Slate’s Michael Agger wrote a nice post this week, musing on the way Apple changed the way we scroll with the introduction of Lion just over two months ago.
It got me wondering: how long did it take people to adapt to the new rules of scrolling?
Personally speaking, I found it disorientating for only a couple of days. Then for a few more, I still had to engage my brain a little, but it didn’t feel so weird. After that, I stopped noticing. It took about a week, perhaps a few days more. Now it feels completely natural.
Until, that is, I try using the Mac that lives in our kitchen. This is an older MacBook, ill-suited to running Lion. It still runs Snow Leopard like a champ, though, and acts as all-purpose family browsing machine and music hub. On this machine, scrolling still works the old way – which is how the rest of the family like it to be, since they’re not using Lion at all.
Needless to say, installing Scroll Reverser has solved that particular problem. It means each of us can pick the scrolling style that suits us best.
Back to Agger’s article. He writes:
Apple had decreed that “natural scrolling” was the new standard, overturning 25 years of convention. This was more discomfiting than rearranging furniture. This was pulling out the chair as you were taking a seat.
And he’s right to say that: Apple did turn scrolling upside down, they did pull the chair out from under us. But in the end, it turned out to be a small problem. Adjusting was as simple as righting the chair and getting back to work.
How about you? Did you adjust without difficulty, or have you switched back to the old style scrolling (which you can do in System Preferences -> Trackpad -> Scroll and Zoom)?
