7 ms·

The person who decided to make this scroll sideways instead of down when you scroll down, and not to scroll sideways when you scroll sideways should be put in s

by Jgrubb 8y ago

The person who decided to make this scroll sideways instead of down when you scroll down, and not to scroll sideways when you scroll sideways should be put in stocks in the town square.

sarreph 8y ago
Maybe you didn't get the memo, but it's actually an early release of the 'new' way scroll. Scrolling 1.0 = normal scrolling Scrolling 2.0 = left/right up/down directions are inverted respectively Scrolling 3.0 = left/right scrolling only, via up/down gestures (use left/right gestures at your peril)
- shrikant 8y ago
  > Scrolling 2.0 = left/right up/down directions are inverted respectively Man, this thing drives me nuts, and it's the first thing I change in every touchpad-equipped device I own. Scrolling is not swiping, people!
  - hnra 8y ago
    I'm the complete opposite. Touchpads not using reverse scrolling feels so weird to me.
    - roywiggins 8y ago
      It's the touchpad version of whether joystick-down means nose-down, or nose-up, in video games. Endless debates can be had!
      - tk75x 8y ago
        Joystick down means nose up because it's simulating the yoke of your airplane in which you pull back (joystick down) in order to "pull up" the nose of the plane. The recent fad of reversing the touchpad scrolling direction is an attempt to simulate how we use our phones in which we tap the content on screen and drag it around to pull other content into view. Because the touchpad was invented to replace a mouse, I expect similar motions to produce the same results. For example: scrolling the wheel down moves your viewpoint in the current window down, so a similar motion on the touchpad (swipe down - use two fingers to differentiate from a normal touch) should produce a similar result. Instead, we get manufacturers who by default include un-intuitive configurations of something that had been working for decades for billions of people. At least for now we are allowed to change those settings.
        DonHopkins 8y ago
        Input devices should allow users to configure a velocity mapping curve (which could be negative to reverse the motion). X-Widows had a crude threshold-based mouse acceleration scheme, but it's better to have an arbitrary curve, like the TrackPoint uses, that can be optimized for the particular user, input device, screen size, and scrolling or pointing task at hand. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration One of the patented (but probably expired by now) aspects of the Trackpoint is that it has a very highly refined pressure=>cursor speed transfer function, that has a couple of plateaus in it that map a wide range of pressures to one slow or fast but constant speed. The slow speed notch is good for precise predictable fine positioning, and the fast speed notch is tuned to be just below eye tracking speed, so you don't lose sight of the cursor. But you can push even harder than the fast plateau to go above the eye tracking plateau and flick the cursor really fast if you want, or push even lighter than the slow plateau, for super fine positioning. (The TrackPoint sensor is outrageously more sensitive than it needs to be, so it can sense very soft touches, or even your breath blowing on it.) Here's a description of Ted Selker's work and all the refinement that went into the TrackPoint, that he developed at IBM Almaden Research Lab: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 Highlights: In 1984 he observed that it took 0.75 - 1.75 seconds to reposition the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, which is a long time for something that you do quite often. ` He tried many different ideas and built several prototypes, then later when he was working at IBM Alameda Research Lab, he had a chance to refine the idea into a product. He had his father, a material scientist, help by designing the special non-skid rubber that the clitoris was made from. IBM wouldn't let him ship it until it was measurably as efficient as a mouse for common tasks. The thing going for it was that it