I want the world to scroll this way
magicscroll.net
magicscroll.net
I agree that smooth scrolling long text is hard to read and trips up line scanning, but this UX seems be like playing an cruel game where I have to drag just enough to scroll a whole page. Any more or less and I get a torn page that's even harder to read than normal scrolling.
I have an alternate solution to this problem: just hit space or page down when you're reading a long web page. It scrolls a whole page, with just enough animation to help you track where you are.
That said, this solution will also break in that situation. But it will break worse since there will be no way to get the text at the top to scroll into view.
So you're saying the working solution doesn't work on sites with completely broken UIs such as Google+? What a surprise.
That's like criticizing middle-click-to-open-in-new-tab because it doesn't work on broken sites implementing fake links via javascript, without actual links backing them.
You're saying the UI on Google+ is broken because the header stays on the top? I love that feature - more sites should implement it.
1. I'm saying the UI on Google+ is broken because the way it's implemented (and it's not the sole offender) means page-wise scrolling as described by OP does not work anymore.
2. But your suggestion that G+'s worthless header has no reason to stay fixed and eat up 20~30% of the vertical space is also correct.
Funny how frames are avoided for historical reasons when they often seem like the ideal solution. Remember when Twitter expanded conversations in a fixed box on the right of the screen? Should have used frames. Fixed header? Same deal.
Blogs wouldn't regularly collapse under load because blog posts could actually be static html pages instead of being dynamically generated just so we can slap the same header and linkroll on each one.
We wouldn't need new html5 tags to tell screen readers and crawlers where's the content and what's navigational elements because they would be in separate (i)frames.
Ajax's use could be actually reserved for interactive web applications instead of ugly optimizations like loading the comments separate from the article so the article itself loads faster.
I've been telling this to people for years, at my street corner, with my megaphone. But nobody is listening! It's a conspiracy!!!
I often use the "page style: no style" in firefox setting in firefox in the view menu. That gets rid of fixed positions and a lot of other annoyances.
javascript:for(var a=document.querySelectorAll('*'),i=0,e; e=a[i]; i++) if (e.currentStyle.position == 'fixed') e.style.position = 'static'; void(0)
It works perfectly. Well, I vaguely recall there was one site, where it didn't work, don't remember which one (nor cared to figure out why it didn't). At first I was worried that looping over all elements on a page would be too inefficient, but JS is so fast nowadays, there's no noticeable delay. Also, there's no getElementsByStyle method, so I'm not sure how to even go about optimizing that loop.
>Pages with position:fixed banners/headers are all the rage these days. But when I try to read content inside one of these pages and hit Page Down or Spacebar, firefox calculates the page length relative to the whole browser window, not just the part visible underneath the position:fixed header. So it scrolls too much, and the first few lines of the next page end up hidden
>Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Edit: Oops, I guess it's already there. I couldn't think of a site with an appropriately sized fixed header to test it, but Google+ is such a site and pagedown works perfectly there. Nice.
Works for me on FF17. Does not work on Safari or Chrome.
BusinessWeek.com articles don't totally work. They seem to have an extra pop with their header. So 2 levels of BS. Can't totally fault the browser there.
Techcrunch.com works perfectly fine too.
So yes, fixed in FF17 and also seen to work on FF18.
The code's open source if you want to fiddle with it: https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader
One use for the two torn half-pages is that you can still see the preceding text for reference. I think that's the main reason for it. Otherwise, use page down or the arrows.
I have noticed that reading on the kindle app on my phone is extremely comfortable, and it basically incorporates the things I just mentioned -- narrow column width and page turns that aren't disorienting. I know people hate pagination on the internet because it is associated with slow page loads, but fast pagination would be awesome.
EDIT: tried it on some other articles, chose some boring ones just for the contrast, it might be just me, but the auto scroll option is going to be the only way I read articles in the near future, I actually read them faster, and more likely to reach to the end of it (based on a very short experiment though). It's also a great distraction killer (ads, banners, related stories) Nice.
just use the mousewheel / trackpad scoll area / two finger trackpad scroll gesture or swipe your finger on the touchscreen to scroll as much as you want at a time! it seems quite natural. I always though paging things is a very very bad UI pattern, but this "fluid paging" works great for plain text ...though nothing beats good ol' scrolling for a media rich documents or something with a fancier layout...
