Re: scroll bar and drop down list usability



On Thu, May 04, 2000 at 10:33:43AM -0700, Gerry Chu wrote:
> The best scroll bars are the ones with the up and down arrows next to each
> other.  Perhaps we should have a "mouse touchpad": think of the up and down
> arrows next to each other, but you don't have to click on them to move up
> and down.  Mousing over a arrow would move the page in that direction.  Not
> very consistent with the other widgets, but handy nonetheless.

Hmm. One nifty thing that RISC OS (Acorn one) did with scroll bars was
to make them 'reversible' . Clicking with the left button moved the
scroll bar in the expected way, whereas clicking with the right mouse
button scrolled in the opposite direction. This made a huge difference
because a classic scrolling technique is to whizz down the document,
see something you want to read, but go past it. You are then forced to
laboriously repostition the mouse pointer at the opposite end of the
scroll bar before you can move back up again. Very painful. Under RISC OS
you just clicked the right mouse button to go back up again.

This partially depended on *very* consistent mouse button usage
though: Assuming a right-handed mouse arrangement; left button was
click in the mac style (named select), the right button was called
'alternate' I think and wasn't always used, the middle button was
called 'menu' and *always* brought up a menu appropriate to the thing
clicked upon. (There were *no* menu bars in RISC OS --- everything was
done with pop-up menus brought up by middle-clicking, so no hunting
around the screen for the application menu bar like win95/motif/
gnome/kde) The right button could be used by the application
programmer for 'alternate' uses --- eg a move drag instead of a copy
drag.

hmm. I could go on about the qualities of Acorn's GUI for
ages. Suffice to say that I haven't met a better one since (Though I
never got to try NeXTStep...)

> Fitt's law: I think there should be NO window borders when a window is
> maximized.  If we could figure out how to make the bar of the scroll bar
> flush with the window (like mozilla), the user could scroll the page with
> the mouse at the very edge of the screen.

Absolutely. Incidentally, Has anyone noticed how KDE gets this
horribly wong when you have the menus at the top of the screen in
mac-style? --- The top pixel line isn't part of the menu, thus missing
*entirely* the point of having the menubar at the top...

Phil

-- 
nosig




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