Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Have you made the flip?

If you've tried Lion, the newest version of OS X, you've probably noticed that the scroll motion is opposite everything you've trained yourself to do. If you're like me, you might have found this pretty disorienting.

I stuck with it for a few hours, trying to undo muscle memory, and then switched back. However, my brain was already half in transition, so I decided to press forward. The paradigm is now more focused on the page, and less on the scrollbars, and I think it's going to end up being the right decision.

Unfortunately, I still have to use some Macs running Snow Leopard. If you've flipped like I have, you might find this tool useful:

Scroll Reverser

This is a simple program to do the flip on earlier versions of OS X, and just might make your life a little bit easier. It did mine.

1 comment:

Real G said...

I also was immediately disoriented, and wanted to change it back. But Lion brought a bunch of other muscle memory to train, so I soldiered on.

Once I read "Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating" and I thought of my scroll wheel as a touch surface (like my iPhone), then the change was much easier to rewire.

Who knew I was scrolling backwards all these years?! :)

However, this checkbox is one of the first things I tell people when they are thinking of switching to Lion.

Thanks for the link.