3 ms·

Would love to have had the Open Look and Athena scrollbars. Open Look was super cool looking, but awful to use. Athena was (is?) awful looking and lacked any a

• kick 7y ago
  Athena/xaw's still exists; ctrl-mouse3 on xterm to get a selection box to enable it.
• DonHopkins 7y ago
  Open Look scrollbars would be impossible to implement properly in the web browser without using the Pointer Lock API that let you "warp" the mouse cursor position, because when you click on the elevator or cable, the elevator cab actually pushes the cursor up and down with it. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Lock_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Loc... Here's a demo of Open Look scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" video, which he produced for the ACM CHI 1990 conference. It also has demos of many other kinds of scrollbars and other widgets. (Sun Microsystems, Inc. OPEN LOOK, 1988): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=12m57s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=12m57s >All the Widgets (Fixed v2) - 1990: This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0. When I was working on The NeWS Toolkit at Sun (an Open Look toolkit implemented in PostScript), Jonathan Payne implemented the Open Look scrollbars, and I thought they had such a cool interesting 3D shape with their elevator, cable, anchors, ridges and arrows, that I carved an 3D Open Look scrollbar for him out of soap as a birthday gift. (He also implemented JOVE: Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs for Unix, and JED: Jot EDitor for TNT.) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_screen_snapshot.gif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_scr... Google Wave also had elevator-like scrollbars with arrows on the elevator, but since they were implemented in the web browser without the Pointer Lock API, they could not push the cursor like Open Look scrollbars, so they implemented a weird shadow and didn't move the elevator until you moved the mouse away, with was very confusing to users: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scrollbars/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll... >Using Google’s scrollbars, it’s also possible to scroll by clicking, but since the arrows are attached to the thumb, that creates a bit of a problem. Typically, the thumb indicates the scroll position. But since you can’t move the thumb while the user is clicking on it, Google has introduced a second element, a «shadow» that is displayed below the thumb. This shadow indicates the current scroll position: http://ignorethecode.net/upload/217/click_scroll_google.mp4 http://ignorethecode.net/upload/217/click_scroll_google.mp4 >If the user moves the mouse away, the thumb will eventually move to the shadow. >I did not notice this until a commenter on Hacker News pointed it out. He also notes that the scrollbars seem to perform poorly with longer waves. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944012 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944012 https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/http://www.completewaveguide.com/guide/Master_Wave's_Interface#The_Non-Standard_Wave_Scrollbar https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/http://www.comple... >The Non-Standard Wave Scrollbar >Figure 6-1. Unlike the scrollbar in your web browser, Wave's scrollbar is the same height no matter how long the list it's scrolling, which keeps the up and down arrows always the same short distance away. >The scrollbar on the right side of Wave's panels works a bit differently than the scrollbar in your web browser. Like most scrollbars, you can drag it up and down to scroll, or click its up and down arrows to move it. Unlike most scrollbars, the Wave scrollbar's height doesn't change. It's always the same, small size, which puts its up and down arrows in close proximity to one another, as shown in Figure 6-1. Google's intention is to benefit people accessing Wave on mobile devices or netbooks with a limited mousing area, but it has thrown off some preview users.[2] Google explains "the deal" with the scrollbar in Wave's Help section:[3] >You might find that the scrollbar in Google Wave behaves a little differently from scrollbars in other Google products. To use it, you can drag the bar or you can use the arrows on either end of it—clicking the arrows without moving your mouse allows you to very quickly scroll up and down the page. >Even at this early stage, at least one developer has created a Google Chrome extension that reverts Wave's custom scrollbars to Chrome's native scrollbars. Google Wave: Scrolling. How to use the scrollbars in Google Wave. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxt2LXCSw5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxt2LXCSw5Q
  • erikpukinskis 7y ago
    I do recommend, for anyone who is interested in low level WIMP interaction design.... play with teleporting pointers! Not because it will ever work... it’s too weird to really use in a production system. But just try it because it’s really an interesting experience to have your pointer move while you use it. It turns the pointer more into a physical object on the screen. But try it in a place it makes sense. This scroll bar is an example. I first tried it in a zoomable interface where I wanted the pointer to stay in a consistent “local position” within a window, even though the window was moving and changing size. Just a really interesting thing for me to feel as a UI designer at the time.
• quicklime 7y ago
  I would've liked it if they had included scrollbars outside of the common GUI toolkits. For example the type of scrollbar that can be found in editors like Sublime Text or VSCode, which is basically a long thumbnail of the document.