thou shalt put the scrollbar on the left

Mike Klein mike at twinsun.com
Fri Feb 20 19:55:06 UTC 1998


Hmm Scrollbars....
Rambling Thought's....

Flop-out scrollbar have high nostalgia value.

Anyone have the new mouse with the scroll-wheel on it?

Scroll-bars ar a bit of an anacronism.  Didn't scrolls go out of style
centuries ago with the advent of bound-books & page?
(Of course with the WWW we have the worst of both worlds :-)

I direct your attention to "TOG on Interface"
(He even talk's about the first appearance of
proprtion scroll bars in 'Small Talk' pg. 211).
Specifically, Ch 27, Fitt's Law.

	Fitt's law states that the time required to move
	from a starting point to within the confines of
	a target area is dependent on a logarithmic
	relationship between the distance (D) from
	the point to the target area and the
	size (S) of the target.

[Something akin to:  Time = C1 + log (D/S + C2)]

I often find that the easiest way to "scroll" is to just drag select past the
appropriate boundary, and let auto-scrolling do the work.  (Note: easiest ~= fastest).

NextSTEP did scroll bars the best:  The scroll buttons were all located in the
bottom-left corner (where your eye is when you are attempting to look for the
first line off of the bottom of the view),
so that moving amogst them for fine scrolling operations required
no large mouse travel.  Clicking in the "thumb" of the scroll bar did NOT move the
thumb... only draging it did.  The thumb was proportionally sized, and never shrunk
beyong a usable distance.  (I'm sure many of you out there have had to deal with the
one-pixel-high scroll thumb, at times)  And the bar was on the left.

Windows 3.1 did it the worst:  Whilst draggin the thumb, if you left the scroll gutter,
the thumb & text would jump back to its original position.  The net effect is that
while scrolling, you have to watch the scroll bar, making it difficult to read while scrolling.

-- Mike Klein





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