[Sugar-devel] Scrollbar width

[Sean DALY]

I'm not sure, is there an equivalent for non-XO keyboards?

A pity the scrollbar is so thin when there are so many pixels available.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be useful to offer an optional
rollover bubble mode like on the old pre-OSX Macs, useful for
describing key combo equivalents in an unfamiliar interface...

Sean


On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> This, incidentally, is precisely the reason the grab key was designed.
> Scrolling in this manner requires continuous pressure on the mouse
> button, while simultaneously moving the finger across the trackpad,
> which can be difficult, especially on smaller laptops, and for
> smaller/younger fingers with less developed motor skills.
>
> The grab button (there, quite crucially, are two of these on the XO:
> one on each side of the spacebar) was designed to allow children to
> use their non-dominant hand to press the button while using their
> other hand on the trackpad to manipulate the view. This design was
> meant both to eliminate the need to "target" the scrollbar in the
> first place (since this would work anywhere within the scrolling
> region, just like 2-fingered scrolling), and to make it easier for
> children to do since drag'n'drop can be tricky.
>
> Eben
>
>
>> 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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>>
>