You can change the settings in preferences, of course, but Mac OS X Lion has trackpad scrolling backwards from what’s normal. Instead of two finger scrolling down making pages go down, it goes up, like if you were touching the screen. Like iOS. As if we needed more indication that Apple is trying to unify their touch computing with their regular computing. [9to5Mac]
Hmm from a UI perspective it is changing what the control actually is. When you are scrolling in a window, the control is actually the scroll bar on the right hand side. The Scroll Bar indicates two main things: 1. the length of the page, 2. the region you are viewing.
When you use the traditional (original) two finger scroll method you are actuating the scroll bar to move down which logically scrolls the page contents down.
If you change the function so that it operates like your iphone or ipad, it is the page itself (like paper) you are moving. In my opinion this paradigm only makes sense when you are actually touching the screen.
I’m not a cognitive psychologist, but I believe that making Mac OSX UI behave like a touch screen device doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t seem intuitive. People have long established habits and expectations when using computers. Whether you use a scroll wheel mouse or two finger swipe gesture, you generally expect the page to scroll down. Changing this could be frustrating. I suspect it wont be a popular function. I’d like to know if I’m wrong.
If the screens become touch screens then that would be a different story. Maybe one day they will have both a touchscreen AND a trackpad. Each one independently configured to behave according to how the UI is expected to operate (or by user selection). The Screen would behave like iPad or iPhone (swipe the screen down and the page moves up), the trackpad would behave as it already does (swipe to scroll down) .
I felt the same about it Steven, that is until I used it for a few hours today. It took ten minutes to wrap my head around it but then I didn’t have much of a problem, oddly enough I found that it was more intuitive when in the full screen mode rather than windowed.
Steven Bloom
Friday, February 25, 2011 at 12:07 PMHmm from a UI perspective it is changing what the control actually is. When you are scrolling in a window, the control is actually the scroll bar on the right hand side. The Scroll Bar indicates two main things: 1. the length of the page, 2. the region you are viewing.
When you use the traditional (original) two finger scroll method you are actuating the scroll bar to move down which logically scrolls the page contents down.
If you change the function so that it operates like your iphone or ipad, it is the page itself (like paper) you are moving. In my opinion this paradigm only makes sense when you are actually touching the screen.
I’m not a cognitive psychologist, but I believe that making Mac OSX UI behave like a touch screen device doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t seem intuitive. People have long established habits and expectations when using computers. Whether you use a scroll wheel mouse or two finger swipe gesture, you generally expect the page to scroll down. Changing this could be frustrating. I suspect it wont be a popular function. I’d like to know if I’m wrong.
If the screens become touch screens then that would be a different story. Maybe one day they will have both a touchscreen AND a trackpad. Each one independently configured to behave according to how the UI is expected to operate (or by user selection). The Screen would behave like iPad or iPhone (swipe the screen down and the page moves up), the trackpad would behave as it already does (swipe to scroll down) .
Kyle
Saturday, February 26, 2011 at 9:27 AMI felt the same about it Steven, that is until I used it for a few hours today. It took ten minutes to wrap my head around it but then I didn’t have much of a problem, oddly enough I found that it was more intuitive when in the full screen mode rather than windowed.