lion

Lion taught us we were scrolling the wrong way for 25 years

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When I started using Lion, the first thing I did was turn off ‘Natural Scrolling’. A week ago, I decided to try natural scrolling again. After using it for a few days, I started getting used to it, and a week later, I actually find it more natural.

The way scrolling worked in the past, you were manipulating the scroll bar, which acted as a window into your document, showing the portion of your document that’s visible in the window. Therefore, when the scroll indicator is at the top you see the beginning of the document. When you drag it down to the bottom, you see the end of the document.

With natural scrolling, you’re manipulating the document content rather than the scroll bar. This is the same way scrolling works in iOS. Since Lion de-emphasizes the scroll bar, this makes more sense. I still prefer to show the scrollbar as an indication of the document size, however.

Links for 2011-02-22 through 2011-02-26

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Links for 2011-02-22 through 2011-02-26:

  • OS X Lion Walkthrough: Versions and Auto Save – Two new features that have found their way in the first Lion developer preview but might seem too complicated or “hidden” as only Apple applications support them right now are Versions and Auto Save. With auto-saving capabilities for documents and a proper versioning system in place, Apple is aiming at simplifying the workflows of many users that have to deal with dozens of documents on a daily basis but often forget to save changes and are inevitably forced to start over. To put it simply, Lion will let you work on your documents without having to worry about saving anything. If you do want to save a specific version of a document, however, you can do so in order to access it later from a Time Machine-esque interface that will let you revert to a previous version of a document at any time. Let’s see how it works.
  • Tiny Wings – Huge Success [Stefan Sorin Nicolin, Spielhaus] – With all these AAA titles coming out for the iOS platform (and elsewhere) there are still some games who pop out of nowhere and climb the charts in no time as if there is nothing easier in the world to accomplish.
  • [devel] OpenGL ES 2.0 support « cocos2d for iPhone – The idea is to use this thread to discuss how to implement OpenGL ES 2.0 support without the need to write a shader for each CCNode.
    The idea is that if the CCNode contains a shader, then it should use it, otherwise it should continue rendering itself using the GL ES 1.0 code.
  • Django Reinhardt: A Look Behind the Namesake of WordPress 3.1 | Blogging, WordPress, Social Media, Web Publishing – WordCast – With the release of WordPress 3.1 and announcement that this version was named Django Reinhardt, WordPress fans around the world are now learning about Django Reinhardt, the legendary and often overlooked jazz guitarist and composer.
  • Cocoa Samurai: Practical Design Patterns with Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch – When Mac OS X 10.6 was introduced, the Mac got a very powerful duo of developer tools that made development on a lot easier. With iOS 4.0 developers finally got access to these tools as well. These tools are known as Blocks & Grand Central Dispatch.
  • Does the world *really* need yet another Twitter client, RSS reader, ToDo list or backup application? « Successful Software – My heart sinks every time I hear a would-be-entrepreneur announcing they have written yet another Twitter client, RSS reader, ToDo list or backup application. Haven’t we got enough of those already? There are more than 1,900 Twitter apps already (possibly a lot more). Somebody probably released another one while I was writing this post. We have passed the Twitter app event horizon, where it is probably quicker to write your own custom app than it is to try and work out if any of the existing apps fulfils your requirements.

Posted by Postilicious