As you may remember from our series on common usability terms, I have a lot of interest in graphical user interface concepts. In addition, I applaud anyone trying to improve existing concepts, people that try to think beyond set conventions to come up with an improved version of that concept, or a new concept altogether. Thorsten Wilms took on the well-established concept of the scrollbar, and came up with a few interesting tweaks.
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Member since:2005-12-13
the whole idea behind the two finger gesture as opposed to the scroll pad to the right of your track pad is that you're not limited to a small area, which is generally what makes scroll bars somewhat unhandy, since you'll have to move the cursor to a specific area of the screen.
This is eliminated by the addition of the scroll wheel and in Apple's case the two finger gesture.
Member since:2005-07-17
I don't think you understand how scrolling works on most touchpads. You move your finger along the right physical border up and down and it's exactly like a scroll wheel, just flat and without tactile feedback.
[edit]
To make it clearer, here's a demo of stand-alone, probably Synaptics based (like in most notebooks, including Apple ones) touchpad and some common possible gestures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF9sXAMLBW0
Edited 2008-05-11 11:23 UTC
Member since:2005-07-12
Or on any PC since Windows 2.0 that has a mouse with THREE buttons (even my old Mouse Systems optical on one of the metallic pads with the blue and red lines going each way and the 25 pin Serial connector had three buttons!) - or ***SHOCK*** pushing down on the scroll wheel. You get this nice little arrow cursor that lets you scroll in any direction - without even having to move sideways to the scrollbar.
That's what I don't get - this isn't innovative, it's a step behind two decades ago. (though it would be nice if middle button scrolling was persistant to the window element that had the focus if scrollable and not just the window itself)
Member since:
2005-07-17
I never got why double finger scrolling is so much better than regular using the edge of a touchpad. I have to move my entire palm to perform this gesture which makes it slower and I can't see myself using it for a prolonged time like when reading an e-book. Edge scrolling is also more intuitive, window has a scrollbar on the right (and/or down) and so does touchpad.
More on topic. I think the popup scrollbar concept is not so good mainly because I can't see a simple way to jump to a certain point in the document anymore.