That’s caused by stray portions of extra signal floating just outside the cross section of the conductor. Try using balanced lube next time.
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That’s like saying “a design is good if it’s good” – it’s trivially true, but it doesn’t move any argument forward. Design requires choices, and even the choice to change nothing still has to be weighed against other possibilities.
As I say, I don’t know what the experience of Linux users is like, and I suspect wheel scrolling doesn’t always work well. It doesn’t even work very well in Windows, and lots of PC laptops had unusable trackpads until recently (still?). If you’re constantly having views scroll ten pages in a single jump etc., then yes, it makes sense to rely on scrollbars, so they need to work.
But when Apple made the UI change we’re talking about, an integral part of that was to first make sure wheel scrolling worked flawlessly, on every possible Mac configuration, for more than a decade. In that context, it is totally reasonable to say “this is how scrolling works”, because (1) it does work and (2) deciding how scrolling works is exactly their job; that’s what design is.
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He likes full sized USB-A/USB-B. He is willing to concede that mini-USB is sometimes useful, but he hates micro-USB and USB-C, believing them to be less than robust.
The Micro plug design is rated for at least 10,000 connect-disconnect cycles, which is more than the Mini plug design.[15][18] The Micro connector is also designed to reduce the mechanical wear on the device; instead,the easier-to-replace cable is designed to bear the mechanical wear of connection and disconnection.
There are three fully usable scroll bars right down here at the bottom of my Mac’s screen where I’m typing this reply. (I kinda wish Discourse did a bit better working out min-height so that weren’t the case, but I digress.)
I can assure you though, scroll bars weren’t deprecated, unsupported, or otherwise disrespected. Fixed up a bit over the years, yeah. But that’s a good thing, right? Although now that we’re talking about it out in the open like this, I’d totally help get the pitchforks lit if you wanna get a mob going or something.
I agree with his objection to USB-C. The insertion is not deep enough for a secure fit. I’ve taken to using a tab of painters tape to hold connectors in place.
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Dude’s grumpy.
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I’ve been using various flavors of Linux for over 20 years & the scroll wheel has never been an issue for me. Been using Macs longer than that, and Apple, as you say, takes pains to make sure their hardware & software work well together.
Re: computer annoyances…
Web page designers who choose to use light gray or yellow text on a white background.
It might look spiffy, but the object of a web page is to convey information, and you don’t do that by making it hard to read.
There’s a Firefox plug-in called Contrast Fix! that helps with that, but for those pages it doesn’t help, I don’t bother with them.
Re: Cookies…
People might think differently about them if the cookie was required to be labelled as to its function:
‘This cookie will spy on your internet usage and report back to this company. Accept?’ Y N
Browser plug-ins are your friends.
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These are annoying but there’s regulatory reasons behind this. EU privacy directives require informed consent about cookie storage which is why you’ll see these notices (although many sites over-pivot here). Some web sites will try to be smart and not show the notice depending on your geolocation some others will just display anyway out of an abundance of caution.
Or better yet the invisible scroll bars that are all the rage these days. (Or any invisible UI element that requires mouse or keyboard focus to see - what a fucking awful anti-pattern.)
Welcome to Software as a Service.
That’s an awfully ableist perspective. Thankfully both Windows and Mac have options to make the scroll bars always visible, although I fully agree that they are getting too small. In fact the current trend is to get rid of as much window chrome as possible which may look pretty in screen shots but is terrible for usability.
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I am generally in agreement with such pronouncements, but on this one: if we were designing modern UX/UI from a clean slate, how would click-drag on a small non-Fitts region ever be a usability win for anybody, relative to a dedicated wheel, ring, or whatever?
To the contrary; while the literal statement is trivially true, what it communicates is absolutely not trivially true, and is in fact one of the fundamental threshold concepts that defines UX as a discipline: “Just because you like things a certain way does not mean that everyone else will.”
Good UX respects the preferences of a diversity of users. The lived experience of real actual human users is to find the trend in scrollbars to make for frustrating and difficult interactions, and to interfere with their workflows. For these users, trends in scrollbar design are manifestly user hostile, and to deny that reality is not only to implicitly gaslight them, but to transact bad UX practice.
