[Sugar-devel] Scrollbar width

[Art Hunkins]

I'm with Eben completely with this.

SoaS needs a resonable way to scroll - both vertically and horizontally. 
External scrolling mice do a nice job of vertical scroll, as does the 
occasional laptop touchpad (the Intel Classmate is one).

Horizontal scrolling is another matter, with no obvious solution (for other 
than VM's?). With SoaS's narrow scrollbars, kids are left with a major 
impediment - as am I (a quite senior citizen with similar challenges).

I'd suggest, for starters, that SoaS scrollbars default to a width about 
double what they are currently.

Art Hunkins
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eben Eliason" <eben.eliason at gmail.com>
To: "Paul Fox" <pgf at laptop.org>
Cc: <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009 9:58 AM
Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Scrollbar width


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.

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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