You scroll to the bottom and automatically start reading from the top, but your next line is somewhere in the middle. A faint line where the top of the page previously was would help here.
All those other things he mentions are also problems, despite his proclamation to the contrary.
Even if he somehow has managed to "fix" the scrolling "problem" (and judging from the comments on this story, he hasn't even come close), reading stuff on on a computer will still be mostly the same (for better or for worse) experience.
One of the side effects of being born with this condition is missing lines when reading a book. Growing up with computers, I always found it a little difficult to follow long lines of text or the next line as I scroll.
I'm a lot older now and hardly have these problems, if ever at all. I've pretty much perfected guessing varying levels of depth perception, I guess, as this effects my stereoscopic vision. I'm not sure what goes on at the neurological level or 'lower level', however.
Anyway, you don't know how natural it felt to read this. It almost worked too well, so I would like to test it out a little more before, just because I'm a natural sceptic.
Regardless, kudos on this great work and creative thinking.
And yes, it almost did feel like words 'moved' a little sometimes when I was a child and was still developing strong optic/extraocular muscles. It is difficult to explain/articulate, especially since it happened such a long time ago and I'm working from memory, though.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/lca...
It color codes lines aiming to solve missing or loosing your place while reading.
I'll try it out tonight.
If you find it helps your reading please email me and I'll take time to improve and fix it.
But it does make me wonder if other forms of spatial landmarks could be employed in large paragraph text. Perhaps enlarge the start of each, if only for a couple of words, in a way that quickly tappers back to the normal text height. Extreme run-on sentences might require subclauses to be highlighted similarly. Line spacing should accommodate the extra needed height, but remain regular, making the whole document appear double spaced.
At least, that is the picture in my head. It might not do any better than this Beeline reader.
I might actually like it better if it just colored one line red, the next line blue, and so on. Absolute positioning instead of all this clever gradient stuff.
I think this would be great for children with reading issues. It would be great as a 'feature' that can be turned on or off on an operating system (on the desktop, tablet, or smartphone). It feels almost like 'training wheels', and as such, I think it'd be great.
However, I do now realise that the line underlining the text can be distracting for someone who no longer has trouble following from one line to the next. Also, it is too easy for children to use this as a crutch, and may actually hinder muscle improvement if used for too long.
Also, like I said, I don't really have reading issues anymore, but I can see how this could've helped me when I was a kid. I definitely would be interested in reading the results of this tested on kids. As another person said below, my primary schoolteacher also suggested we use a paper to block out the bottom text when reading line by line, and this did help, but I think I was very self-conscious to actually do it all the time.
You're on to something!
Edit: Added clarification.
Not everyone with strabismus has the same symptoms, right? It depends on many factors, as I'm sure you know, which is why I tried to give a bit more info on myself. When I had my third eye surgery (due to my strabismic eyes) around 1995, they told me reading from line to line would be harder at first. And they were right. At this point, though, they had gone into my eyes before I was 5 twice and had cut and then 'reconnected' some nerves. Only my third time was laser. As you may know, knowledge of the causes of this eye problem, especially in the 80s, was pretty minimal. I remember feeling like a guinea pig because they would contradict each other sometimes and say one thing then say they don't fully understand this condition and would have to try different things. And then the "Well, you can try it".
What I'm saying is, it's not as clear cut. It's always interesting for me to read others's experience with strabismus, though.
I had eye surgerie(s?) when I was very young and don't really remember them. They probably helped, but I've avoided further surgery due to the "guinea pig" impression you describe, and the fact that I don't feel like my vision is severely inhibited. My depth perception is probably worse than that of other people, but I've never known better (and I think my brain has learned to compensate using a strategy skewed toward motion parallax instead of stereopsis).
Anyway, this scrolling method is unreadable to me, for whatever that's worth.
This question is for all of you with strabismic (yes, it is a word :D) eyes: Do you 'see' 3D movies? Or are all of them flat with red, blue and various outlines on the screen? For me, it's the latter. Now I have no idea if this has to do with this condition or is something else!
There are other ways to perceive 3d, such as motion parallax, so yes, we are normal people too :)
That's the reason i am not excited about 3d movies and hope they keep making 2d versions of them
Reading text in books requires quick eye jumps (saccades). Now, with smooth scrolling, we add to that the need to do smooth pursuit movements , trying to follow the scrolling text. For me, the biggest problem is figuring out where to continue reading after scrolling when the smooth pursuit ends (probably because smooth pursuit has higher margin of error). I think it would really be helpful is there was a line indicating the previous page boundary on screen when changing pages.
a lot of people actually like scrolling. So many people in fact, that they successfully pressured Apple to add scrolling as an alternative to pagination in iBooks.
