Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They’re pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they’re so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don’t want you to scroll! “Ah”, they say, “that’s what the scroll wheel is for”. My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time.
Honestly, for such a crucial element, it is infuriating how bad some software gets them. Between narrow, auto-hiding scrollbars and developers who don’t understand how rage-inducing scroll-jacking is, it is enough to make me back out of a site / application and either discard what I was going or find an alternative immediately.
Out of interest, why do you use a Wacom tablet as your primary input design, and how do you find using it that way?
I started by using it just when I wanted to free hand / annotate some stuff in various documents or whiteboards. Got so used to it that I eventually stopped using the mouse and haven’t plugged one in my work PC in years.
I just like how it’s an absolute position mapping of my screen as opposed to a mouse that sends relative movement.
I annotate lots of network diagrams and do lots of whiteboarding. Handwriting with a mouse just sucks.
Now with muscle memory, I can click on anything without dragging or looking.
I’m also more confortable for long periods of time when holding a pen then I am holding a mouse.
There is a scroll circle thingy in the tablet, but that means changing my grip on the pen a bit and I still prefer functional scrollbars because I can just click where I want to go or otherwise just know how far down I already am.
(On the plus side, document preview scrollbars like in VS Code is great)
Other than shitty UIs, there’s very few bugs, but some applications do like to glitch the fuck out with absolute positioning (the webex call in progress floating window just bounces around if you try to drag it). 1-2px wide UI elements are dumb.
The Wacom is also probably why I haven’t switched to an ultrawide screen for work because the mapping feels squished. (Unless they made an ultrawide ratio tablet, I guess)
I do use a mouse on my home PC though, gaming with a Wacom tablet just doesn’t make much sense.