[Sugar-devel] Scrollbar width

[Sean DALY]

FWIW, I have seen lots of kids ages 6-8 who know what a scrollbar is,
but have a hard time mousing it up and down when using SoaS, even on a
larger screen such as the Dell Latitude 2100 education netbook.

Sean


On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 6:13 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> 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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