I'm one of the people who uses that. I'm trying to be polite, but my honest reaction to this interface was, "oh god, this is awful," when I tried to use the mouse to scroll the page.
Options aren't a bad thing. Android offers multiple keyboards for people who find one method of typing more efficient/comfortable than others. I don't see any downsides to it because everyone gets what they want without forcing anyone to conform to a model they don't like.
On the other hand, I imagine that if you were someone that liked pagination, this might be pretty nice.
Innovation takes getting used to, evolution doesn't.
Now, for better or worse, I have no problems switching my scrolling when I'm using someone's Windows computer.
The line is the interesting feature.
My system doesn't need to use 2/3 of a page for two buttons though.
Most articles are "paginated", but you "scroll" up/down between pages. So you get the same nice physical sensation of vertical scrolling, but also the nice physical sensation of pages. (Plus, they get to lay out photos nicely, etc., knowing how it will fit exactly with the text.)
2. Control feels too fine. It's too easy to lose your place and mental effort needs to be devoted to properly placing the page divider. I would like to see a version that scrolls in discrete steps by line, perhaps with a little smoothing by way of animation. This would also give you a new feature: using the divider as a reading aid as people often do with rulers and real books.
Think of it this way: you have two controls, page turn and pixel-advance. What is a control with granularity somewhere between those interfaces that combines some of the advantages of both for navigating?
3. I'm not convinced by the divider. I think it either needs to communicate a visual metaphor, perhaps implying that the new page comes out on top of the current page using shadows, or just needs to be softer using blurring or fading the adjacent text out to white. And I don't think you should be able to cut a line of text in half (addressed in (2)).
The interface teaches me how to use it very badly. The most obvious interface clues are the arrows to either side of the page, but these work in the usual manner (hopping from page to page), so they distract me from the heart of your interface.
When I do happen to mousewheel, I can't immediately understand what that does. Am I moving myself or a divider? Why is the divider coming from the top? What's above the divider? Why is it snapping like that, instead of scrolling smoothly? The snapping erects a level of indirection between my (smooth) wheel movement and the movement of the divider, which obscures my ability to understand what's happening. I can't decide whether to scroll upwards or downwards—which is "forwards?"
Why is there a white page "behind" the text if I scroll the divider upwards? Is that what's on the next page or the previous page? Why are you showing me a white page?
The sense that I'm reading downward yet new text comes from above feels very strange. I see how you've ended up here, but it's highly unintuitive. Alas, it's also fundamental to your concept, so whether the concept lives or dies (once all other problems are removed) is a question of whether people can adapt to this spatial "warp."
The "snappy" movement of the page divider line feels clunky. Move per pixel, in immediate response to mouse wheel (or touch drag?) movement—preferably with inertia—definitely not per line.
This is not the way I want the world to scroll. But I see where you're going: leaving the text in place makes sense, and if you're going to do that then using a divider from the top follows inevitably. So the idea is worthwhile, but this implementation is its own enemy.
I tried it without allowing the scroll back on the first page (i.e. stop the white page from appearing behind.) but it made the ui feel stuck.
Also, I think your problem with the scrolling is your mouse. Does your mouse have a smoothly scrolling middle button, or is it one of the ones that moves in clicks? Scrolling with my touchpad worked excellently.
You only see a white page when you are before the beginning of the text you are trying to read... otherwise scrolling up results in going to the previous page.
even better, have a background gradient corresponding to the "age" of the horizontal line that's being shown
the gradient would make a subtle but intuitive hint as the movement commenced!!!
The moving bar revealing text is ok for keeping text from moving but it feels weird when part of the page is from one page and another part is from another. Reading with the arrows to just 'flip' the pages worked better for me.
Because the 'next' page starts at the top, it creates pagination / layout issues when a paragraph is split between the top and bottom of the page with the scroll line. This is tolerable in page flips because the previous part of the paragraph is gone, but distracting in partially turned pages.
All in all it was an interesting thing to look at and think about though.
