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Comment by eggbrain | Hacker News Reader

>scrolling now works as it does on iOS devices--drag up on the trackpad to scroll down, drag down to scroll up--complete with "rubber-band" effects at the end of scrollable areas.

This doesn't make sense to me from a design sense. With an iPhone or iPad, your finger was touching the screen, so it emulated real "dragging" content down to where you could see it. With a computer however, there's a disconnect between the screen and your fingers, which makes it not as intuitive. Combine this with a few years of two finger scrolling being the exact opposite, and I feel like this will kind of be a pain to get used to.

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I think that there is conceptually no superior way of scrolling. One is as good as the other. Traditionally you dragged the scroll bar, in Lion you drag the page, one makes about as much sense as the other.

What is a problem is that everyone is used to dragging the scroll bar, not the page but I’m not sure whether that’s going to be a big problem. I tried it and my brain already flipped for vertical scrolling after an hour or so. (I still get horizontal scrolling wrong.)

> I think that there is conceptually no superior way of scrolling.

...which means you should go with the mechanism people have already internalized. I thought that was a key principle of UI design: if you don't have a good reason to violate established expectations, don't do it.

One argument for the new behavior is that more people have internalized scrolling behavior on a modern touchscreen browser than have internalized the old MacBook way of scrolling. It makes even more sense looking forward. Steve Jobs has predicted that classic keyboard-equipped computers are going the way of "trucks" - if that's the case, it makes some sense to standardize toward touchscreen conventions.

This reminds me of some usability trials I did last year - relatively few of the users employed the mousewheel to scroll (only one, as I remember it) when viewing web pages. But almost all of them had iPhones so obviously they knew how to scroll there.

I'm a two-finger scroller on my Macbook, I'd be willing to accept the argument that there are actually more people doing it in the iOS way now.

> ...which means you should go with the mechanism people have already internalized. I thought that was a key principle of UI design: if you don't have a good reason to violate established expectations, don't do it.

Sure that's good advice for beginners, but Apple is good at design. They know the rules and the know when to break them. This is how design evolves; because great designers can imagine how something new could ultimately be better once users get used to it.

If you just follow all the rules you end up like Jakob Nielsen, with a data-backed justification for every detail, all of which adds up to something inelegant and ugly as sin.

It's worse than that. One finger dragged up moves the cursor up, two fingers dragged up scrolls the window... down? Is it really sensible to be internally inconsistent?

It also runs counter to scroll wheels on mice, which has a physical reason for the direction too.

It doesn't make sense only because you put it in terms of some completely abstract and made-up notion of "scrolling the window". Put another way:

One finger drags the cursor up and down

Two finger drags the underlying page up and down

Four finger drags the underlying space left, right, up or down

Perfectly consistent, no? I won't argue that forcing people to relearn scrolling is an uphill battle. But I'm a Dvorak typist.

It's one way to look at it. I'm used to the behavior of the scroll wheel, and also the scroll keys - moving the cursor down will necessarily move the underlying page up to keep it visible, so that equates to 'scrolling down' in my mind. This was completely logical until smartphones came along. Obviously Apple are finding a lot of their users believe (or soon will believe) otherwise.

The new scrolling isn't totally incompatible with scroll wheel usage, if you're willing to overthink it a little bit. Imagine that the scroll wheel is resting on the page, and that by applying upward/forward movement to the top of the wheel, you apply downward force to the page, moving your viewing pane higher on the page. Like so: http://imgur.com/245lA

That is the physical reason I referred to.

I am not sure this will feel that inconsistent:

- Page Up scrolls the page down

- Up arrow (eventually) scrolls the page down, too.

Looking at it that way, the only exception is be single finger drag. I guess that 'has' to be that way because otherwise dragging a finger down a bit would be too different from lifting it shortly, then clicking a bit down.

I'd wondered whether they would eventually make that change. I haven't tried it yet but I'm sure interested to. It seems like it may make sense with the iOSification of content/scroll views in Lion — they've added smooth pinch-to-zoom and rubber-band scrolling (where it lets you scroll past the bounds of an item with increasing tension until it snaps back when you let go), so maybe it "feels right" in use. I don't know.

i scroll down a lot more than up, worried for my wrist, carpal tunnels

This can be turned off with one checkbox in the touchpad settings, which I did immediately.

Actually, I was unable to disable it for my Magic Mouse, though. According to the release notes:

"Multitouch trackpads that only support two-finger gestures will not have an option to reverse the scrolling direction in the Trackpad System Preferences pane."

I assume the Magic Mouse only supports two-finger gestures, so maybe that explains it. Either way, I had a really hard time getting used to it.

I ended up having to revert to Snow Leopard thanks to issues with Dropbox, Evernote and NewsRack anyway, but I'd be surprised if that scrolling behavior and a lot of the new UI weirdness actually makes it to the final Lion GM. We'll see.

Dropbox and Evernote are deal kills for me too. I'm going to play with Lion for a day or two more then switch back to my image of SL.

I haven't tried my magic mouse on Lion yet, so I hadn't run into that problem yet.

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