No, not for these users. These scrollbars do not work as well for them as the old versions. You are not them and your experience may be different. But there are plenty of users who find modern scrollbars to be anything but “fixed up”; quite the contrary.
Does this mean that we have to keep around every legacy interaction design in a product? No, of course not. But these sorts of decisions can’t be made in a vacuum. Who are you leaving behind in your design choice? Who is being harmed? Are there ways to make the interaction design more accommodating while still implementing the preferred trend? In this case, the video demonstrates ways to create interfaces that are more accommodating.
A useful empathy lesson is to consider whether there might be users with a disability who rely on the interaction design. Would you accept the creation of tiny, intermittently invisible scrollbars if you knew they were harming disabled users who relied on the mouse and who had trouble targeting them? Why would you tolerate it for non-disabled users with the same challenges?
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That’s actually the angle from which I am thinking about this. I don’t claim to be any sort of usability expert, but nor am I completely bereft of clue. I just truly don’t see how the click-drag scrollbar compares favorably to anything under discussion here, specifically for atypical and/or challenged computer users.
The vertical scrollbar has been largely replaced by the scrollwheel, but what about the horizontal scrollbar? My current mouse (Corsair Harpoon RGB Pro) scrolls only up and down. Sure, I’ve used fancier Apple mice, but they don’t track as well. (And one of them, with a scrollball was fairly awful at scrolling besides.)
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You’re assuming clicking and dragging is occurring in all cases?
Scroll bars aren’t just there for interaction, they are there to convey information. Navigability aside - strictly from a visual perspective the tiny disappearing scroll bars that are so trendy these days also make it that much harder to see where you are in a document.
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Requiring developers to properly support hardware-based scrolling is an unambiguous accessibility win, indeed it’s a selling point for the idea. Unlike software scrollbars, there is no way to do it without going through the system’s wheel interface, and therefore implicitly supporting assistive technologies (including those that use a screen-based UI). Everyone can use a dedicated scrolling mechanism of some kind, whereas many people have problems with small pointer targets.
I agree that auto-hiding scrollbars is the wrong default and probably shouldn’t even be an option, but it doesn’t disadvantage anyone preferentially, except that it’s less of a problem for people who use screen readers.
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One thing that a scroll wheel can’t do is quickly go to a certain part of the scrolling area. If you know that something is at about 80% of the total height (for instance the comments button on a long ad-filled web page or a function in a long code file) then click & drag is still much faster than scrolling all the way down.
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The Shift key changes scrolling from X to Y. Has that still not been implemented in Windows?
I was referring only to the pointer interaction with them as being so fiddly and problematic. As visual UI elements I have no objection to them (but certainly no fondness, either.)
That is true. But I still don’t think that benefit brings nearly enough positive value to offset the obnoxious little dexterity test that mouse interaction with scroll bars requires. They may not be as bad as ye olde right-click-drag, but they’re still just a poor solution to a universal need when it comes to usability for those with various hand or motor control difficulties.
Let’s say you are using a touchpad and you have one finger.
Let’s say you are using a mouse with a scroll wheel and you have arthritis, and clicking and mousing are reasonably comfortable but using the scroll wheel is incredibly painful.
Let’s say you mouse using eye tracking or a joystick and your setup doesn’t support scroll wheel emulation.
Let’s say your laptop is a bit older and doesn’t support multitouch gestures for scrolling.
Let’s say you’re mousing using a prosthetic hand.
Let’s say you’re using an Apple Magic Mouse and you’re wearing gloves.
Let’s say you are in a remote field station or a school with older computers or any of a dozen other situations and your mouse doesn’t have a scroll wheel.
Let’s say your touchpad driver is being wonky.
Let’s say you are a trackpoint user.
Let’s say your scroll wheel is broken.
Let’s say the document you’re scrolling through is 315 pages long and you need to scroll through it more quickly than the scrollwheel permits.
Let’s say you’ve used a mouse for 40 years and you’ve never used the scroll wheel and you don’t like it.
There are plenty of reasons where using scroll wheels or two-finger scrolling on a touchpad is not ideal. No one of these may dominate, but they all exist and they’re all real, and it’d be hard to justify denying all of them with a dismissal of usable scrollbars.
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I encounter three or four of these scenarios daily.
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This behaviour has been in Windows for as long as I can remember.
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