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The scrolling interface is always visible. It's just on the input device instead of the screen. Originally, the scroll bar itself was the interface. You scroll
by millstone 13y ago
The scrolling interface is always visible. It's just on the input device instead of the screen.
Originally, the scroll bar itself was the interface. You scrolled by clicking the little arrows, or by grabbing the scroll thumb and dragging. But when scroll wheels were introduced, the scroll bar became less necessary. And with the advent of trackpad magic/mouse scrolling, which support both horizontal and vertical scrolling, the scroll-bar-as-interface becomes ridiculous.
(Note that the default OS X behavior is not "hide scroll bars," but "hide scroll bars if your mouse or trackpad supports scrolling.")
That said, while there's no longer much need to interact with scroll bars, there's still a need to indicate that scrolling is possible, and possibly your position in the document. But surely we can convey that in fewer than the ten thousand pixels that a scroll bar consumes?
- mbell 13y agoFor the most part I agree, I like what OSX does. However, there are edge cases which are infuriating. Have you tried to scroll through an HTML <select multiple> in Chrome on OSX? The only word I can use to describe the experience is 'rage'.
- andrewvc 13y agoTrue, but select multiple is horrible. It's easy to code but my god is it unusable.
- mbell 13y agoNo argument here, it sucks and I would never design something that way, but phpmyadmin uses it in several places which is where I run into it.
- rdsubhas 13y ago<select multiple> sucks wherever it goes. and when the designer makes it smaller in height, it sucks ten times more.
- emn13 13y agoRight, but that's largely the fault of the browser, not the OS or the concept. Knowing that it's not the smartest choice for a webdesigner, but it's essentially equivalent to a bunch of checkboxes with labels.
- johnchristopher 13y agoSo far I only met trackpad magic/mouse scrolling on a mac or laptop. That leaves a lot of desktop computers out. I am typing this on a iMac 2006 and even if the mouse has a wheel I still grab the bar because it's more precise (it allows to put the text where I want) than scrolling (which just increments height offset by a proportional fixed value).
- leviathan 13y agoWhen my mouse died, I got a magic trackpad instead. It's much more precise than using a mouse, you don't need to keep hunting the scroll bar everytime you scroll, and with all the gestures I don't even miss the mouse anymore. With a little practice I'm even able to do Photoshop work from the trackpad.
- ttflee 13y agoMagic Trackpad prevails, at least in this case.
- johnchristopher 13y agoThat's not a valid argument against scrollbars, it's a valid argument for magic pad.
- aestra 13y agoTell that to my mom. The only way she scrolls is to use the scroll bar itself as the interface, clicking the buttons. I try over and over again to convince her the scroll wheel is faster, and show her. She hates it, she strongly prefers the old way. She is old school. She can't get used to the scroll wheel. I'm not sure why. I'm not sure if it is just muscle memory or what.
- Gormo 13y ago> But when scroll wheels were introduced, the scroll bar became less necessary. This isn't true; scroll wheels are more convenient than using the scroll bar for progressing through a document sequentially, but there's no facility for absolute positioning using a scroll wheel. You can't move to a specific point on the page with the wheel, and can only move in one direction or the other at a speed limited by how fast you can physically spin the wheel on the mouse. Probably the best alternative to a scrollbar for absolute positioning that I've ever seen is the "document map" feature of some text editors, which provides a vertical thumbnail of the entire document in a column that works similarly to the way a mini-map in a game works: you see the layout of the document, zoomed out, and can click on exactly where you want to go.