Thread: Ipod touch owner on the fence
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maacruz is offline maacruz
2009-04-30 , 23:47
Posts: 1,101 | Thanked: 1,185 times | Joined on Aug 2008 @ Spain
#40
Originally Posted by attila77 View Post
It is cool. There is no need for the image to 'coast'. You could land at the extrapolated end position immediately, just as page up or page down does not need to animate the scroll. Kinetic, as in animated method of scrolling, is meant to be cool.
No way. Kinetic is meant to be usable. With page up/down you move the page by big integer units, so the extrapolated end position may easily end too up or too down, then you'll have to scroll more (key up/key down) at constant speed to center the content. It is very easy not to get to the desired position if you don't know where it is, too, leading to repeated searches up and down.

This is plain wrong. You cannot compare two specific implementations and draw conclusions about the physical interfaces in general. If it has a button, it must cause strain and if it's a stylus/finger it never does that ? Doesn't sound plausible to me at all.
You are wrong, but may be I haven't expressed myself clearly enough.
By buttons here, I mean physical buttons, as n810 keys/dpad/etc, where the size, position and stiffness of those buttons is of great importance. What is more, we are talking here in the context of some particular devices, so I'm not going all general. The case of the n810 is a clear example, trying to use its keyboard, given the way the device must be hold and the fingers posture over the keyboard, will cause trouble after a relatively short time.
The use of GUI "buttons" is a different matter, since the strength needed in a touchscreen is lower. Here prolonged postural issues may be more relevant, depending on how the device is/must be hold and if/how the stylus is/must be used, influenced by usability issues like GUI element size, device/GUI responsiveness, repetitivity, etc.
Again, there are not just two ways of scrolling content. See pyqtoreader - it's faster and more precise than kinetic scrolling. Kinetic is just hero of the day, there are plenty other methods of scrolling (stylus based or other) that can replace it one day (given apple does a fancy implementation of them )
May be there aren't just two ways, but of those I actually could test in the NIT/ipod/iphone, kinetic is the better. That is not saying it is just alone the best, since for example in very large pages it is more efficient to use other GUI method for coarse positioning, for example moving a box over a zoom-out view, and then kinetic scrolling/drag for fine positioning.
So, if a more usable/ergonomic method replaces it, I'll welcome it.

Umm, and you cannot do continuous 'flow' scrolling with scrollbars, buttons, drag-zooms, or other methods ? I'm afraid I don't get it.
Have I said that? I'm afraid not. What I said is a quite different thing, read the sentence as a whole.
About scrollbars, on a device like NITs/ipod/iphone it is imprecise and jerky (stylus positioning, long pages), takes screen real state, and element size and/or position may make them really difficult to use. GUI buttons have some of those issues too. Hard buttons, see issues about tendon strain.
About "drag-zooms" (drawing a box by clicking and then dragging the opposite vertex and zooming the box content), I fail to see how it relates to scrolling.

About your pyqtoreader, unfortunately I'm not able to install it (some issue with python-qt4-* package versions that apt-get doesn't like), so I cannot comment on the scrolling methods you have implemented.