eliminated the 0.75 - 1.75 second hand repositioning penalty, but of course the fundamental problem with it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute positioning device like a mouse. So he had to come up with ways of overcoming that problem. The trackpoint performs very well for mixed typing and pointing tasks, since you switch between typing and pointing so often, and that adds up to a lot of time, and is a very common way of using computers. The mouse is still better for tasks that are mostly pointing and clicking, but it takes up some prime real-estate on your desk, and there are many situations where a mouse is impossible to use with a laptop. He also made the observation that when the cursor moved above eye tracking speed, you tended to lose track of it. And also the observation that some of the time you needed to position it finely around a small area, and other times you needed to move it quickly across a large area. So he came up with a pressure-to-speed "transfer function" that had a non-linear mapping from how hard you were pressing it to how fast the cursor moved. The mapping had a plateau at "predictable fine positioning speed" (i.e. there was a wide range of light pressure that would map to moving the cursor at one exact slow predictable speed, so you could smoothly cruise the cursor around with a light touch at a speed that was good for exact positioning. Then after the plateau of light pressure, it sloped up smoothly until just below eye tracking speed, where there was another plateau, mapping a wide range of harder pressure to a fast-but-not-so-fast-that-you-lose-track-of-it speed, for coarse positioning without losing the cursor. And then above that there was a fast speed for quickly flicking the cursor to the other side of the screen. Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!
- jm20 8y ago
  Don't forget, Scrolling 3.0 is only available on this year's New ScrollBar(tm)
  - godzillabrennus 8y ago
    It’s only available in rose gold. It can be yours for the bargain price of $1999.95 USD. Don’t be the last person in your herd of Apple users to pay money to add scrolling functionality back to your MacOS and iOS devices.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Requires ECMAScript 2021, but transpilers should be available soon on npm.
- mlloyd 8y ago
  Courage.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
conradfr 8y ago
And the scrolling changes midway ...
stronglikedan 8y ago
It only lets me scroll sideways, so I cannot even use the wheel (even when it gets to the end where it scrolls vertically for a bit). I have to scroll lock the mouse and move the whole thing from side to side. That alone makes me close the window and not read the content.
MR4D 8y ago
Steve is rolling over in his grave on this.
- mohammedbin 8y ago
  *scrolling
- SteveNuts 8y ago
  People have been saying this since the day after Steve died... Yet somehow Apple still thrives.
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    It’s been a long time and he would have been angry about something by now. The question is, what?
  - setr 8y ago
    In the same fashion that microsoft and ibm thrives: its lost its dominance in the consumer market “headspace”, printing money but no longer being a company worth knowing. Its just another BigCo at this point, with all the benefits and dullness associated with it. (Eg it’s difficult to be excited for apple product announcements; they have a money-printing operation and their only intent is to maintain it as-is; naturally any updates will be rather mundane, safe iterations on the running system) In other words, apple became boring, or at least has been boring for a while now. I mean, the whole computer market is boring (tablets, phones, laptops, etc; all the same shit YoY), but its kind of hard to think that current-apple is going to break that trend, in the same way you wouldn't expect IBM or Xerox to. Don't know of any startups doing anything terribly interesting in the space, with any real chance of success. Hell, at this point Microsoft might be the likeliest candidate: at least they're doing something with stuff like stupidly big conference room screens and maybe Hololens will do something cool.
