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.
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)
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!
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.
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
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!
So after pooh-pooh-ing the name "Joy Button", IBM finally settled on and trademarked the name "Trackpoint." But one concession they made, was when they published a two page ad spread in Time Magazine with a close-up of the Trackpoint, above the slogan "So hot, we had to make it red!"
Ted Selker also made a prototype Thinkpad with TWO hot red Trackpoints on the keyboard, which invitingly resembled a pair of nipples. It was very popular with everyone he tested it on, but unfortunately OS/2 had no idea how to cope with two pointing devices, so there wasn't much use for it, besides being a wonderful ice breaker at parties.
Of course, but that's just a metaphor. Lots of people pick up a game controller having never used a joystick or a flight simulator before, so lots of arcadey flying games do it the other way, and receive scorn from people who prefer yoke-style controls. Who are, in turn, considered uptight and annoying by people who want arcade controls.
Witness endless discussion on the subject:
https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/inver...
https://battlefront-forums.ea.com/discussion/76095/let-us-cu...
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.
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.
An article unlike a computer isn't a new exciting tech marvel it should be simple and work on any device that can render text and multimedia.
I viewed it on Firefox on my MBP and thought it was great.
Were all the normal keyboard/mouse wheel navigation methods broken?
Seemingly good design would imply working for the 90% that don't presently use mac or detecting that a device isn't a phone and presenting a usable interface.
Seriously how do you screw up something simple like scrolling?
I also enjoyed the effect. For anything I visit repeatedly, such as webmail or github, or news websites, I prefer a "lean" implementation. But a product page that I will visit may twice in its lifetime? Knock yourself out!
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.
Just because a conversation starts with a topic doesn’t mean it stays there.
crosses self, prays for forgiveness
/lifestyle brand/
...that it's going to take a massive misstep of some kind to shake people off the platform. A handful of UI misfeatures won't do it, even if it would do it to users of other software and platforms.
At least - Apple will try it. But I don't think it's going to fly.
Part of the Apple Magic[tm] is conspicuous display of ownership. Rent-to-wear won't have the same cachet.
And I probably wouldn't argue.
After all, when viewing the page on an iPad, I can't double-tap the top of the screen to make it go back to the beginning. Irony at its best.
Seriously - that's a great feature that I use multiple times per day, and Apple broke their own rule!
There's also a strange contradiction in these millions of people always complaining how Jobs would hate this or that, while essentially relying on the implied authority of the name!
If you all are capable of accurately predicting Steve Job's hypothetical opinions on all matters of design I wanna see some products you designed.
Apple[Jobs] produced a steady stream of industry game changers - original iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, even the MacBook Air. Plus supporting ecosystems and software, including Siri and iCloud. And business relationships - with music companies, movie companies, phone carriers, podcast creators, and app devs.
Apple[Cook] has acquired a mountain of cash, but product development has followed a consistent and predictable faster+thinner+more_expensive path.
No game changers. Not one. Watch is the closest thing to a new class of products, but it seems to be an Ive vanity project rather than something that really scratches a user itch that users didn't even know they had - which was the classic Jobs USP. (And - ironically - Watch isn't obviously a design classic.)
No big new ecosystems. No big new business relationships - unless you count far-from-leading options like ApplePay. No game changer products. Just endless glacial refinement.
Which is fine for generating mountains of cash, especially when you're selling into new markets like China.
But you can only keep producing reruns for so long before you lose momentum. And buyer good will isn't infinite.
Luckily for Apple, Windows is still an incredibly terrible POS as an OS, so the motivation to switch isn't there. Nor is MS ever likely to do better for cultural reasons.
And Linux is - Linux.
So Apple can continue on this path for five more years. Maybe ten. But when the next new thing appears - quantum, bio, plain old distributed, whatever the hell it is - Apple will be buried by it.
We need fresnel refractive scrolling. Perfect for Retina displays, and to teach cosines to the laymen.
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.
Version 70.0.3538.77 (Official Build) (64-bit) Windows 10 Professional Nvidia drivers