The Guide to VMS Performance Management[1] suggested that you enable smooth scrolling on your VTxxx terminals and cut your user's baud rate from 9600 to 4800 in order to support more users, since the smooth scrollers wouldn't notice that their baud rate was lower. Yeah, I was a jumper.
[1] http://odl.sysworks.biz/disk$cddoc04mar21/decw$book/d32va177... [2]
[2] I can remember enough of this paragraph from the '80s to google it in one go, but I can't remember my wife's cell phone number. I should have words with this brain.
I would gladly give up my catalog of lyrics to songs from the 1970's in exchange for additional memory capacity! :-) I just wish someone had told me in my youth "Don't memorize that stuff, you'll need those neurons later, trust me."
One thing I find tough to deal with is the default amount of characters "scrolled" for a given mouse wheel move: the default takes way too long for my tastes. I find around 50 characters a lot nicer. Also, what about co-opting the scrollbar? It's a much more natural and smooth scroll as compared to the mousewheel, giving users more precise control over how much to scroll.
This just feels like fancy pagination. I tried partially scrolling ahead as I was reading and it disoriented me further, because the upcoming text was showing up at the top, behind where my eyes were, replacing the old text. This is confusing and not better.
For everyone who doesn't like it immediately please try it for a few days if you're able. I'm working against decades of learnt behavior so I don't think you can judge it on immediate impressions.
It works really well over long texts and often your screensaver will come on before you need to adjust anything.
It's normally best to set the speed to just slower than your natural speed, so that you don't feel that you're racing the line.
I'm not sure that I like the results of this experiment, but I completely understand the motivation behind it.
Even when reading something on paper I'll find myself actually moving the book itself further away from me as I read down the page.
This design is also harder to skim, because you need to keep moving your eyes back up as you scroll.
I almost always keep what I'm reading near the top of the screen. I like to be able to scan ahead, read the lead lines on coming paragraphs, see how close I am to the end of the sentence/paragraph/chapter, or even just track my position in the larger context of the piece. Pagination disrupts that near the bottom of a page.
I can live with pagination if I have to, but I much prefer to scroll. It's interesting, because maximizing the size of my look-ahead viewport leads me to make the opposite optimization: I like my text to move a lot.
Interesting idea though - what does this do on a touch device?
VT100 may have something to do with this though. Straight scroll isn't optimal either. When reading long texts, I prefer to have it presented in chunks, but retain 1/8th-1/4th of the information I was already looking at in case I need to refresh where I was just now. If I can't have that, a straight scroll (bar or paper) is preferable, and if I can't have that, page to page isn't so bad either.
If, upon starting to scroll, the previous page were either whited-out entirely, or the contrast was greatly reduced, I think this would be much better.
I want a progress bar at the bottom, with filled and unfilled segments. (Or for that to be an option.) I'd like the 'transition ruler bar thing' to be bigger, maybe a 3 pixel feathering would be enough. And it'd be nice if I could have some customisation over speed. It was very fast, which is good, but I think I want some kind of acceleration style movement in there?
Somehow I got stuck at 99.99%, which is going to be frustrating for some people!
Anyway, it's neat.
Everyone reads differently and looks for different things in a reading experience (if you couldn't already tell by the comments). I remember once when I was in elementary school, a teacher suggested to kids that were having trouble focusing or who were losing their place that they should use a piece of paper to obscure everything below the line they were reading and slide it down the page as they went. For reading on a screen, reflowing and resizable text can helped greatly with focus and "losing place" problems (I love Readability), but the "scroll line" concept you've got here has the potential to maybe go a bit further.
I think that if you blanked out everything below the scroll line, or everything below a good-sized margin of it (so as to preserve some of the text from the previous "page", to enable a bit of bouncing back and forth), you'd have a pretty good, functional recreation of that, and some people might find it pretty useful.
I've used Enable Viacam (http://eviacam.sourceforge.net/index.php) to sort of do this using head tracking, but you don't really move your head that much when reading, and it's too sensitive to changes in seating position.
If this could be implemented correctly, I think the result would be a superior reading experience to any alternative so far.
The code is open source and available at https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader if you want to have a poke at it.
because "Report This Page" is the only button, i instinctively hit it under the muscle-memory assumption that it's the back/escape button. chances are you're going to get a good deal of noise from beginners because of this
While we're on scrolling, I want my browser to act the right way all the time: I hate that scrolling becomes zooming on maps-- hate, hate, hate. I want scroll to pan the map.