    - sgustard 8y ago
      You concluded all this from horizontal scrolling?
agumonkey 8y ago
Ah well since the days of <forgot-the-name>.js slides framework I lost faith :D We need fresnel refractive scrolling. Perfect for Retina displays, and to teach cosines to the laymen.
ff10 8y ago
For the record, it seems to work both ways with desktop Safari.
- sethherr 8y ago
  Also works correctly on iPhone safari
- g2e 8y ago
  And Chrome! (maybe they fixed it)
segmondy 8y ago
if you scroll long enough, it switches and starts scrolling down.
- prh8 8y ago
  I thought you were joking and then it happened and I was still startled.
csours 8y ago
Think different [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different
artursapek 8y ago
It's so fucked up on my linux thinkpad that it's funny
redeemedfadi 8y ago
I think it's kind of cool. /dissenting-opinion
- wwweston 8y ago
  Novelty and breaking expectations regarding established HCI conventions are different sides of the same coin, I guess.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  I'm presuming you viewed it on a mobile device. On my laptop running firefox I had this experience. My laptop is presently docked to the right of my monitor on my desk. When docked I use a keyboard and mouse with the actual laptop being slightly to the right using its touchpad is somewhat awkward but do-able. Space bar to go down doesn't work, page down/up doesn't work home end doesn't work arrow keys don't work. Try clicking on the little arrow that doesn't work. Try dragging the screen that direction with the mouse doesn't work. Grab scrollbar manually and pull it down doesn't work. I literally skipped that section because I couldn't figure out how to read it. Note I didn't realize you could grab the scroll bar manually do scroll horizontally because I have never had to do that. After reading this thread I tried reaching over awkwardly to use the 2 finger scroll mode on the touchpad keeping in mind the normal sensitivity is such that one full swipe top to bottom about 2 inches is 2 pages of text. So about 1 inch per page of text. Swiping through the first section the "overview" took 62 awkward swipes left to right about 2.5 inches each. About 155 inches of travel almost 13 feet for the last few it actually went down while I scrolled sideways which made me pause for a moment. Scrolling through pages of content is so basic that going through the massive work of making a beautiful device and all the software required to run it and making reading about it that painful is remarkable. Its like launching a new high end clothing store and making the entrance a dance dance revolution pad where one must complete a hip hop number to enter. It isn't merely subjectively terrible. Edit: On my phone also running firefox in vertical orientation it scrolls normally but cuts off a bit on the right hand side, in landscape orientation it scrolls normally AND looks correct.
  - sgustard 8y ago
Waterluvian 8y ago
On my phone it scrolls normally but the left and right of most images are cut off. Latest chrome.
pgrote 8y ago
It's locked me up twice now. Version 70.0.3538.77 (Official Build) (64-bit) Windows 10 Professional Nvidia drivers
brynjolf 8y ago
It is super lägg to scroll as well. The scrolling is bad and the website is too heavy to scroll properly on my iPad pro 9.7 with Safari. I guess they don't dogfood their stuff after the IOS12 release.
jcadam 8y ago
Agreed. It took me several seconds to figure out what to do, as the scroll-wheel on my mouse did nothing. I had to grab the horizontal scrollbar on the bottom of my browser and drag sideways. I imagine it works well on a phone in portrait mode. On a desktop with a 16:9 monitor, a horizontally scrolling webpage is... bizarre.
glaurung_ 8y ago
That's weird. It works normally in the "Matterialistic HN" app's built in browser.
smacktoward 8y ago
Official Apple response: "You're holding it wrong."
Havoc 8y ago
Especially with a mouse wheel. It's just off in terms of coordination
jraph 8y ago
This page works correctly only with JavaScript disabled. I wish more websites were like that.

