Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiaaro | Hacker News Reader

Honestly... this made things confusing without improving my reading ability.

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.

View on HN

"You'll get used to it" can quickly becomes a lazy excuse for many bad experimentations in interaction design, but in this case I really think this is the right answer. At first, I found it disturbing as hell, and the implementation could be better (for instance, with a margin between the two pages, in addition to the black line), but this is really an interesting and promising answer to the pagination/scroll debate.

Like, you'll get used to inverted scroll in Mountain Lion?

Innovation takes getting used to, evolution doesn't.

I never got used to that, it seemed totally backwards to me. I can deal with it on a screen where my finger is (almost) physically attached to what I'm scrolling, but not on a detached mouse/trackpad and display.

I actually got used to it fairly quickly. After a day or two I instinctively used reverse (or "natural") scrolling, and I can switch back pretty easily when I'm using other people's computers. It does seem like almost no one else switched though.

I didn't just get used to the inverted scrolling, I fell in love with it. I think it makes perfect sense, and fells more "connected" with what I'm doing.

Eh, I hate it, personally. It's the first thing I disable when installing Mountain Lion.

this is a surefire way to not get used to it.

Loved that feature, it feels so much more natural. It was only a problem when I had to use a windows computer for like 5 minutes and everything was inverted again.

Yeah, that is how I felt at first as well. But I regularly use a Windows VM / Remote Desktop Client for Windows on my Mac, so I've gotten used to scrolling one way in the VM window or the RDC, and the other way outside it in the rest of my Mac.

Now, for better or worse, I have no problems switching my scrolling when I'm using someone's Windows computer.

My work computer is windows, and it was driving me nuts to have to reverse scroll... I found that I could invert scrolling on windows with the AutoHotKey app. Works pretty well.

You can actually enable this scrolling behavior in Windows through a per-mouse registry setting[0].

[0]: http://www.bisql.net/2011/12/natural-scroll-win-7/

This is why I try not to overtweak my computer. Sure I could rice the whole thing out, but then I'm useless on any other machine. I try to strike a happy medium where I'm reasonably productive but can still use another computer when I have to.

I took the plunge and tried inverted scroll. At first it seemed weird, but after a day or so it felt like the most natural thing ever (and I've been using Macs since 1984). Now I find it difficult to go back to 'wrong way' scrolling.

I dunno, I have tried it, and it was ok after a bit on the touchpad. Then I plugged in a mouse. Did not work at all. I could not use it like that. So now I have scroll reverser[1] to scroll that way with just the trackpad. But really, I was flipping back and forth with the settings (there was something weird with the back/forward swipes for browsers) I don't even know which way it is right now. But it doesn't matter, as soon as I start moving it I can get feedback and do it correctly. So I can get used to having it flipped on me rather quickly. I might make some false starts.

[1]: http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

I'm completely sold on inverted scroll. 100%. It maps to touch interfaces and touch pads, it's "moving content" instead of moving that little (mostly invisible in Mountain Lion) progress bar, and the "moving content" concept fits extremely well with smooth deceleration - it always slides to a stop at the same distance after you've gone the same speed. The scroll bar becomes a progress bar and almost nothing else.

for what it's worth, I use "natural scrolling" in mountain lion

On the flip side I actually liked it. I'm a FF user, and in the instant it clicked my first thought was "damn, I need chrome."

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.

Absolutely with you on this - any kind of pagination on the web makes me cringe.

On the other hand, I imagine that if you were someone that liked pagination, this might be pretty nice.

Do you hate it because its bad, or do you hate it because it's different?

Because it is bad.

I want to reiterate this - scrolling is good if you can do endless page scrolling and keep your eyes in one place, while moving the text to match them. I always continuously scroll articles I read so that my current line stays near or at the top of the page. Much better than a tiny black bar moving down the page while I have to move my eyes.

It would be a lot less confusing if the text from the previous page dissapeared...or if that line that follows you worked not with pages but as a scroll....

The line is the interesting feature.

Or if the dividing line was twenty times thicker. When pages are narrow, my brain tends to start reading the next line before it is finished reading the first line. Imagine how well this works out for me when the "next line" is not only from the previous page, but currently cut in half by the scroll line.

Yes! That was the 1st thing I thought as well. If you could make the previous text disappear or set it at 30% opacity it wouldn't even ned a divider. I like the way this reads. I'd like to see it as a feature for iBooks / e-readers.

The New Yorker iPhone app does a fantastic job by combining the best of both worlds.

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.)

I got used to it when scrolling forward. When you want to scroll back up, though, this approach really seems to break down.

I thought it was pleasant enough to use. I actually have my middle-mouse button remapped to PgDn, so this is more or less how I navigate already.

My system doesn't need to use 2/3 of a page for two buttons though.

It's the difference between moving the page and moving your eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com