Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
This still sounds crazy to me. If you're playing a game, or editting a photo, you have a mini-map or a thumbnail that shows the whole area. If you want to move which part of that whole you're looking at, you move the box on the mini-map/thumbnail to where you want to go. Click down, arrow down, content moves up. Scrolling should work the same way, no?
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Picture a document window like a parchment scroll though, the kind with a top and bottom rod around which the paper rolls.
If I can only scroll through the parchment using the handles at the top and bottom, that would be like using the scroll bar - I'd use the top roller and roll "upwards" (away from me) to scroll down, and I'd use the bottom roller and roll "downwards" (towards me) to scroll up.
That's what the non-inverted scrolling is like. You're using the scroll wheel or track pad to directly manipulate the "rollers", which is the scroll bar on a GUI window.
If, however, you were to grab the edge of the paper scroll and pull upwards, you'd be scrolling downwards, and vice versa. This is what inverted scrolling represents - directly manipulating the paper, rather than the rollers (or window control in GUI parlance)
From a consistency perspective, inverted scrolling makes far more sense - wherever my mouse pointer is positioned, initiating a two finger swipe or a scroll wheel action will begin moving the displayed content underneath my mouse in the correct direction. Contrast that with non-inverted, where when I swipe or scrollwheel I'm actually interacting with a scroll bar control that is nowhere near my mouse - the scroll bar is going in the right direction, but the display content underneath my pointer is moving opposite.
Edit: Another way of saying this is that it's traditionally been backwards up until this change in 10.7 - you've never, ever, scrolled a window with a trackpad or a scrollwheel before. You've actually moved scrollbars, and just gotten used to your documents moving in the opposite direction in response to the change in scrollbar position.