May I continue on this path that's headed off topic? The backspace/delete key is not navigation - don't navigate history when I backspace; because sometimes, the text field gets defocused, I think I'm about to delete text and blam previous page and my form filling was for naught.
</rant>
It matches the aesthetic of a printed book, but differently through this "unrolling" model. I think it's a great blend between a book and a single screen. The words are fixed, but you still have the smooth moving window of what's before and after your current sentence.
And perhaps this is less important but neat: it allows you to remember where certain passages were by position on the page since they don't move.
Great job on this. I'll be trying it out in the coming weeks.
I hate scrolling to be honest, I lose concentration when everything moves and kind of makes me dizzy.
I like some ways I've seen on the ipad to paginate info without scrolling. No, I hate the pagination effect.
So, in essence, no scrolling, no visual distraction, just show me a page on the screen, then the next, then the next.
Like a magazine.
It is your business, as web designer, to fit content in a page and auto adjust it to my resolution, without breaking the intended relation between text and images, and without distracting me.
Like a book.
(I know I could use automatic scrolling for the same purpose, but I don't like it when the text is constantly moving.)
However, one thing I would like to see is the bar fading the text in and out as it scrolls. Both or one, I don't know. I found the bar too harsh. Im not saying it would be better, I'd just like to try it out to see.
Also, I'd like to see adobe reader do this. See if that improves the experience.
I think a quick shadow does a lot to give the divider some heft and alleviate concerns about visual ambiguity between foreground and background page.
It would look something like http://cl.ly/image/2N3B2V2d2L3W (pardon the wonky #ss_topPage). It can be done in CSS (+ two empty divs, uh) with small effort. To me it feels like the most usable skeuomorphic hint you could drop.
I undertstand from the comments that it does something differently when you have a scroll wheel, but since I am on a touch based device I just see arrows for forward and backward and a remarkably small amount of text on each "page". It's infuriating to use.
I would love to see where further iterations of magicscroll would go. Slightly disappointed by the extremely skeptical HN responses though...reminds me of the stuffy old science committee in Futurama.
It worked really well for me, was a really pleasant way to read, and helped me keep my place better. I'll be using this in Chrome.
------
Edit: After using it to read a few articles, here are some additional thoughts.
* I don't have to be as vigilant with scrolling to keep my position (at the top of the page, in my previous method). I can track where I am on the page based on its vertical position, because that's not changing anymore.
* I wish the bar were more visible. I want to be able to track it in my periphery.
* I can scroll up on the first page. I shouldn't be able to.
* The reversed scroll direction in Mac OS X 10.8 doesn't make sense anymore. I feel like I should be controlling the bar. Perhaps reverse the scroll direction?
In addition, I don't know if you're using any light gray for visual cues. That's a problem. My screen is crap with shot contrast and light gray tends to become white that I can't see. I wish to hell everyone would stop using light gray everywhere.
Scrolling actually is continuous (think of a scroll being unrolled from the botom and rolled up at the top).
Revealing would be nice for reading forward, and I have to admit that I feel a sense of accomplishment and control when revealing further text. And as a result, I read more of the page!
But the psychological aspect of revealing things can also be done with scrolling, for example the parallax pages such as NikeBetterWorld (now taken down but you can see it at http://www.ianlunn.co.uk/demos/recreate-nikebetterworld-para...) and Ben the Bodyguard and the other sites here: http://webdesigncrowd.com/websites-unique-scrolling-adventur...
As you reveal more of the world in a novel way, you feel a sense of curiosity. Once the novelty wears off, though, you are left right back there with the content.
The key to revealing things is that you are more focused on the new stuff instead of the old. In this sense, I agree tha the revealing is better than scrolling, because when scrolling, you don't immediately focus on the new stuff. Instead, the old and some of the new stuff is all a big blur until you stop scrolling. That breaks your concentration.
However, as someone pointed out, revealing is not good for "scrolling back up". That is an important point. Revealing is a different psychological phenomenon.
To summarize: revealing is not scrolling. Revealing is about using a novel method of showing new content, always de-emphasizing the old one (in Ben the Bodyguard, for instance, new things move but the old things stay still). Revealing is good for presenting information in a forward direction, and wears off with the novelty of the method. The web shouldn't all scroll this way.
