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Who Killed the Scrollbar?

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Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#221

Post by underwater »

novok wrote: post #188

The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized. Making scroll bars finger sized takes up way too much screen space in mobile UI, so they were regulated to a passive progress bar indicator and the scrollbar actions were moved into swipe gestures instead. With that change you lose the ability to prec…

Samsung has implemented scroll bars in their browser and other Android apps and it works perfectly fine without being clunky or obtrusive.

Touch scroll bars don't need to be precise because most of the time we can just scroll normally. But it's nice to have an ability to jump to a specific part of the document in a consistent way.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#222

Post by pkamb »

thrower123 wrote: post #33
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

Desktop software has never recovered from Office adopting the terrible Ribbon element instead of proper menus and toolbars.

The Ribbon is great. At it's heart it's like a menu and toolbar, but with big recognizable icons, differently sized touch targets depending on importance, and always-on-screen familiarity.

It would work really well as a "menu" for a touch-based OS, even.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#223

Post by gxqoz »

I actually don't mind the lack of a scrollbar in the mobile version of Pocket. There are times where I don't necessarily want to see the progress of the article. The web version of Pocket seems fine to me.

What I really don't like is the Wall Street Journal mobile app which has an unreliable scrollbar, presumably due to ads. Articles frequently end well after you've scrolled to the "bottom" of the scrollbar so you can't ever tell how far through you are.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#224

Post by thrower123 »

pkamb wrote: post #222
thrower123 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop software has never recovered from Office adopting the terrible Ribbon element instead of proper menus and toolbars.

The Ribbon is great. At it's heart it's like a menu and toolbar, but with big recognizable icons, differently sized touch targets depending on importance, and always-on-screen familiarity. It would work really well as a "menu" for a touch-based OS, even.

No, I cannot disagree with this more strongly.

There's nothing good about it that you couldn't do better with customizable toolbars before.

If there are ways to customize it now, I'm not smart enough to do it anymore.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#225

Post by com2kid »

acqq wrote: post #217
city41 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless. I've tried Word and Excel, both behaved so. Insane!

> I've just seen the new Microsoft Office. On the desktop. With a big screen. But just pressing the File menu makes the document you work on completely disappear behind something useless.

That's been the case for I think a decade now. Maybe longer.

To be fair, now days they make really good use of that space. Earlier iterations of that UI were pretty bad, but a giant list of recent documents, a list of recent document templates, and all the main commands to do things (save, open) are positions to the left where they have always been.

Given that Word now days auto-saves (about time!), the main thing I'm going into the File menu for is to switch to a different file, at which point the file menu showing me a list of, well, files, is pretty useful to be honest.

Also it has a search box, and search boxes are nice, I welcome UI changes that allow for more search boxes in the world.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#227

Post by com2kid »

silon42 wrote: post #209
kps wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did lose height; 1600×1200 → 1920×1080. For a while you could find 1920×1200 if you looked hard and spent more, but at the next increment everything is 16:9.

I have 2 1920x1200 and there is no reasonable upgrade except maybe something like 40" 4K (and not in retina/high dpi mode). 2560x1600 would be ok, but it's too expensive.

3440x1440. Less pixels overall than your current setup, but incredibly nice to use. Also affordable, you can get them for under $400 during sales / end of year clearance.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#228

Post by ken »

novok wrote: post #199
JohnFen wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized And yet, several mobile apps I use routinely have found a way to make it work reasonably well. They use a slim line of a scrollbar to indicate where you are, and if you touch the scrollbar then a larger finger-friendly handle appears which can be use…

Testing on my iOS device, I don't think it's an app thing, but UIKit standard thing that comes with scrollviews. The bar doesn't become finger thick, but it's still usable. I've been using iOS devices for a long time, so it shows you how hidden it is. I agree it's sloppy on desktops, but it helps to understand the reasons why the sloppyness happens. Kind of like electron apps :p

I've heard this from several sources, but never been able to make it work. What apps, and what version of iOS? Is it new in iOS 13?

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#229

Post by paulddraper »

city41 wrote: post #37
buboard wrote: post #3

Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in…

I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

> just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

Wow that is sloppy.

Re: Who Killed the Scrollbar?

#230

Post by contextfree »

vezycash wrote: post #101

Let's not dance around in a circle - Apple started this with their "minimalist design." First on desktop and later with mobile. Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. Apple doesn't copy and paste things. They'll think deeply before copying. And will modify things to fit their unique needs and situation. Unfortunately, those who copy Apple switch off their brains and pursue the "looks" ALONE, ignore the "feel" and jus…

"That's why people hated Windows 8."

However, Windows 8 had an attempted solution for the specific problem called out in the article (the lack of a standard convention for getting an overview and jumping to a section of a long document or content scroll): semantic zoom. You could pinch-zoom out to get an overview of a view and then quickly jump to a specific section. (Scrollbars still existed but were only shown while using a mouse or pen. The mouse had access to the zoomed-out view as well, via a button on the scrollbar.) This was sadly removed in Windows 10 and I really miss it.

So, people may have hated it, but it solved the problem the article highlights, which today's "less hated" products don't.

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