[Sugar-devel] Scrollbar width

[Gary C Martin]

On 10 Dec 2009, at 14:58, Eben Eliason wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Paul Fox <pgf at laptop.org> wrote:
>> benjamin wrote:
>>  > Hello,
>>  >
>>  > On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 22:43 -0500, Art Hunkins wrote:
>>  > > I've now got whole-screen scrollbars working well in my music activities,
>>  > > but I'd like to make the bars wider. The automatic settings (as used in most
>>  > > activities) are too narrow for my taste.
>>  >
>>  > First of all I would like to say: Please do not play with themes, just
>>  > because you don't like something that much ... (especially should you
>>  > dislike them in general and not only in your activity)
>>  >
>>  > Other than that. IIRC the reason for the scrollbars to be that narrow
>>  > was the plan to use the Grab-Key+Touchpad for scrolling. This means that
>>  > the main purpose of the scorllbar is to show the position, but not to
>>  > use the handle itself for scrolling.
>> 
>> and just in case it's not clear from the above -- the grab-key+touchpad
>> feature is present in XO-1.5 releases, and available for the XO-1 if the
>> olpc-kbdshim package is installed.
> 
> I was a proponent for grab scrolling in the early days of Sugar at
> OLPC. However, it seems clear now that, without customized hardware
> (which was the assumption back then) this solution simply isn't viable
> as an intuitive and discoverable way to navigate content. I think that
> retaining the functionality via some other mapping or shortcut would
> be nice (especially to offer the functionality as designed on the XO
> hardware itself), but I don't see reason not to improve the usability
> of Sugar on all platforms by increasing the scrollbars to a more
> manageable width.

I'd argue the narrow scrollbar width is still a relevant design choice, being there to indicate document length and current view location into it. Most non-XO hardware platforms are very likely to have their own hardware support for a scroll wheel type behaviour. I very rarely need to drag a scrollbar these days, it's all two fingered scrolling which works fine in Sugar on a VM (though we could do with a control panel to adjust sensitivity).

Regards,
--Gary

> Of course, in addition to this we should make sure that wherever
> possible the scrollbars are given every last pixel up to the edge of
> the screen, so that they become, effectively infinite in width (or
> height, when horizontal), thus making them difficult to miss.
> 
> Eben
> 
> 
>> paul
>> =---------------------
>>  paul fox, pgf at laptop.org
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