Re: InSight

[Christian Scholz <ruebe aachen heimat de>]

Hi!

> R> Apparently, while most people agreed with some of InSights ideas
> R> and were awed at some of their interface design possiblities, the
> R> idea was met with great resistance by the people higher up.
> 
> All I remember was some posts about a "scrollball" which was supposed
> to completely replace the scrollbar, despite lacking significant
> functionality which scrollbars have.  It caused lots of fun on Usenet,
> with the person proposing the scrollball refusing to believe that
> people actually used a scrollbar in modes other than he originally
> thought, and asserting he had a much greater knowledge of UIs than
> anyone else.

I searched for the original article and actually I must say that the
idea is not that new, maybe in a different form. I saw a similar thing
in MUI, a OO GUI system on Amigas. But there the scrollbars did not get
replaced by something else but what he called "scrollball" was added.

Actually you had in the space between the vert and horiz scrollbar
a button (there is some free space in the bottom right corner then
anyway) and while pressing it the scrollarea followed your mouse
movements. Another way to activate this was by pressing the middle
mouse button while being inside the scollfield.
Also there is 3d Studio Max which also lets you scroll something
by just holding down your left mouse button inside a list but outside
the actual test of an entry. I must say that this was a very intuitive
and fast way of scrolling (just because you donīt have to move your
mouse somewhere else).
But nevertheless I think that scrollbars are still useful so maybe the
GTK guys should think about adding this to their scroll widget? :)

best,
  mr topf