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View Full Version : Your oppinion: Two finger touch scroll in Ubuntu(/Gtk)?



juhnicks
July 10th, 2011, 04:38 PM
Nowadays, touch devices are in more and more peoples hands.

But there is one thing that i would change:

Use two fingers to scroll contents.

Why? Consistency.

On current touch devices, you use one finger for interaction (clicking buttons etc.) and scrolling, but two fingers for zooming and rotating.

In my opinion, scrolling, zooming and rotating all belong to navigation.
So in my opinion, it is makes more sense to do it all the same, with two fingers.

Additionally, it would also be consistent to the usage of touchpads. You also use two fingers to scroll on most of them.

If we would use it, it would also allow us to keep functionality we would loose with one finger scroll. Drag and drop would be difficult to implement, as you need to understand if the user wants to drag or scroll. Or within Gimp, you wold have to switch between painting and scrolling with some sort of toggle.

And at last, it can be implemented alongside usage with the mouse. No need to have different setup for mouse and touch. (Imagine a tablet you dock into your 24" LCD and mouse and keyboard)

So, the advantages would be:

Consistency (all navigating done with two fingers; similar to touch pads)
Can be implemented alongside (does not interfere with mouse)
No degrade in usability (drag and drop)
Perfect touch screen interface with ayatana scroll bars


Disadvantages:

Need multitouch hardware
Different to other implementations (Android, iOS etc.)


So, what do you guys think?

Depending on feedback, i would like to suggest it on developers mailing lists (or Ayatana?)

PS: Hello everybody :D
PPS: i hope i've hit the right sub forum :D

EDIT: Posted in Ayatana questions: https://answers.launchpad.net/ayatana-scrollbar/+question/164559