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I want the world to scroll this way

magicscroll.net

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Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#61

Post by rdwallis »

artursapek wrote: post #52
rdwallis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just anecdotal but magicscroll.net is a pretty popular ebook reader. Though that might be inspite of the scrolling rather than because of it. For everyone who doesn't like it immediately please try it for a few days if you're able. I'm working against decades of learnt behavior so I don't think you can judge it on immediate impressions.

I see. Well, it's a bold experiment and you're definitely thinking outside the box. Do you intend the user to scroll as they are reading, or to have them wait until they finish a page and scroll entirely over to the next? I find the former hard to get used to, and the latter is just pagination. So maybe I'm a bit confused on how exactly this is meant to be used.

If you use the extension or the main site ebook reader you can set it to scroll at a specific word per minute speed.

It works really well over long texts and often your screensaver will come on before you need to adjust anything.

It's normally best to set the speed to just slower than your natural speed, so that you don't feel that you're racing the line.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#62

Post by jonknee »

If you want the world to scroll in a new way, you need to support mobile. Desktops are quickly becoming legacy devices, especially for reading.

I undertstand from the comments that it does something differently when you have a scroll wheel, but since I am on a touch based device I just see arrows for forward and backward and a remarkably small amount of text on each "page". It's infuriating to use.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#63

Post by kafkaesque »

I was born with pretty severe strabismus and underwent a few major eye surgeries throughout my life.

One of the side effects of being born with this condition is missing lines when reading a book. Growing up with computers, I always found it a little difficult to follow long lines of text or the next line as I scroll.

I'm a lot older now and hardly have these problems, if ever at all. I've pretty much perfected guessing varying levels of depth perception, I guess, as this effects my stereoscopic vision. I'm not sure what goes on at the neurological level or 'lower level', however.

Anyway, you don't know how natural it felt to read this. It almost worked too well, so I would like to test it out a little more before, just because I'm a natural sceptic.

Regardless, kudos on this great work and creative thinking.

And yes, it almost did feel like words 'moved' a little sometimes when I was a child and was still developing strong optic/extraocular muscles. It is difficult to explain/articulate, especially since it happened such a long time ago and I'm working from memory, though.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#64

Post by dreadsword »

This isn't a scroll interaction, its a pagination interaction. I don't think that this breaks up reader's flow any less than scrolling down a page, or turning a physical page in a book. The creator's assertion that "its better, deal with it" is detrimental to their credibility, IMHO.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#65

Post by geon »

The point of scrolling would be to exploit the visual/spatial center of the brain to give you a sense of context. You know where you are, relative to all other content.

This experiment feels like set of slides, and i don't necessarily feel where I am as I click back and forth. I feel lost.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#66

Post by msutherl »

1. One downside of this interface is that it's difficult to keep track of where you are. The scroll metaphor is broken and the pagination metaphor is not fully implemented (you need an indicator of where you are, like pages in a real book). The percentage indicator doesn't cut it.

2. Control feels too fine. It's too easy to lose your place and mental effort needs to be devoted to properly placing the page divider. I would like to see a version that scrolls in discrete steps by line, perhaps with a little smoothing by way of animation. This would also give you a new feature: using the divider as a reading aid as people often do with rulers and real books.

Think of it this way: you have two controls, page turn and pixel-advance. What is a control with granularity somewhere between those interfaces that combines some of the advantages of both for navigating?

3. I'm not convinced by the divider. I think it either needs to communicate a visual metaphor, perhaps implying that the new page comes out on top of the current page using shadows, or just needs to be softer using blurring or fading the adjacent text out to white. And I don't think you should be able to cut a line of text in half (addressed in (2)).

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#67

Post by da3da »

I think this would be very nice in an ebook or other long form writing where I need to backtrack to find some earlier reference. Where it doesn't work well is in hierarchical data like HN comments. I installed the chrome extension and used it to read the comments on this posting and it was nearly impossible to use. With things that are arranged hierarchically, such as comments, a single page works better than this, but I do think this will be nice on longer articles or with ebooks.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#68

Post by haroldp »

jiaaro wrote: post #28

Honestly... this made things confusing without improving my reading ability. a lot of people actually like scrolling. So many people in fact, that they successfully pressured Apple to add scrolling as an alternative to pagination in iBooks. I'm one of the people who uses that. I'm trying to be polite, but my honest reaction to this interface was, "oh god, this is awful," when I tried to use the mouse to scroll the pa…

I thought it was pleasant enough to use. I actually have my middle-mouse button remapped to PgDn, so this is more or less how I navigate already.

My system doesn't need to use 2/3 of a page for two buttons though.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#70

Post by wtracy »

artursapek wrote: post #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 u…

Have you ever tried reading a web page over a person's shoulder while they occasionally scroll up and down? It's really jarring (though turning on Firefox's "smooth scrolling" helps.)

I'm not sure that I like the results of this experiment, but I completely understand the motivation behind it.

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