I remember it was very weird for the first three days or so and I kept scrolling in the “wrong” direction, but then after that initial hump, it became second-nature. I started using natural scrolling when it was introduced, on the assumption that the option to switch the scroll direction back the other way might one day disappear, so I might as well try to get used to it. Apple should have left the scroll wheel alone, and at the very least decouple the scroll wheel and trackpad settings.Īlso, if it's all so "natural", why don't we have "natural cursor key direction"? Practical considerations trump naturalness every day of the week and twice on sundays. And if there's one thing that doesn't help with that it's having different devices/software do different things. You could just as easily argue that the scroll wheel sits between the finger and the content, so if I pull the wheel toward me, the underside moves away and thus pushes the content up.īut like I wrote before, unlike with a trackpad or touchscreen, the connection between the finger movement and what happens on the screen is not obvious with a scroll wheel, so you're down to muscle memory. In many ways, that was a stupid decisionĭisagree. So, the scrolling represented the action of moving scroll bar down, rather than the page canvas up. The “traditional” scrolling where you scroll the wheel down so the page moves up was made when every UI had vertical scroll bars. It's like a much much tinier scale version of the backwards brain bike challenge: It's not too hard to switch back to regular scrolling for me, but there's that initial jarring backwards moment to break my brain first. If I just use it it's fine, but if I think about it too much my brain locks up when things go backwards.īut anyways back to scroll wheels, yeah muscle memory is a big bastard. Visually cause the size they look/feel pretty similar to the app switcher, but it still works as cursor/selector like the rest of the interface. But if you have folders on the top row, it shows giant icons at the top where you can move up and select horizontally from there (instead of digging into the folder). Basically it works as a cursor everywhere that I can think of, except the app switcher, where it works as a scroll. Well the latter is that the same physical input can work on the two contexts (cursor vs scroll). Got my ATV on now in front of me and figured out what specifically breaks my brain and why. Like moving a cursor down moves the content up as a side effect, while scrolling up is a direct action on the content to move it up. That's why I found it so hard to switch back to traditional scroll wheel scrolling: it's almost impossible to predict what will happen even if you know the setting that's in effect, it's 99.9% muscle memory.Ĭognitively how it works for me is that scrolling (whatever the physical mechanism) is ultimately a separate input specific to the content. With a scroll wheel, I don't see either direction making more sense than the other, though. But on a touch screen of course you can't really push the cursor down to make the screen move up because your finger will leave the screen. With the keyboard, we only use cursor down to have stuff scroll up. Are you pushing down the cursor, or pushing up the screen? Both can make sense with a pointing device. And that's why "natural" scrolling is a misnomer. What I'm thinking of it's not technically controlling a scroll, it's more along the lines of controlling a cursor
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