The mind is a funny thing. It’s really quite amazing that it can be trained to act so differently on two different screens.
On an iPhone or iPad, no one (that I know of) has ever questioned that you should pull down to move up. I suppose it’s because the iOS interface does such a good job of emulating a physical piece of paper or tape. You slide virtual objects just as you would physical objects.
Meanwhile, on a computer, no one questioned that screen objects should move in the same direction as your finger—though this is the antithesis of reality in the physical world.
And so like others who have taken to natural scrolling in Lion, I now feel like I’ve been doing it “wrong” on my keyboard-bound machines all this time.
What goes up must be… new?
There is a subtle similarity between iOS and desktop operating systems that’s now been broken by natural scrolling, however.
In iOS, we typically find new information at the top of ticker tapes. Any app that makes use of “pull to refresh” behaves this way.
On a desktop, we normally find new information at the bottom. For example you would scroll down to advance a PDF, word processing document, or email.
In both cases, down resulted in new. With natural scrolling, even though it’s physically equivalent to the behavior in iOS, down now results in old.
Of course, we all read PDF and email on our iOS devices, too, and natural scrolling still seems, well, natural. But I can’t help but wonder whether part of the reason my mind wants to pull down (when it should push up) is because it knows that’s how to get to the new stuff.
In any event, I find that natural scrolling works best if you pretend that everything on your screen is a physical object that can be pushed, pulled, or slid. That’s clearly the future envisioned by the constant-creators of our electronic universe.
Who knows. Maybe I’ll write documents bottom to top in twenty years. We know not the limits of iOSification.
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I always thought it was the orthogonal orientation of your mouse to the stuff on the monitor. Meanwhile, stuff on a mobile device is in the same plane as the gesture you are making.
It always took a few minutes to adjust from regular to inverted when I would do a flight simulator on my computer back in the day.
…To me, the concept of an iOS device is that you “hold the content in your hand” (isn’t that what Jobs said about the iPad? “the internet in your hand(s)”?) — like a piece of paper I hold in my hands, if I want to focus on the bottom of it, I would pull it up. On a computer screen that is standing in front of me, my analogy is a piece of paper, or a poster, attached to a wall – as I read through it, I run a pencil or a finger along the surface as I’m reading it. So, as I am getting close to the bottom, my finger moves down…
Ergo, “natural scrolling” was off in 5 minutes.
Be advised that the ability to turn this off on the Mouse and Trackpad preferences panes is hardware/software dependent. I found the proper preference without any trouble on my MacBook, which has a built-in trackpad. I couldn’t find it anywhere on my iMac until I turned on Bluetooth and linked to a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse. Then the choice appeared and I could make scrolling ‘normal’ again. The change stayed when I turned off Bluetooth.
The difference seems to be the presence or absence of Microsoft’s Intellipoint drivers. I use the identical Microsoft scrolling mice on both machines, but I don’t have Intellipoint on my MacBook and do have it on my iMac. When Microsoft’s drivers stand between a mouse and OS X, you don’t get the change scrolling option. When they don’t, as when I attached a Bluetooth mouse, you do. I may just uninstall Intellipoint and be done with the hassle.
Also, from what people are saying online, it appears that, although the option appears on two panes, there’s only one preference for both scrolling mice and trackpads. Since they’re very different ways of interacting, Apple may need to let users set mice to scroll one way and trackpads the other.
The same thing occurred to me. I don’t think Apple would do this, but someone else might.
I think I’m going to end up using a separate mouse a lot less. For me, it’s really only useful when using an external keyboard, which I sometimes use when I need a number pad. During those times, it’s convenient having a mouse nearby.
It was all very logical before Apple introduced so-called “natural scrolling”. What I mean is that:
1. On a touchscreen, it feels natural to push the content back and forth with your finger. That’s how iPod, iPhone, iPad work. The paradigm is that you’re actually moving the content around like moving a piece of paper. It feels natural – NOT because we’ve become used to it but rather because that the way the brain apparently wants to interpret it.
2. On the other hand, when using a pointing device, the natural paradigm is more like a camera viewfinder, where as you point the “camera” downwards you’re looking at a lower portion of the page. The scroll bar follows the same principle. Again, NOT because we’ve become accustomed to it but rather because that’s the way the brain naturally wants to view it.
#1 and #2 work in opposite directions and this is perfectly natural because it’s the difference between moving the “content” and moving the “viewer”. It’s completely bass-ackwards that Apple has introduced the laughably mis-named “natural” scrolling, which goes against the natural paradigm. Oh, by the way, the new way also works opposite to the established paradigm of all other products, which makes it even more confusing to the user. Thank heavens we can turn it off.
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