Why do scrollbars still exist?
Scrollbars are kinda, sorta, useful. I remember teaching my mom how to use a computer & she would consistently use the scrollbar backwards. And it makes sense: moving it down is moving the page up.. wha?? What the rest of us take for standard (scrollbar-as-document-representational) is backwards to how we read any other book or piece of paper.
While writing a paper recently on a portrait-view screen, I found myself able to see the full page I was writing, AND bits of the prior & next page. This gave such a HUGE advantage for context-analysis and paper flow. I bet most prof’s suffer through poor student papers, simply because the student doesn’t realize what is missing writing in landscape (and even worse, widescreen). In contrast, this is the joy of minority report: a HUGE surface area to hold windows-of-sufficient-size that can be placed with sufficient margins instead of being in an overlapping pile, thanks to the portability requirement. I’m still waiting for short-throw, cheap, hi-def projectors that I can have overhead, to project onto my white, tilted, large physical desktop.
Our eyes are tuned (in the real world) to spatiality. There is a layout, flow, and gradual perceptive fall-off from our field of vision. Computer UI designers are kind enough to give us EVERYTHING. This is required for use, and for the most part, our eyes ignore this extra. Yet, we never have any ‘real’ awareness of what is off-screen. Some window-managers use ‘pagers’, but that isn’t for window content, as much as window layout. I’m a content-layout fan– keeps me focused on my task of creating, instead of doing the window manager’s window-layout job.
So I propose 2 options (especially for pen-computing), both using the mouse-pointer as a grab-and-drag hand, a la Adobe Acrobat, or FF’s plugin.
Gradients
Remaining content 'edged' by gradient
Gradients are naturally-existing creatures around any real-world document. Shadows are handy, and they can tell us (representationally) how much of the document is remaining to view. Sure it’s not a mathematically precise as a scrollbar, but ‘scrolling’ through a newspaper is hardly mathematical.
Magnifing Glass
Similar (actually inverse) to the gradient, I’ve also considered having the margins of a window, where there is still more content, grow in proportion to the content remaining. This would give a ‘squished’ version of the remaining pages.
Likely scrollbars will exist forever, and likely I’ll be happy with grab-and-drag for all apps. Scrollbars do have the goodness of being able to scroll faster than anything else- instantaneous access to the top or bottom of the page. But isn’t that what the ‘home’ and ‘end’ keys do? Oh, wait, most keyboards don’t have those..