Open up a very large PDF document (or webpage) e.g. emacs 600 page long pdf [1]
User asked to: 1) Scroll to half way. 2) Scroll to view next three paragraphs at the bottom of the page. Accelerate mouse-wheel: 1) fast scroll wheel action 2) slow scroll wheel action Touch UI: 1) rapid flick with a finger 2) gentle slide with a finger Keyboard: 1) page down, hold 2) arrow key So far so good. But what about regular notebooks with synaptic touchpads? or using just a mouse pointer? on a touchpad: two finger scrolling is slow (can't easy scroll large chunks of the document) mouse pointer: drag the scrollbar or have to click repeatedly the arrow button at the top/bottom of the scrollbars Both of these are IMHO frustrating. Is there a solution to this problem? Examples: Docks (various implementation). if you have loads of icons they are simply small and fill the whole width, but you generally have a magnification of a few icons around the one your are currently hovering over. This way you quickly get your mouse-pointer to the area of interest (eg. middle of the doc) that section gets magnified and you can move your cursor to precisely select the desired near-by icon. Two scrollbars (full & current section): e.g. [2] here you have two timelines top is moths, bottom one is days and the dead centre is the current date. If you drag bottom one you get the "precission" scroll, and if you drag top one you get "rapid" scroll. Here is an idea [3] for using orthogonal axis to define "precission" scroll: * click and drag downwards/upwards -> rapid scroll * click, hold drag to the left off-the scrollbar, drag up-down -> precission scroll really using the orthogonal axis to define acceleration as in mouse-wheel. Are there any other ideas? Have any of them been implemented? Personally want a Gtk implementation =) Now with this continious rendering problem there is another issue of "jumping scroobar" which can be observed on Google Reader. This one is related to delayed loading / rendering. By default google reader loads a dozen of articles as you scroll down it loads more articles and your scrollbar jumps upwards since the whole document became larger. In this case the expected behaviour is reverse, by default precission scroll is required, with visual indication of where-abouts you are in the global document length and ability to switch to rapid scrolling (which is not useful at all in dynamically loadable documents). No clue how to fix this one. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/emacs.pdf [2] http://www.suse.de/~coolo/opensuse_11.3/ [3] http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Variable_20Rate_20Scroll_20Bar ps. Hope this is appropriate for ayatana discussion. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
