Joho the Blog
|
|
|
July 25, 2005
Clicking above or below the slider thingie advances or retreats your window by approximately one window's worth of display. That's useful, but I'd also like to be able to right-click in a scroll bar and get taken to that proportional spot in the document: Right click three-quarters of the way down and it shows you the document three-quarters of the way in. Sure, I could slide the slider thingie, but that requires more eye-hand coordination than my eyes and hands have put together. Maybe Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 25, 2005 10:43 AM
|
Comments
This is already partially possible with OS X. There's a system-level preference which let's you switch between the two behaviors described here.
Posted by: ryan king | July 25, 2005 12:21 PM
Uh, David? It works that way now. Point to the proportional spot on the scroll bar, left-click and hold. The document will scroll there.
Posted by: Mark Federman | July 25, 2005 02:36 PM
Not a bad idea, David. Perhaps you already know that in Mac OS X you at least get a choice via the system preferences (see link to image). But having it both ways via a right-click (or modifierkey-click) could be cool.
http://scottfeldstein.net/misc/2005/macosxscrollprefs.jpg
Posted by: scott | July 25, 2005 02:44 PM
Mark: "And hold"??? Do you think microseconds grow on trees!
(= Passive-aggressive for Thanks!)
Posted by: David Weinberger | July 25, 2005 03:22 PM
When Be introduced the BeBox, it drew a lot of techie Mac users, but also a lot of Amiga users who wanted something worthwhile to migrate to.
One of the things that created a lot of discussion in that new community of two cultures was the way scrollbars rendered and functioned.
IIRC the Amigans were used to proportional scrollbars and wanted no truck with anything else. Proportional scrollbars (again, IIRC--haven't touched my Miggy for years) were proportional to the amount of scroll space they represented. This provided immediate feedback on (A) how large a document was and (B) where you would go in a document if you dragged the slider there.
Oh, wait, that's what we're using now! :-)
Posted by: Branko Collin | July 26, 2005 09:59 AM
Back in the dark ages the scroll bars on Symbolics computers worked this way. Clicking the middle (!) button would scroll proportionally. I never understood why this didn't catch on, although I'm happy that other features of Symbolics scroll bars are lost, such as the fact that they would "grab" the mouse as you tried to scroll through them.
Posted by: Dennis Doughty | July 27, 2005 02:40 PM
> Back in the dark ages the scroll bars on Symbolics
> computers worked this way. Clicking the middle (!)
> button would scroll proportionally. I never
> understood why this didn't catch on, ...
It did, kind of. That's the way most X11 window managers handle scroll bars now. Middle button scrolls proportionally.
Posted by: robc | July 30, 2005 06:55 PM