by Jgrubb 8y ago

The person who decided to make this scroll sideways instead of down when you scroll down, and not to scroll sideways when you scroll sideways should be put in stocks in the town square.

sarreph 8y ago

Maybe you didn't get the memo, but it's actually an early release of the 'new' way scroll. Scrolling 1.0 = normal scrolling Scrolling 2.0 = left/right up/down directions are inverted respectively Scrolling 3.0 = left/right scrolling only, via up/down gestures (use left/right gestures at your peril)

shrikant 8y ago
> Scrolling 2.0 = left/right up/down directions are inverted respectively Man, this thing drives me nuts, and it's the first thing I change in every touchpad-equipped device I own. Scrolling is not swiping, people!
- hnra 8y ago
  I'm the complete opposite. Touchpads not using reverse scrolling feels so weird to me.
  - roywiggins 8y ago
    It's the touchpad version of whether joystick-down means nose-down, or nose-up, in video games. Endless debates can be had!
    - tk75x 8y ago
      Joystick down means nose up because it's simulating the yoke of your airplane in which you pull back (joystick down) in order to "pull up" the nose of the plane. The recent fad of reversing the touchpad scrolling direction is an attempt to simulate how we use our phones in which we tap the content on screen and drag it around to pull other content into view. Because the touchpad was invented to replace a mouse, I expect similar motions to produce the same results. For example: scrolling the wheel down moves your viewpoint in the current window down, so a similar motion on the touchpad (swipe down - use two fingers to differentiate from a normal touch) should produce a similar result. Instead, we get manufacturers who by default include un-intuitive configurations of something that had been working for decades for billions of people. At least for now we are allowed to change those settings.
      - DonHopkins 8y ago
        Input devices should allow users to configure a velocity mapping curve (which could be negative to reverse the motion). X-Widows had a crude threshold-based mouse acceleration scheme, but it's better to have an arbitrary curve, like the TrackPoint uses, that can be optimized for the particular user, input device, screen size, and scrolling or pointing task at hand. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration One of the patented (but probably expired by now) aspects of the Trackpoint is that it has a very highly refined pressure=>cursor speed transfer function, that has a couple of plateaus in it that map a wide range of pressures to one slow or fast but constant speed. The slow speed notch is good for precise predictable fine positioning, and the fast speed notch is tuned to be just below eye tracking speed, so you don't lose sight of the cursor. But you can push even harder than the fast plateau to go above the eye tracking plateau and flick the cursor really fast if you want, or push even lighter than the slow plateau, for super fine positioning. (The TrackPoint sensor is outrageously more sensitive than it needs to be, so it can sense very soft touches, or even your breath blowing on it.) Here's a description of Ted Selker's work and all the refinement that went into the TrackPoint, that he developed at IBM Almaden Research Lab: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438461 Highlights: In 1984 he observed that it took 0.75 - 1.75 seconds to reposition the hand from the keyboard to the mouse, which is a long time for something that you do quite often. ` He tried many different ideas and built several prototypes, then later when he was working at IBM Alameda Research Lab, he had a chance to refine the idea into a product. He had his father, a material scientist, help by designing the special non-skid rubber that the clitoris was made from. IBM wouldn't let him ship it until it was measurably as efficient as a mouse for common tasks. The thing going for it was that it eliminated the 0.75 - 1.75 second hand repositioning penalty, but of course the fundamental problem with it that you can't get around is that it's a relative positioning device, not an absolute positioning device like a mouse. So he had to come up with ways of overcoming that problem. The trackpoint performs very well for mixed typing and pointing tasks, since you switch between typing and pointing so often, and that adds up to a lot of time, and is a very common way of using computers. The mouse is still better for tasks that are mostly pointing and clicking, but it takes up some prime real-estate on your desk, and there are many situations where a mouse is impossible to use with a laptop. He also made the observation that when the cursor moved above eye tracking speed, you tended to lose track of it. And also the observation that some of the time you needed to position it finely around a small area, and other times you needed to move it quickly across a large area. So he came up with a pressure-to-speed "transfer function" that had a non-linear mapping from how hard you were pressing it to how fast the cursor moved. The mapping had a plateau at "predictable fine positioning speed" (i.e. there was a wide range of light pressure that would map to moving the cursor at one exact slow predictable speed, so you could smoothly cruise the cursor around with a light touch at a speed that was good for exact positioning. Then after the plateau of light pressure, it sloped up smoothly until just below eye tracking speed, where there was another plateau, mapping a wide range of harder pressure to a fast-but-not-so-fast-that-you-lose-track-of-it speed, for coarse positioning without losing the cursor. And then above that there was a fast speed for quickly flicking the cursor to the other side of the screen. Once I was sitting in a coffee shop in Mountain View hacking on my Thinkpad, and Ted and his wife Ellen rolled in, sat down, and started chatting. Ted noticed that my Thinkpad's Joy Button was all worn down, and he was mortified and quickly excused himself to go out to the car. Ellen rolled her eyes and shrugged, explaining that he was always like that. Then he came back with a big bag of red Joy Buttons, and replaced my worn-out one right there in the coffee shop, and gave me a few extras as spares!
jm20 8y ago
Don't forget, Scrolling 3.0 is only available on this year's New ScrollBar(tm)
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  It’s only available in rose gold. It can be yours for the bargain price of $1999.95 USD. Don’t be the last person in your herd of Apple users to pay money to add scrolling functionality back to your MacOS and iOS devices.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Requires ECMAScript 2021, but transpilers should be available soon on npm.
mlloyd 8y ago
Courage.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

conradfr 8y ago

And the scrolling changes midway ...

stronglikedan 8y ago

It only lets me scroll sideways, so I cannot even use the wheel (even when it gets to the end where it scrolls vertically for a bit). I have to scroll lock the mouse and move the whole thing from side to side. That alone makes me close the window and not read the content.

MR4D 8y ago

Steve is rolling over in his grave on this.