Lacking this, I (and I suspect many others) improvise by using a mouse selection, and constantly growing the selection by shift-clicking. This breaks if the UI has messed with the relevant UI events (e.g. disabling selection or popping up something on mouse clicks).
I wouldn't mind some controls for this designed specifically around the activity of reading. Maybe tap to advance one sentence or one paragraph. Keep the current paragraph entirely in view (unless it's too big; then keep the current sentence entirely in view). Shift the text a paragraph at a time. Make it advance both the marker and the text, so the reader doesn't have to manage those two things separately.
I'd especially like a good tablet solution to this, since reading is my primary activity on a tablet, and there's no mouse in that case.
I also frequently go back and re-read previous lines when I'm reading, because I sometimes just don't absorb things on first-pass. The auto-scrolling line needlessly introduces an urgency to the reading experience that I don't particularly enjoy. Sure, you can pause it, but then that is something you consciously have to think about doing while reading. "Free scrolling" doesn't introduce any extra thinking, because you do it subconsciously most of the time.
So, no, I don't find this particular useful or innovative.
A better solution? A scrolling system that tracks your eye movements in conjunction with a sophisticated AI to adapt to your preferred scrolling behaviour over time.
I'm getting lost on the page, there's no simple anchor for my eyes. I agree with some of the arguments (scrolling disrupts reading position) but this doesn't fix it.
Iterate some more, perhaps try entire pages moving down to replace the existing page? Something, anything, to give me a better feeling for scrolling through pages.
You also have no idea how long-winded an article is and if you need to tldr;
For the ebook reader on the main page at magicscroll.net you can set it to use Ethan Schoonover's solarized colors: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized which I prefer to the black on white.
All that said, it could just be that it's new. I'll happily try the extension for a while (thanks! makes it a lot easier to try out) and report on things later :)
One detail does jump out at me: I would prefer a gap between 'bottom' and 'top' so I can park the separator out of sight. I might just be obsessing with keeping a 'clean' page, but I do find myself trying to do so.
While I agree that stationary text may be easier to focus on the words themselves, I personally find the "magic-scroll" effect makes it harder for me to read. I tend to move my content into the middle of the screen and will occasionally jump back and re-read a paragraph, both of which magic-scroll seems to prevent.
Perhaps it's a user adaptation problem, but it just seems more constrained and less natural to me...
Without a force-feedback mouse... I guess I'd prefer if there was a little bit of "edge resistance" or something going from one page to the next.
Otherwise, I'm OK with just hitting page-down to go to the next part of the page. It would be nice if browsers were a little smarter, and tried to not cut off text at the top edge. So in other words, when you hit page-down, you will see a complete line of text at the top.
However the scrolling effect DID actually remind me of my own natural behaviour. I tend to either randomly selecting and unselecting the paragraph I'm focusing on, or highlighting the first paragraph and holding the mouse button down, to incrementally select the text on a page as I read it/scroll.
At first glance I could maybe see myself enjoying this scroll effect minus the pagination, where the text still scrolled upwards but the page had a 'reading line' near the top that showed content above it dulled.
Do we have someone who is proficient in speed reading? I would be very interested in opinion of such a person: is paging and associated flipping of pages making speed reading harder or easier than scrolling?
For reading on a large enough display (laptop, desktop or even any newer tablet), I think it's unnecessary. The way I read on these devices doesn't involve scrolling very often. I read like I do on print, but scrolling replaces the page turn much like it does on his. I don't read text while I'm scrolling usually, I'll read what's on the page, then scroll it to give me a new chunk to read. It's not a big deal at all.
There are keyboard short cuts and clickable side arrows to turn the page, though why they decided to override [space] with autoscroll, I cannot comprehend.
The scrolling feels backwards, now that I'm gotten used to Apple's tablet-style reversal on the touchpads. I'm sure this makes sense on a scroll wheel. Not sure if there is a way to detect the default scroll mechanism.
Overall, thumbs up for many long article applications.
I have ABSOLUTELY no problem tracking scrolling text as I read it. I think pagination is of the devil. We could have paginated the web in '93, but the beauty of the web is pages can be endless.
Your conclusion may be valid, but I don't think the bug you found has anything to do with it.
Maybe it's just a bug, but it seems intentional and it ruins the experience for me.
Are we talking about the same thing?
Shameless plug: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/purify/kjiappjpfpa...
