Scroll Bars - Old Style vs. New Style

It seems that since the release of Lion I've heard a fair number of
grumps regarding the new style of the scroll bars. My response is that
the new style is quite superior, eliminating a bit of display clutter.
I have no difficultyl scrolling with my Magic Trackpad and admittedly
only given my Magic Mouse a small number of tries.

So, I'm curious as to the other's here in this group regarding their
experiences with the new style scroll bars.

 

I prefer the old. The styling of the new is kinda nice, but they're too
small and narrow. In this day of 27 inch monitors I can't understand the
usability advantage of making them smaller.

 

I'm happy with them. My granddaughters, who have had minimal time using
them, don't seem to like them. I'd tell them "Move up, Luddites!", but I
don't think they'd know what I was talking about.

leo

 

Scrolling with the Magic Trackpad is no problem at all since you don't
use the scrollbars.

When I am already using the trackman I find the behavior of the scroll
bars to be so obnoxious and annoying that I am convinced they were
designed *specifically* to be annoying and obnoxious.

I have been using mice since 1986 pretty much every day. It is quite
hard for me to get the scroll bar to appears, and when I do get it to
appear, it is quite hard to grab the little tiny thumb to drag.

When dealing with long documents, the Trackpad is inadequate because it
takes multiple swipes to scroll long distances, so you need the
scroll-wheel, but it pops up for such a fleeting time that it can take 2
or 3 tries to get it.

It's better in Mnt Lion.

 

TaliesinSoft:

If evolution hadn't prepared us to adapt and become accustomed to
change we would not be here to comment on scroll bars. I am thoroughly
accustomed to the Lion scroll bars and I no longer consider them to be
new. By now they are as natural as the former scheme, and I don't
notice them at all.

There are, of course, persons who are quite determined not to accept or
adapt to change, and who will spite themselves to maintain their
obstinacy. Such persons are usually called conservatives, but
regressives is the more appropriate term, since they waste their lives
trying to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics and turn back the
clock.

 

On 2012-07-14 05:30:07 +0000, Király said:

[commenting on the new style scrollbars]

I find the width of the new scrollbars perfectly adequate to convey the
needed information clearly and without taking up unnecessary room in
the window. I'm using a 21.5 inch iMac with the screen resolution set
to 1600 x 900 pixels.

 

Mine parallel yours.

 

With the trackpad they're fine since you don't need the scroll bars at
all except, occasionally, as a visual guide to position in a window.

With a mouse (if it has a scroll wheel) it comes to the same thing. (Or
magic mouse I suppose, but I haven't tried one).

As Kiraly says, on large screens the smaller bars don't contribute much
to de-clutter - but on the smaller screen of the MBA it certainly does.

Apple could have included a "narrow/wide" option for the scroll bars.

 

That would not be the native setting for the screen would it? It would
be more like 1920 by something. These LCD screens set at anything but
native always look less than sharp to me unlike the big old CRT's in
this respect, you could vary them in res and they remained sharpish
over a few ranges.

 

Anybody here have to use both Lion and a pre-Lion system, where
scrolling goes "the other way"? I find going back and forth causes
me to scroll the wrong way relatively often. I'm sure if I only
used the "new way", I'd be used to it quickly enough.

With the scroll bars becoming invisible, it is annoying that you
sometimes can't tell, without trying to scroll, if there is any more
content to scroll to.

Martin

 

Martin Frost me at invalid stanford daht edu

You can change the behavior in Lion to be the "old way".

You can set the scroll bars in lion to be always visible; however, you
won't have the arrows at the ends.

Also, if you try to scroll, and there's no more content, you'll get that
little bounce that some people complain about.

 

The native resolution of my iMac is 1920 by 1080. I lowered the
resolution to 1600 by 900 so that text would appear a bit larger,
helping me to see it better. As an aside it is interesting how much
sharper letters of the same size appear on my retina display iPad.

 

I turned off "natural scrolling" so that it behaves the same way it
always has.

It's interesting that third party tools have been available for ages
that reverse the scrolling direction, and almost nobody was interested.
But when Apple did it and made it the default, everybody jumped on the
bandwagon.

That's why I don't understand the scroll bars being hidden by default.
With the visible scroll bar I can tell at a glance:

-if there is more content to view,
-about what point in the document I am at, and
-about what percentage of the entire document is visible at the time.

All useful stuff to know; I'm not sure why someone would want this info
hidden, but I guess people have their reasons. What surprises me is how
Apple considers this number to be so big as to make it the default.

 

Since I use the MagicTrackpad for scrolling and I have that only on Lion
systems, no, I don't have the problem. On non lion systems I use a
scroll wheel, and it works correctly.

(I wish Lion would allow one setting for trackpads and the oppositie for
scroll wheels).

 

Because it makes sense with a trackpad. It really is the natural way to
scroll. I remember some people complaining about the iphone scrolling
'backwards', but they were wrong. You touch something and move up and
the content should move up. Simple. Works with any touch surface.
Doesn't work with a scroll wheel at all.

 

No, it's not. You made your iMac fuzzy.

Granted, the iPad would still be sharper, but you made the difference a lot more dramatic.

 

Yes, I realise that is the reason. Some friends of mine do the same.
My solution to this prob is to get a bigger screen at 1920 across (the
pixels are just bigger and everything is) and keep it native res. My
Macbook screen is very tiresome at its native res but would be too
ugly a sight at anything but. Luckily I have other screens. Two of
them are 1920 x 1200, the 26" one is nicer than the the 24" because
everything is a little bigger but still sharp.

Nothing is the best on LCDs not set at native resolution. But "letters
of the same size" is open to different interpretations.

 

On 2012-07-15 07:55:36 +0000, Lewis said:

[in respoonse to my having stated]

I have a bit of a visual problem with the display set to 1920 by 1080,
an example being the text in the menubar, and that is why I changed the
resolution to 1600 by 900, making it easier for me to see. Admittedly
the text may be a bit fuzzier but the difference in size makes it more
readable for me.

 

There's certainly a case for a third party add-on for pre-Lion systems to
enable Lion like behaviour. Caveat: I have no idea how feasible this
would be to implement.

I had this very problem with Linux Mint 11. It appears that the Ubuntu
folks have jumped onto a similar paradigm in this area. If you didn't
know that an area was scrollable your only hint was an extremely thin
vertical line in green and on a small screen that was hard to see. At
best you waved your mouse around in the general direction of where you
thought the scrollbar might appear.

I skipped that version because of this behaviour. Apparently it was
configurable but by the time I found that out I had lost the will to be
bothered.