mohammedbin 8y ago
*scrolling
SteveNuts 8y ago
People have been saying this since the day after Steve died... Yet somehow Apple still thrives.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  It’s been a long time and he would have been angry about something by now. The question is, what?
- setr 8y ago
  In the same fashion that microsoft and ibm thrives: its lost its dominance in the consumer market “headspace”, printing money but no longer being a company worth knowing. Its just another BigCo at this point, with all the benefits and dullness associated with it. (Eg it’s difficult to be excited for apple product announcements; they have a money-printing operation and their only intent is to maintain it as-is; naturally any updates will be rather mundane, safe iterations on the running system) In other words, apple became boring, or at least has been boring for a while now. I mean, the whole computer market is boring (tablets, phones, laptops, etc; all the same shit YoY), but its kind of hard to think that current-apple is going to break that trend, in the same way you wouldn't expect IBM or Xerox to. Don't know of any startups doing anything terribly interesting in the space, with any real chance of success. Hell, at this point Microsoft might be the likeliest candidate: at least they're doing something with stuff like stupidly big conference room screens and maybe Hololens will do something cool.
  - sgustard 8y ago
    You concluded all this from horizontal scrolling?

agumonkey 8y ago

Ah well since the days of <forgot-the-name>.js slides framework I lost faith :D We need fresnel refractive scrolling. Perfect for Retina displays, and to teach cosines to the laymen.

ff10 8y ago

For the record, it seems to work both ways with desktop Safari.

sethherr 8y ago
Also works correctly on iPhone safari
g2e 8y ago
And Chrome! (maybe they fixed it)

segmondy 8y ago

if you scroll long enough, it switches and starts scrolling down.

prh8 8y ago
I thought you were joking and then it happened and I was still startled.

csours 8y ago

Think different [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different

artursapek 8y ago

It's so fucked up on my linux thinkpad that it's funny

redeemedfadi 8y ago

I think it's kind of cool. /dissenting-opinion

wwweston 8y ago
Novelty and breaking expectations regarding established HCI conventions are different sides of the same coin, I guess.
michaelmrose 8y ago
I'm presuming you viewed it on a mobile device. On my laptop running firefox I had this experience. My laptop is presently docked to the right of my monitor on my desk. When docked I use a keyboard and mouse with the actual laptop being slightly to the right using its touchpad is somewhat awkward but do-able. Space bar to go down doesn't work, page down/up doesn't work home end doesn't work arrow keys don't work. Try clicking on the little arrow that doesn't work. Try dragging the screen that direction with the mouse doesn't work. Grab scrollbar manually and pull it down doesn't work. I literally skipped that section because I couldn't figure out how to read it. Note I didn't realize you could grab the scroll bar manually do scroll horizontally because I have never had to do that. After reading this thread I tried reaching over awkwardly to use the 2 finger scroll mode on the touchpad keeping in mind the normal sensitivity is such that one full swipe top to bottom about 2 inches is 2 pages of text. So about 1 inch per page of text. Swiping through the first section the "overview" took 62 awkward swipes left to right about 2.5 inches each. About 155 inches of travel almost 13 feet for the last few it actually went down while I scrolled sideways which made me pause for a moment. Scrolling through pages of content is so basic that going through the massive work of making a beautiful device and all the software required to run it and making reading about it that painful is remarkable. Its like launching a new high end clothing store and making the entrance a dance dance revolution pad where one must complete a hip hop number to enter. It isn't merely subjectively terrible. Edit: On my phone also running firefox in vertical orientation it scrolls normally but cuts off a bit on the right hand side, in landscape orientation it scrolls normally AND looks correct.
- sgustard 8y ago

Waterluvian 8y ago

On my phone it scrolls normally but the left and right of most images are cut off. Latest chrome.

pgrote 8y ago

It's locked me up twice now. Version 70.0.3538.77 (Official Build) (64-bit) Windows 10 Professional Nvidia drivers

brynjolf 8y ago

It is super lägg to scroll as well. The scrolling is bad and the website is too heavy to scroll properly on my iPad pro 9.7 with Safari. I guess they don't dogfood their stuff after the IOS12 release.

jcadam 8y ago

Agreed. It took me several seconds to figure out what to do, as the scroll-wheel on my mouse did nothing. I had to grab the horizontal scrollbar on the bottom of my browser and drag sideways. I imagine it works well on a phone in portrait mode. On a desktop with a 16:9 monitor, a horizontally scrolling webpage is... bizarre.

glaurung_ 8y ago

That's weird. It works normally in the "Matterialistic HN" app's built in browser.

smacktoward 8y ago

Official Apple response: "You're holding it wrong."

Havoc 8y ago

Especially with a mouse wheel. It's just off in terms of coordination

jraph 8y ago

This page works correctly only with JavaScript disabled. I wish more websites were like that.