Not for me. I am far more likely to finish a news article on the web - with a physical newspaper, I read the beginning of many front page stories, but don't always flip to the rest of it. The rest of the claims are quite dubious.
It's a neat technology, one which I may like for books. But not for articles. I prefer having it all "there."
I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the fact that you're just not sufficiently interested. Kind of like reading the blurb on a website, and then not clicking through to the article itself.
Something to keep in mind also: having articles continue in the remainder of the newspaper is a cultural (US? English-language?) thing. In Germany, articles in physical newspapers are not split up like that.
If anyone has a way to trigger extensions, please share.
Here I like the fact than I can already start focusing at the top of the page while finishing to read the page at the bottom.
Weird, yes, but it has at least this advantage over classic pagination display.
1. When I say HTML, I mean HTML + a host of CSS and Javascript libraries
I don't read the entire length of the page before scrolling, I read a paragraph or two before scrolling.
When I read a book, I don't usually put the book in one place then read down it, I'll often move the book up slowly to that it's always in a position to read where my head/neck is comfortable.
I, for one, am glad that the world doesn't scroll this way.
It would be nice to use this method with some texts I want to read...but definetley not all.
Can't scan.
Probably would be really good to read an academic paper I really want to grasp a second time.
Good experiment!
Edit: (Since it said it was Chrome only...tried it with Chrome, text from previous page still shows up...)
I use <spacebar> and <shift-spacebar> when reading the web; paging up/down is more comfortable for me than scrolling.
Kindle is also excellent for reading because it uses distinct pages. I set my text large and columns narrow, then it's easy to speed-read by scanning my eyes down. It results in many more page turns, but it results in faster reading and less strain.
Static "newspaper" text is a neat idea and we already have this functionality - page turn. But marrying it with scrolling is confusing. I just don't see an advantage here.
1) Advance to the last page -- progress is 99.99%. 2) Go back one page -- progress stays at 99.99%. 3) Go back another page -- progress is 57.08% (which happens to be correct).
A little tangential: Xfce has a dictionary applet. That includes a speed reader. Which only displays words, one word at a time in quick succession. It's actually pretty simple to use. And works really well. I wouldn't have thought so. Should add that to smartphones. No scrolling required!
Because you have a pretty good idea if the person has scrolled to the last page (cause you are tracking it) you should be able to get some metrics on how many people finish the article etc and use it to promote your product.
And I agree with the comments that the divider itself doesn't provide enough of a visual cue about what's going on. I'd either go with the drop shadow suggestion, or play with a thicker divider that feels like a physical object.
This experiment feels like set of slides, and i don't necessarily feel where I am as I click back and forth. I feel lost.
Rather than this, I'd rather just have a "80% screen down" scroll option.
Implemented beautifully in ForceFeed (http://qwerjk.com/force-feed) which is currently down :(
No seriously, this is great. An unexpected advantage is that's it is actually harder to skim. You're encouraged instead to read things thoroughly. I, for one, skim articles way too much.
But, I don't like this.
No idea someone was working on this RIGHT THEN. You are my freaking hero.
I'm missing the magic.
Firefox 18, Win 8 x64
Separate the bottom line of the new page from the top line of the old page with more space.
And also add or remove each line all at once instead of gradually.
I don't. The idea looks revolutionary and fun the first time you try it. Then you scroll back, start to read, and notice it has no advantages.
Timestamp: 11/01/2013 7:28:33 PM
Error: too much recursion
Source File: http://www.magicscroll.net/staticScroll.js
Line: 751
This is what I see without zooming - http://imgur.com/pGJuk
I'll see what I can do to add some breaks to the page rendering loop. I get the impression that the Firefox version needs a bit of work.
Neat idea.
A good effort, I didn't realize it was a pitch for the magicscroll extension till I read it a few times.
This is the reason why I am not so much into this scrolling.
Hopefully this will trigger innovation in scrolling.
page breaks tend to occur in awkward places,
which makes you jump back and forth between pages.
This would be quite useful to me as a PDF reader.
Only after reading the comments I went back and used a scroll wheel. The lack of any feedback that you could scroll was annoying.
Personally, I can't find a comforting way to read on the web(and I read a lot), most of the time I'll go selecting text(sometimes with the keyboard, sometimes with the pointer) but then it will feel tiring or weird doing that and I'll switch to just scrolling bit-a-bit, but then I'll start losing track of the line I'm at and go back to selecting, I feel this approach is much better than this.