Nicolas Roard wrote:
Le 27 mai 05 à 11:19, David Chisnall a écrit :
Has anyone noticed how much scroll-bars suck? They are not bad as a
display component, and they are okay if you want to scroll
approximately, by a line, or by a page (as long as you are not near
the end of a large document), but for anything else they are really
painful.
It's not that scrollbars per se suck. It's the implementation you're working
with. The issue you seem to have is with the behaviour in specific instances
which could be improved.
A scrollbar can reasonably be used to scroll a view by one pixel. Perfect for
fine scrolling. I'd ask, though, why you would need to scroll by such a small
amount?
Can we come up with something better? The thing where scroll bars
really fall down is the ability to scroll an arbitrary (smallish)
amount accurately. I would propose (as a first approximation)
placing a dial at one end of the scroll bar (perhaps replacing the
arrows, perhaps in addition), which could be dragged in a circular
motion for fined grained positioning of the scroller. This would
eliminate the digital nature of the buttons.
Circular mouse movements are typically harder to control for most people. Dials
also don't make a whole lot of sense to many users because you "rotate" a dial
in the real world but you can't meaningfully "rotate" a mouse.
From memory both Tog and Raskin have written about dials so I refer you to
them for the finer details of the debate.
Regards,
Sheldon
