Re: Multitouch review 3: kinetic scrolling

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2012-02-02 at 00:48 +0100, Carlos Garnacho wrote:
> Hey :),
> 
> On mié, 2012-02-01 at 23:37 +0100, Florian Müllner wrote:
> > On mié, 2012-02-01 at 08:00 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > - Restricting kinetic scrolling to touch devices is correct,
> > > experience-wise
> > 
> > Is it? I don't think Windows 8's Metro interface limits kinetic
> > scrolling to touch devices (but I may be misremembering here), and Allan
> > explicitly mentions kinetic scrolling with mouse input[0].
> > To me it sounds like a desirable feature for non-touch input in some
> > situations like missing scroll wheel or crappy touchpads.
> 
> My feeling is that mixing interaction paradigms is a wrong thing to do,
> kinetic scrolling inherently comes with its oddities wrt selection and
> DnD, those are kinda expected and sorted out in a way or another on
> other touch platforms, but bringing those changes to mice users may be
> frustrating.
> 
> A more generic principle I agree we should follow is direct
> manipulation, in the case of scrolling:
> 
> * On touch devices: the content follows your finger
> * On touchpads: the content scrolls smoothly, proportionally to the
> finger(s) movement/velocity in the touchpad [1]. Note that the synaptics
> driver already does it's sort of kinetic scrolling itself.
> * On mice: you move via the scrollbar

I've had those same discussions with Jon when we were discussing
Scrolling [1] and, despite agreeing with you when we started the
conversation, I think that we should at least have the ability to
experiment with that behaviour for non-touch, if only to integrate with
platforms that use kinetic scrolling with non-touch.

Cheers

[1]: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Scrolling