3 ms·

You know your stuff, I can tell! In a pre-release version, we had hidden the native scrollbar and put our own scrollbar graphic on it that would animate using C

You know your stuff, I can tell! In a pre-release version, we had hidden the native scrollbar and put our own scrollbar graphic on it that would animate using CSS transform according to native scroll offsets vs. DGXL viewport dimensions. The scrollbar size (width/height) and position made more sense, but at the end we couldn't get it to feel quite right. We're quite happy with the native scrollbar. It's fine on mobile too.

blntechie 6y ago
Your implementation is pretty neat. We recently kind of went down the path of our own scroll bar in one of our app forms because users wanted the scroll to behave in a very specific way. It was impossible to make it work as expected in all the OS and browsers. We eventually rolled back the change, restored the native scroll bar and instead provided a big optional floating scroll button in the bottom corner of the app which user can choose to use to scroll the way they expected to. Kept everyone happy.
- robbiejs 6y ago
  Thanks, we really wanted to get the scrolling right so I'm glad it shows. > We eventually rolled back the change, restored the native scroll bar Doesn't it feel good to remove a bunch of "hacky code" and just go back to native? Even if it's not 100% like you imagined, at least you know that the other "perfect solution" never really existed.
chrismorgan 6y ago
Yep, I think native scrollbars is reasonable for DGXL. Maybe eventually you’ll sniff whether scrollbars take space and draw your own that match the size if they do, but it’s definitely a little risky. These sorts of things are particularly interesting once you support a sparse spreadsheet; drawing your own scrollbars becomes much more compelling then, so that you can make them more useful. No idea about Excel, but LibreOffice Calc—(which amusingly gets scrolling by precise touchpad wrong in just the same way as Luckysheet, sans the wrong horizontal direction; this stuff is hard everywhere)—well, LibreOffice Calc’s scrollbars essentially pretend the whole time that the document is only as large as the extent of the cells with content or the selection, whichever is larger in each axis, plus a screenful or so in each axis. So if you’re at A1 of an empty document, the scrollbars thumbs fill about half of the bar, but if you’re at AMJ1048576 (maximum sheet dimensions are 2¹⁰×2²⁰), the thumbs are tiny at the bottom and right.
- robbiejs 6y ago
  Sounds like a very strange approach, those LibreOffice Calc scrollbars ;-) Sometimes it's useful to give a minimal width/height for a scrollbar thumb, so that it remains visible and selectable. A tiny scrollbar thumb might be "realistic" when it represent the viewport vs document dimension, but it always looks a bit stupid. How come you know so much about scroll bars? Did you make your own spreadsheet app/component?
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    The spreadsheet approach makes a lot of sense: they’re dealing with what’s practically a near-infinite document (a million cells is close enough to infinity in such cases!), but people seldom actually use that many cells. Thus, the shenanigans they pull are to make the scrollbars useful, so that they typically give a fair reflection of the actual size of the document the user is dealing with. I imagine Excel does something similar. I know so much mostly just because I observe carefully, in both desktop and web software. I haven’t implemented anything like this, but when I observe things imperfect on the web and it’s a type of imperfection I’m not familiar with, I often assess it to figure out whether it’s possible to get right. I also value getting things right in straight HTML/CSS with no JavaScript.

blntechie 6y ago

Your implementation is pretty neat. We recently kind of went down the path of our own scroll bar in one of our app forms because users wanted the scroll to behave in a very specific way. It was impossible to make it work as expected in all the OS and browsers. We eventually rolled back the change, restored the native scroll bar and instead provided a big optional floating scroll button in the bottom corner of the app which user can choose to use to scroll the way they expected to. Kept everyone happy.

robbiejs 6y ago
Thanks, we really wanted to get the scrolling right so I'm glad it shows. > We eventually rolled back the change, restored the native scroll bar Doesn't it feel good to remove a bunch of "hacky code" and just go back to native? Even if it's not 100% like you imagined, at least you know that the other "perfect solution" never really existed.

chrismorgan 6y ago

Yep, I think native scrollbars is reasonable for DGXL. Maybe eventually you’ll sniff whether scrollbars take space and draw your own that match the size if they do, but it’s definitely a little risky. These sorts of things are particularly interesting once you support a sparse spreadsheet; drawing your own scrollbars becomes much more compelling then, so that you can make them more useful. No idea about Excel, but LibreOffice Calc—(which amusingly gets scrolling by precise touchpad wrong in just the same way as Luckysheet, sans the wrong horizontal direction; this stuff is hard everywhere)—well, LibreOffice Calc’s scrollbars essentially pretend the whole time that the document is only as large as the extent of the cells with content or the selection, whichever is larger in each axis, plus a screenful or so in each axis. So if you’re at A1 of an empty document, the scrollbars thumbs fill about half of the bar, but if you’re at AMJ1048576 (maximum sheet dimensions are 2¹⁰×2²⁰), the thumbs are tiny at the bottom and right.

robbiejs 6y ago
Sounds like a very strange approach, those LibreOffice Calc scrollbars ;-) Sometimes it's useful to give a minimal width/height for a scrollbar thumb, so that it remains visible and selectable. A tiny scrollbar thumb might be "realistic" when it represent the viewport vs document dimension, but it always looks a bit stupid. How come you know so much about scroll bars? Did you make your own spreadsheet app/component?
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  The spreadsheet approach makes a lot of sense: they’re dealing with what’s practically a near-infinite document (a million cells is close enough to infinity in such cases!), but people seldom actually use that many cells. Thus, the shenanigans they pull are to make the scrollbars useful, so that they typically give a fair reflection of the actual size of the document the user is dealing with. I imagine Excel does something similar. I know so much mostly just because I observe carefully, in both desktop and web software. I haven’t implemented anything like this, but when I observe things imperfect on the web and it’s a type of imperfection I’m not familiar with, I often assess it to figure out whether it’s possible to get right. I also value getting things right in straight HTML/CSS with no JavaScript.