![]() If you lay a piece of paper on your desk, and push up (forward) on it with two fingers, which way would it move? And it’s my belief that interfaces should be as intuitive as possible to free up our cognitive capacity for more important tasks than navigating space (like creativity, expression & critical thinking). With natural scrolling, when you push up on a trackpad, the content moves up. ![]() In the physical world, stuff usually moves when you push it, that’s what our brains expect. So if it’s not moving around, why are we pushing it? Instead we should be pushing the content, itself, which does move (virtually, anyway). But our screen/viewport is almost always stationary relative to us. The scrollbar on the screen is merely an indicator of the position of our viewport. I like to think of moving the content itself, rather than scrolling a page. Natural scrolling is flat out better than reverse scrolling, and here’s why.įirstly, I find the concept of scrolling itself a little problematic. But while experimenting with different types of workstations, I got to thinking about the concepts of the two types of scrolling, and suddenly it dawned on me that I WAS WRONG! In 2011, when Apple made natural the default mode in OSX Lion, I thought it was purely a matter of preference and I was already used to reverse scrolling so I opted to stick with reverse. Many people are used to reverse scrolling, because when scroll wheels were introduced to mice, they were linked to the indicator in the scroll bar, which controlled the viewport on a page. Natural: Swipe fingers up on trackpad, magic mouse, scroll-wheel, content goes up, scrollbar goes down. Reverse: Swipe fingers up on trackpad, magic mouse, scroll-wheel, content goes down, scrollbar goes up. For those that don’t know, here’s the difference between the two: It’s because a few years ago I switched to Natural Scrolling. Have you tried reverse scrolling with your mouse? Let us know how you got on in the comments.Occasionally, when using someone else’s laptop, I swipe my fingers up or down the trackpad to “scroll” a page up or down, and to my surprise, it move the opposite way I expect it to. If you’re on Snow Leopard you can download and install the Scroll Reverser app to get a preview of soon to arrive feature. ![]() But having used reverse scrolling for nearly a week I have taken to it like a duck to water. I was skeptical at first, thinking that I would never be able to adapt to this new system of scrolling. This new feature is one of the many ways in which Apple is bringing iOS concepts to OS X. That might sound weird but if you’re an iOS user you have already witnessed this “reversal” in the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch where gesturing up the screen brings you down and visa versa. But with OS X Lion, scrolling up will bring you down the page, while scrolling up will bring you down. We are accustomed to scrolling up to go up, and scrolling down to move down a web page or app with our mouse. It’s a semi-complicated and maybe alien concept, so bear with me… reverse scrolling is basically where you scroll with your mouse (or trackpad), but in reverse. When OS X Lion finally arrives, it will bring with it one fairly major change Reverse Scrolling.
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