Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour

Posted Aug 29, 2011 17:05 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour by dgm
Parent article: Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour

> What's hidden is the scroll manipulator or "thumb", and this is only useful for mouse interaction: In a touch device you drag the content window to scroll, and with the keyboard you simply press the direction key.

I would like to point out that this form of scrolling is extremely annoying for large documents (think single-page HTML e-books). With a proper scrollbar you can go directly to any position in the document, but on a tablet with only swipe gestures you are forced to repeat the gesture, perhaps dozens of times, to achieve the same effect. The page-down and spacebar keys on keyboard are a bit easier due to auto-repeat, but are still awkward for selecting a position perhaps 50% of the way through 1,000 screens worth of plain text.

Scrollbars, including "thumbs", are just as important on touch devices as on devices with mice. Perhaps more so, in fact, given that touch devices also tend to lack keyboard-based scrolling.

Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour

Posted Aug 29, 2011 18:52 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

On the only touch system I've made significant use of (my Android phone), making a long vertical stroke makes things scroll like mad towards the appropriate end of the page, and a tap stops the scrolling.

Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour

Posted Aug 29, 2011 19:42 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

That is true of my device as well (a Motorola Xoom running Android 3.1). The scrolling does not continue indefinitely, however, thus the repeated gestures. It's fine for normal web pages, but lose your place in a megabyte or two of text and you'll probably wish you had a way to simply set the position from memory without scrolling linearly through the document.

Most dedicated e-book readers provide a 'go to page...' function which can substitute for a scrollbar, but most of these do not handle raw HTML files, and the built-in Chrome web browser's scrolling leaves much to be desired from an e-reader point of view.

Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour

Posted Aug 29, 2011 21:19 UTC (Mon) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

In some situations, my phone running Android also seems to pop up a "thumb" when you start scrolling in the normal way (e.g., in the contacts list). You can then grab the thumb and scroll arbitrarily far with a finite-sized movement. Seems like a reasonable solution in that context, though it'd be useful if it were supported by other apps like the browser, and I'm not sure I'd want it on my laptop...