https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPzRWca53Is
As you’ve probably heard, touchpad scrolling is backwards in OS X Lion. Instead of pulling your fingers down to scroll down a window, you know push your fingers up.
Confused? You will be. It undoes years of muscle memory. So why would Apple do this?
It’s easy: because of iOS. It’s the same gesture you make on the screen of an iOS device when you scroll up and down the screen. You want to scroll down? You pull the content up.
It’s another example of the influence of iOS on OS X.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
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Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
113 responses to “Why Is Scrolling Backwards In OS X Lion?”
Yay touch.
Except it makes little sense here because there is no direct manipulation of the content as there is on iOS: one area where pulling things from iOS doesn’t help much.
Makes sense for those using touch pads. Will definitely take some getting used to otherwise. I imagine it will be a feature you can toggle back and forth?
You can turn this off and go back to the normal scroll by simply unchecking a box in the trackpad preferences.
Is it not because the scroll bars are invisible most of the time? I.e. in the old way, you were moving the scrollbar down. So down made sense. But in iOS the scrollbars are less prominent, so you are moving the page contents up instead. So up makes sense.
Why is it backwards? Simple. A scroll-wheel was designed as an alternative to move a scroll-bar. instead of clicking. Roll up to move the bar up, and, therefore, the page up. Trackpads and Magic mouses were all built from this principle: to move the scroll-bar.
With Lion, Scroll-bars are no more. Therefore there’s no reason to keep this old behavior. Make the action manipulate the page directly. This new behavior makes more sense for the new window layout.
Simple human interface logic.
tl;dr
Scroll-wheel moves scroll-bars. No scroll bars in Lion = scroll-wheel moves page.
Thank bloody Christ for that
You all know what this means… the touchscreen iMac is coming. And if they do it correctly…. like the patents shows, this could be promising. I am calling it right now. Touch screen iMacs coming directly after OSX Lion’s release…. WOOO HOOO
I use my iPad quite a lot and sometimes when I go to my MacBook I actually end scrolling the opposite way by accident. This kind of makes sense but I’m sure there be many who switch it back in their preferences.
dumbest idea ever.
It should be said, “Why isn’t scrolling backwards anymore?”
That is the very FIRST thing I looked for and did after I booted.
Now the interaction of a document using the track pad will be similar to the way you manipulate a large PDF using the hand tool, or the way you navigate Google maps or Google earth. For anyone with a screen smaller than the width of the document, this form of manipulation makes ultimate sense. It should take as long to learn as does any of the aforementioned interfaces.
your dumb, this is a good idea and makes sense
did you try to say? “Why isn’t cool scrolling backwards anymore?”
An idea isn’t a bad idea just because it is the opposite of what you are used to, maybe Apple have found on the Mac that it can lead to you working more effectively.
Seems reasonable, but what does this mean for people who use a mouse? Has anybody reported this yet?
exactly what i thought!
Makes perfect sense. Just deal with it.
It isn’t backwards. The old way is manipulating the scroll bar. The new way is moving the content as if it were real. Nothing to see here.
How is this not intuitive? If you have a piece of paper in front of you you don’t “push it down” to see the bottom of the page… you “push it up”. It’s far more realistic.
A touchscreen iMac? Why would you want that? Will it come with an arm rest? Think about it….
no, that was your parents thinking it would be cool to make babies
I hope it can be put back. But remeber safari beta with tabs above the window chrome? Apple will often try stuff out in the betas.
First reaction – ugh!, But then 10 seocnds thought. My kids (5 and 8) with no computing preconceptions always see the screen as moving up. Only my 38 year old brain thinks of pulling the scroll bar down.
It is a consistent motion of the hands for the same result across devices. For those buying a Mac because of the halo effect of iOS, it will be one of those moments of instant familiarization.
Silly post. Most humans are highly adaptable to change.
Aren’t you?
