Re: Override AppleScrollBarVariant on NSScroller?
Re: Override AppleScrollBarVariant on NSScroller?
- Subject: Re: Override AppleScrollBarVariant on NSScroller?
- From: Bill Monk <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:40:25 -0500
On Apr 12, 2008, at 12:15 AM, Michael Watson wrote:
The bottom line that you're veering away from is that this guy
wants to *force* the double variant on users,
Apologies for appearing to veer away from the point. I brought up
iTunes' scrollbars as an example of why forcing something like this
on users is likely to irritate the hell out of them.
iTunes respects the setting I chose in the prefs Guess which one is
being a better citizen.
And it no longer respects the one I choose, even though I've been
choosing it for much longer than there has been an iTunes. That's not
being a better citizen. I'd urge the OP not to follow iTunes lousy
example in this.
Uh, the double both variant isn't available in the GUI
So what? This is OS X we're talking about, not System 6.5. Plenty of
OS X settings and pref lacked a GUI for years; plenty still do. Not
everything needs a GUI, and not having a GUI doesn't make a thing
unimportant.
so why would you ever complain about an application not supporting it?
Because it's not up to applications to support or not support this.
Scroll bar behavior comes from the scroll bar. Not from applications.
Apps get the scroll behavior for free: the behavior you like, the
behavior I like, and some perfectly valid behaviors that are perhaps
best not shown to grandma. If an app thinks it knows better and
instead breaks things that have always worked, users with their
habits and preferences are going to complain.
iTunes screwed up by breaking something relatively minor, that not a
lot of people use. Doesn't mean it's not broken - it is. It simply
means there aren't a lot of people complaining. If the OP breaks
something *lots* of people use, he should expect complaints in
proportion.
It's never been an official option, just available via an
undocumented preference value.
Official...hmm. In large degree, official is whatever works and
always has. That alone has been reason enough for Apple at various
times to practically move mountains preserving various oddities, or
worse. When did the double-ended double-arrow scroll variant first
appear? OS 8.5? It isn't hurting anything, and while millions may not
use it, surely thousands do.
If Apple decides to remove this variant, fine. It'll disappear from
every application at that time. Not before, certainly not
retroactively as iTunes has done, and not piecemeal, app-by-app, with
this guy going for "prettier" colors but not bothering to replicate
all the functionality, another guy forcing his idea of the "best"
choice, and yet a third decreeing anything without a GUI (at the
moment) doesn't matter.
Messing with stuff people are used to, for no good reason, it's just
a bad idea. I'm sure we agree about that. Blogs were complaining
about iTunes's broken scrollbars the very day the miserable things
appeared. We can argue they aren't "really" broken, or that it's OK
to break a perfectly-working, designed-in feature, which has seen use
for 10-12 years, and which works fine everywhere else in the system,
just because it's not "really truly officially" supported. That won't
make users any happier though.
In my view, there is no difference between OP's scrollbar idea and
iTunes' new scrollbars: Unless you just *enjoy* extra work to annoy
customers, when you could keep happy by doing nothing at all, leave
the scrolling to the scrollbars. It's that simple.
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