Monday, July 30, 2007

Yet another post on "Kinetic" scrolling


Renato Filho has just uploaded a video to youtube showing the MokoFingerScrool object, developed by Chris Lord, integrated with his Maemo Myth application running on the N800 device. Cool stuff.

5 comments:

Jaffa said...

Developers working on kinetic scrolling should agree on an algorithm and a gconf-key for the amount of damping & sensitivity; otherwise users will get confused by different apps having different acceleration etc.

Ideally, I'd love to see Gtk+ patched so that any background in a scrollable panel became a drag point with kinetic scrolling, but doubt that'll ever be done.

Chris said...

Cool to see it being used in another application so soon, good stuff! :)

@andrew: Personally, I don't think global settings would really work with this type of scroll widget - You want the speed to depend somewhat on the content inside the scroll (i.e. big long lists should get faster quicker and slow-down slower than smaller areas).

Also, these sort of fancy widgets are very special-purpose, standardising is a little overkill perhaps. My opinion anyway, I'm sure there are plenty of logical counter-arguments :)

Jeff Waugh said...

One thing that appears to be missing in most of these demos is the correct alignment of the top-most list item when the scrolling stops. It should halt on the list item boundary. :-)

Anonymous said...

Jeff, you must have missed this:
http://codeposts.blogspot.com/2007/07/iphone-like-list-view.html

Jaffa said...

@Chris: perhaps, but you compare the speed of the scroll in this to the iPhone-like-list-view or UKMP and it's inconsistent.

That'd bug me as a user if I need a big flick in one application to move a certain number (or percentage) and only a small flick in another.

Blindly copying iPhone UI items without understanding the UI principles and cohesive, consistent UI which make the iPhone great will be a disaster (IMHO).