Re: A Proposal For The Complete Elimination Of Scrollbars From The GNOME Desktop

[Alan Shutko <ats acm org>]

Posting to GNOME list because I didn't see the original.


>>>>> "B" == Bowie J Poag <bjp@primenet.com> writes:

B> o That scrollballs -completely- replace the presence of traditional
B> scrollbars. Don't even offer a choice between the old and the new;

I notice one important feature of scrollbars which has been completely
neglected by your analysis.  It's a feature that scrollballs cannot
do.

Scrollbars do not only provide translational motion.  They also
provide a visible display of the proportion of displayed area to total
area.  By looking at the scrollbar, I can see if the text displayed is
all of the text that there is, half of the text, or even just a very
small portion of it.

Additionally, the proportional display of a scrollbar allows you to do
exact placement of the scrollbar to given areas.   For example, if I
want the second quarter of the document, I can put a scrollbar there
quickly, but it seems I would have to keep watching the text to do so
with a scrollball.  That ignores stuff like the athena widget's
ability to middle click on a spot and go there immediately.

To use an analogy, it's as if you replaced a mouse on a computer with
an analog joystick.  Better for some limited manipulations, but not
nearly the same thing.

-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - By consent of the corrupted
I've always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.