Re: [Usability] Re: A bunch of UI issues

[lukekendall optushome com au]

On  4 Feb, David Moles wrote:
>  That might be okay. I can't help but think there must be a better 
>  way to solve the problem, though, if the problem is "I decided I 
>  didn't want to scroll here after all; now how do I get back?" 
>  Maybe something in the scrollbar itself... just thinking out loud 
>  here, but how about if when you moved the scrollbar "thumb" it  
>  left a clickable ghost of itself at its old position? 

Or a clickable tick or something.  If any of you ever saw the Nextstep
file difference utility, they used their click scroll bars very well.

(If you clicked in the middle of a scrollbar, you jumped to the middle.
If you clicked at the top, you jumped straight to the top.  It was
brilliant. Page up and down were by shift-click on the up/down arrows,
which of course were adjacent rather than at opposite ends of the
scrollbar.)

Anyway, in the file difference utility, difference sections were
indicated by a horizontal line in the scrollbar.  So, if you clicked
near one, you jumped to that section.

I always thought that a scrollbar where you could just to mark the
current position (so a clickable mark would appear in the scrollbar),
would have been incredibly useful.  Like vi's mark and jump (m and ')
functions for jumping around in a file to places you decided were
significant.

The problem with David's suggestion is if you paged through a context,
the scrollbar would be filled with ghost images.

BTW, I assume that the scroll widget has a minimum size where its
height equals its width, so it's always easy to click on?  And the
distance it scrolls is dependent on the size of the jump, not the
widget's size?

I.e. in a *long* file, the widget might be 10 pixels square, but you
might have to page up several times before the widget even shifted by a
pixel...

luke