activation). Such a threshold would additionally reduce the incidence of activating the Launcher while aiming for the browser "back" button. Here, the point enters the box for mere milliseconds before the user corrects, but by that time the Launcher has already unhidden and the user must wait a second for it to hide again.

One proposed solution from Tom Jaeger via dup:

  https://code.launchpad.net/~thjaeger/unity/home-button

  The branch consists of two commits on top of current unity trunk. The first commit is a simplification of the autohide algorithm with no functional changes (except for rounding errors), making it a lot easier to understand what is going on. The second patch increases what is called "dead zone" in a comment. It's currently hard-coded to 50% of the height/width, which works well on my x61t; it might be worthwhile to make this configurable, though.