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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

#202
post #165
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your alternate solution gets annoying if the page has a header overlaying the text. Like Google+ does. Then you scroll a page, and have to scroll back a little. That said, this solution will also break in that situation. But it will break worse since there will be no way to get the text at the top to scroll into view.

That's why I utterly loath the stupid new trend of having fixed headers. They mess up my reading experience and honestly I thought we all ditched iframes a decade ago because even then we realized that putting frames everywhere isn't usable.

They're especially annoying on devices with small vertical resolutions, like netbooks.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#203
post #165
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your alternate solution gets annoying if the page has a header overlaying the text. Like Google+ does. Then you scroll a page, and have to scroll back a little. That said, this solution will also break in that situation. But it will break worse since there will be no way to get the text at the top to scroll into view.

That's why I utterly loath the stupid new trend of having fixed headers. They mess up my reading experience and honestly I thought we all ditched iframes a decade ago because even then we realized that putting frames everywhere isn't usable.

I wish my browser had a setting called "disable scroll events and position: fixed"..

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another strabismic person weighing in ;) (Is that even the right word? People just call me cross-eyed...) I had eye surgerie(s?) when I was very young and don't really remember them. They probably helped, but I've avoided further surgery due to the "guinea pig" impression you describe, and the fact that I don't feel like my vision is severely inhibited. My depth perception is probably worse than that of other people,…

Ah! Hey, I'm willing to agree that it might just be my googly-eyes that this works for :) This question is for all of you with strabismic (yes, it is a word :D) eyes: Do you 'see' 3D movies? Or are all of them flat with red, blue and various outlines on the screen? For me, it's the latter. Now I have no idea if this has to do with this condition or is something else!

I have strabismus and I can see 3d movies if it's the old kind with the red and blue tinted glasses. For the new ones I can't see the 3d, it just looks like the normal 2d but darker.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#205
post #102

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 guess…

Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/lca... It color codes lines aiming to solve missing or loosing your place while reading.

Admittedly, I didn't try it in any real world setting, but my gut reaction was horror. Even reading through the example paragraph, I did not find the gradients as useful landmarks.

But it does make me wonder if other forms of spatial landmarks could be employed in large paragraph text. Perhaps enlarge the start of each, if only for a couple of words, in a way that quickly tappers back to the normal text height. Extreme run-on sentences might require subclauses to be highlighted similarly. Line spacing should accommodate the extra needed height, but remain regular, making the whole document appear double spaced.

At least, that is the picture in my head. It might not do any better than this Beeline reader.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#206
Nice idea but it breaks horribly if you have a smooth / bouncy scroll plugin (like Chromium Wheel Smooth Scroller) installed. I don't know if it's easy to detect plugins in Chrome any more, but if you can't you might want to mention that somewhere up front. The one I use has a button in the browser UI to turn it off on a given page.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that a broken UI? Should they use frames instead?

No, they should allow the header to scroll with the rest of the page.

It's not a broken UI of Google, it's a browser related issue, wrong calculations of page height.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you hate it because its bad, or do you hate it because it's different?

Because it is bad.

I want to reiterate this - scrolling is good if you can do endless page scrolling and keep your eyes in one place, while moving the text to match them. I always continuously scroll articles I read so that my current line stays near or at the top of the page. Much better than a tiny black bar moving down the page while I have to move my eyes.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#209
post #143

This seems to result in a large number of cases where the visual experience is pointless. The line separating the previous and next page is tiny and easy to miss, and I don't see the use in two torn half-pages on screen. I agree that smooth scrolling long text is hard to read and trips up line scanning, but this UX seems be like playing an cruel game where I have to drag just enough to scroll a whole page. Any more o…

Your alternate solution gets annoying if the page has a header overlaying the text. Like Google+ does. Then you scroll a page, and have to scroll back a little. That said, this solution will also break in that situation. But it will break worse since there will be no way to get the text at the top to scroll into view.

It's not the solution that's annoying here. Those overlying page headers that break space/pagedown need to die a horrible horrible death, and possibly their creators with them.

Re: I want the world to scroll this way

#210
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.

Fox 18 on XP here and I can't get anything to work, either. Mouse scrollwheel, spacebar, arrow keys all do nothing.

In addition, I don't know if you're using any light gray for visual cues. That's a problem. My screen is crap with shot contrast and light gray tends to become white that I can't see. I wish to hell everyone would stop using light gray everywhere.

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