Comments on: Making Long Scrolls on the iPhone Not Suck

By: buy 8gb m2

buy 8gb m2 — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:42:04 +0000

If OS 4.0 is only for the latest two iPhones, Apple will face the fury of recent iPod touch users. Mine is only a few months old, and I will not be happy if it doesn’t even run the first major OS upgrade after I bought it.
The digital format is so wonderful because you don’t have to store stuff in 3d space. You are not forced to look through piles to find your item, you simple scroll through the list, ordered however you want (date, file type, name)

By: fahim

fahim — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 14:21:17 +0000

I really like the way the scroll function works on the iPhone but where it lacks is when you need to go back to the top or to the bottom of the page quickly.

Maybe one way to solve scrolling to the bottom or top of the page is to use a gesture where you’re giving the scroll a ‘boost’ of some sort. let me explain….

You’re at the bottom of a very long page and want to get back to the top quickly…

rather than scroll up and up… you hold down your finger for a couple of seconds (charging it up) and then flick down (release the acceleration) anf it gets you to the top.

Of course, currently when you hold down for a second or two you get the context menu, so some more thinking needs to be done around this part… :)

Fahim

By: شات

شات — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:40:35 +0000

@@Thiinks@@

By: Philipp

Philipp — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:32:18 +0000

I also noticed this and tried your first suggestion by pure curiosity if it would work.
Getting the fade-out time right is surely hard; I just think of the navbar when entering full-screen in FF, which takes too much time for me (anyone knows a about:config key to change this?), but is a good way to show where it went to the average joe.

The second approach seems a bit of too much action for me. Scrolling down and zooming out while viewing the page is a lot to process.

Why not simply use two/three fingers to speed up the scrolling?

By: Henk Jan

Henk Jan — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 11:24:35 +0000

link to british throne succession is broken.

Please remove closing ) from the URL:
Broken:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_British_throne)

Better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_British_throne

By: Ehsan Akhgari

Ehsan Akhgari — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:28:18 +0000

One thing that I have seen the S60 browser do is that for long pages, after a bit of scrolling (as it senses that the user is trying to reach far down the page), it shows a zoomed out vertical preview of the page in front of the page (like a popup window) and designates the currently displayed area with a red rectangle and accelerates the scrolling. This way you have both the small and big pictures in front of you.

That browser of course is for a keypad based device. On a touch screen device, the zoomed out preview popup may appear after scrolling for a while (provided that a considerable threshold of the page’s height has yet to be scrolled into) and stay for a short timeout after lifting the finger off. Faster scrolling can be achieved by dragging the red rectangle on that popup preview.

This way the user has the best of both your proposals, I think.

By: Aleksander Kmetec

Aleksander Kmetec — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:44:05 +0000

Here’s an alternative idea: remove the need for users to scroll to the top of the page. If the only reason for scrolling to the top is so you can reach the location bar, maybe that’s not the best place to put it. In case of Fennec it could automatically pop up when you expose the left sidebar since the left edge of the page is likely to be closer than the top edge.

Also, capabilities of individual devices should not be ignored. If one device comes with a menu button, put an option in that menu that immediately focuses the location bar. Use the same patterns that other apps on that device use or your app will end up looking and feeling out of place. Fitting in with the natives is more important than acting “pure” and better than everyone else.

And please don’t use some poorly documented “magic” behavior like mobile Safari. It’s completely non obvious and I didn’t know about it until today.

By: Paul M. Watson

Paul M. Watson — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:50:40 +0000

Got to say I like the scroll-to-zoom idea. It really places you in the page.

By: Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:26:24 +0000

I have not yet found any solution that I find better to use personally than the scroll bar. I’m sticking to microB and not being able to make myself use Fennec on my N810 mostly because using the scrollbar on th touch screen is exactly what I need.
On the desktop I could live without, I have a scroll wheel on the mouse there. But on the interactive touch screen, contrary to the usual non-touch display and mouse, there is no time wasted with moving the mouse to the right edge of the window and back to the article, the movement is for free, I just need to touch the location to go or drag the scrollbar thumb, which I end up doing most of the time, actually. And I love it, I’d never want anything else. And I hate Fennec’s panning stuff.

By: Gerv

Gerv — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:59:40 +0000

Philip: I don’t agree; if you do that, people will try and interact with it and you are back at square 1.

How about hyperspeed scrolling? It would work as follows.

Observation: If someone is trying to scroll a long way, they first do a fast top-to-bottom finger flick to get the thing shifting. The 1:1 mapping of finger movement speed to scroll speed, which is so useful at low scroll speeds, means that it does get going reasonably fast. But, how can you make it faster? You have to move your finger faster.

The idea: once the scroll is moving at above a certain rate, further scroll actions are _additive_ rather than _adjustive_ of the rate. So if I do a top-to-bottom-fast flick five times, the scroll ends up moving five times faster than my finger, rather than at the same speed as it.

Did I explain that well?

Gerv