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I want the world to scroll this way

magicscroll.net

11–20 of 308 posts

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#12
post #6

Going back and forth between your page and HN by using the browser button doesn't return me to the exact same place I left on your page. Traditional scrolling does that, though. I wonder if that would be easy to implement without a browser extension.

Yes, this is hard to keep track of even after window resizes which changes how many words appear on each page. To do it I'd need to store info about page position in local storage. which is possible with the extension but might be a bit too much effort. I can't think of a way to do it with the bookmarklet at the moment.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#13
post #7
post #3

Works perfectly on Chrome (24.0) but nothing happens on Firefox (18.0).

I found some stickyness on Firefox 18. I've deployed a fix but I put a 24 hour cache in front of the page before posting it to hn so it'll probably only update for you this time tomorrow.

Running FireFox ESR 10.0.7 here; that's broken too. I'll check back tomorrow then.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#14
post #8

What benefit does this have over scrolling = next page? Your eyes have to refocus on the top of the page anyway, you might as well have refreshed the whole text, not just the top line of the second line. Interesting idea though - what does this do on a touch device?

It doesn't scroll on touch devices. You do get the pagination though.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#16
Do you have evidence to support your claim that the true problem is moving words? I'm really not convinced. I feel especially with OS X's inertial scrolling that I can naturally keep track of where I am in an article while scrolling, it has never bothered me.

This just feels like fancy pagination. I tried partially scrolling ahead as I was reading and it disoriented me further, because the upcoming text was showing up at the top, behind where my eyes were, replacing the old text. This is confusing and not better.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#18
This is great! I'm glad you're experimenting. I don't like this particular experiment, however. I far prefer using space / page down to handle a page of text at a time. I don't see much benefit to your method instead, and among other things, I miss having consistent visual anchors when I read.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#19
I'm not sure if this is really an improvement. With traditional scrolling, my eyes stay at about the same position while I scroll. With this scrolling, however, after I've finished reading the last line, I need to look up again. And when I scroll backwards, I need to constantly remind myself to look down after I've read the topmost line. Traditional scrolling doesn't brake the reading rhythm (at least in my case), but this one does.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#20
post #6

Going back and forth between your page and HN by using the browser button doesn't return me to the exact same place I left on your page. Traditional scrolling does that, though. I wonder if that would be easy to implement without a browser extension.

Yes, this is hard to keep track of even after window resizes which changes how many words appear on each page. To do it I'd need to store info about page position in local storage. which is possible with the extension but might be a bit too much effort. I can't think of a way to do it with the bookmarklet at the moment.

Why not use pushState or store this info in the url hash? Both of these will allow you to save bits of info in the url that can be used to make a nice back button experience.
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