A new use for the scroll bar | Hacker News Reader

A new use for the scroll bar

thingsfromthefuture.com

20 pointsmatthaeus31 comments

FYI, this thing needs to talk to twitter, so if you have disconnect.me or something similar installed, you need to allow it to communicate with twitter before you see anything.

Otherwise you get a nice off-white box in the middle of the screen, and not much else.

Yes it grabs trending tweets from the Twitter Search API as content for the demo. If that fails for some reason, then nothing happens (obviously something that I'll need to fix next).

For those as confused as I was, it turns out you have to grab the scroll bar and move it until one of the (initially invisible) bookmarks is highlighted on the right.

(Firefox 7, Linux)

What scroll bar? (Chromium 12, Linux)

THE scroll bar

What scrollbar? (Chromium 12, OSX Lion)

I've never used Chromium, but you don't get the browser's vertical scrollbar on the right side of the screen? I have it in Chrome on Windows. Moving it shows various categories right beside it and lining it up with them changes the content in the middle.

Yeah this is no good for Lion users (assuming that Lion hides ALL scrollbars automatically, right?)

It seems even turning the option to 'Show Always' still doesn't show them. http://d.pr/jMYZ

I have one in Chrome 13 on Lion. What happens if you scroll?

Nothing (On Chrome 14 and Chromium 14).

Weird... If it changes anything else, I'm using a MacBook trackpad and show scroll bars is set to auto.

This is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/EeMg7.png

Awh, I guess it's not a good hack then ',>/

If you have Chrome it should open in that.

What scroll bar? (Firefox 5.0, Windows XP SP3)

are those of you who can't see anything have any type of twitter widget block. I tried in incognito mode and worked. Anyways sort of cool, but i've seen similar implementations of the same idea.

This is probably it, I block all social widgets, addthis, share me, and advertising in my hosts file.

It works on Opera 11.50, Linux. I'm surprised!

UI would be a bit friendlier if; 1) The changes were more responsive. The delay is too long when scrolling and hovering over an element - should be around 100ms or so. If it takes time to load the content, show some visual signal (loading... or similar) that state has changed. 2) You could mouse over and click on each of the items.

I didn't know what to except when I clicked on this post. But as soon as I landed on the page I started scrolling up&down, left&right; eventually "the thing" showed itself to me. The concept is neat; i must say.

This doesn't appear to work in Google Chrome in OS X Lion at all (version 13.0.782.112), although it does work in Safari.

Works in Snow Leopard, same version.

I'm using the same setup (OS X Lion, same build of Chrome), and it works for me.

Great idea and well made, but it frustrated me that I couldn't do anything with the tweets.

I don't think its meant to use the tweets for anything other than content for the demo.

Neat idea for an interface, but as others have pointed out the demo needs some work.

It seems that the API that this is using has been rate limited.

(seems to be working in Chrome and FF)

What is this I don't even

Interesting concept! It would be really useful with this design to be able to click on a label and have the page jump to that section. Simple #hash and anchor should do it.

Chrome, Linux: 14.0.835.35 dev. I don't see any scrollbar. Scrolling with the mouse does nothing.

Got it working in Firefox, or at least I think I did. This is kinda awful, and I do mean that with respect. I'd much rather mouse over the labels on the right and have the message pop up instantly. The delay and amount I have to scroll makes this awkward. I thought it was broken still until I gave up and the message popped in.

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