Eeesh!
i’ve been browsing a gazillion mac sites to try to understand this. i still don’t, and i admit that may be a glitch in my brain. i mean, isn’t “scrolling down” somewhat synonymous with “pulling content up”? the content “goes up” because you want to go down. when i scroll down on an iPhone or a Touch, i don’t REVERT the movement of my fingers. i move them downwards. yes the content “goes up” (as it does when scrolling on any computer), but my fingers still go down. i could go on like this all day :)) i just don’t get it, maybe i look stupid, would love for sm to enlighten me.
but you can always say something is utterly counter-intuitive. especially when it come from the “it just works” company.
Ahh, there we go, much better! Thanks!
It’s more intuitive. You have to imagine to roll some round thing or so.
Calm down everyone. You can choose your scroll direction preference in the control panel. Old or new both work.
Interesting and useful post
Tried it out for the day. Too awkward for my taste, turned it off. Especially since I switch back and forth between OS X and Windows somewhat regularly, the constant changing back will drive me nuts. Also, I’ve just become so used to scrolling that way for such a long time.
Flicking down to move down a document only makes sense in the context of the scrollbar. Essentially, we’re all trained to move a scrollbar.
We SHOULD be getting used to the idea of moving the content instead. Content is where our minds should be, not the chrome that surrounds it.
Whether the interaction is direct or not makes no difference – using a mouse pointer is indirect anyway, and so anything and everything on top of it is too.
It doesn’t mean that at all. It means the coming of multi-touch interaction to the masses. Direct manipulation is possible even when indirectly.
If Apple wanted to sell you a touchscreen computer, they’d make a bigger iPad.
It’s BRILLIANT. Now that I’m back in Snow Leopard so that I can use Photoshop (haven’t got round to installing it in the partition), everything seems weird and unnatural. Definitely a welcome feature for me
Here I thought I was going nuts! Seems like iOS is not as intuitive with my mouse than it was with my iphone…
Brilliant – thanks for the tip, was driving me mad.
Wow I have been on Lion for 38 minutes now and I am used to the scrolling. It make so much more sense when you think about it. This is leading up to the 27″ iMac touch screen Im sure :P
lol!
… first person to put their mucky paw prints on my shiny iMac gets a slap
If you don’t like it. Invert it in your System Preferences… Simple…. It’s like inverting the Y axis in a first person shooter.. Some like it inverted, some don’t… Set it up how you want it and stop moaning…
You can disable this so called feature from the mouse settings. I have an iPhone for about 1.5 years, been using touchscreen phones for about 4, but the regular scrolling is so much better. Just my 2 cents.
Imagine the touchpad is your screen on your iOS device ; )
Can you turn off the backwards scrolling?
This doesn’t make sense at all… When I’m pointing my finger on an iOS device, my finger will remain at the exact point as if I’m turning a page which makes sense on iOS. But when scrolling on OSX Lion, it’s a complete different behavior. Is there a way to change that?
This is driving me crazy… how about an option.
There is an option in the Trackpad area of System Preferences.
I don’t know if anyone’s already mentioned this as I’m not going to read all of the comments, but you can go to System Preferences> TrackPad>Scroll and Zoom and unselect “Scroll Direction – Natural”
Apple would be stupid to make a touchscreen version of the iMac. All this would create is a dirty screen and a case of tennis elbow.
It is very annoying! :-/
The new scrolling is just fine with me but why aren’t people confused with the arrow behavior. There you touch the down arrow to move the content up. Shouldn’t that be reversed too !?!?!?!
And, if you don’t have a TrackPad, just open the Mouse Preferences and near the top of the window you should see a check box with “Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating” OSX Lion comes with the box checked. But if you want it to work the old way, just uncheck the box.
I like it this way…the only drawback is when I use my logitech mouse with the scroll wheel. For some reason when I change the scrolling direction for the touchpad it is changed also for the mouse :/ THAT is annoying
Do not question the Apple. The Apple knows the way.
The real question here is, why was scrolling backwards in Snow Leopard?
WOW. A TOTALLY FUCKING USELESS ARTICLE.
THANK YOU!! You saved me much frustration!