I prefer the direction apple doesn’t call “natural” and I don’t appreciate the implication my preference is “unnatural” because of it.
The whole point is that people have different mental models of these things.
I was using a trackpad before I’d ever owned a device with touchscreen, and so my concept for trackpad is based on mouse:
Moving the cursor with a finger is like moving a mouse on the desk - movement agrees with direction
Scrolling is like treating the trackpad as a ‘virtual mouse wheel’ - towards you moves the content up.
And as for why I think a mouse wheel itself should behave like that? It’s because my mental model of the mouse wheel from the beginning was that it’s a literal physical cog like a roller pressed “against” the view content - and so when the top of the roller moves down the underside of the roller moves the content up.
All the people who grew up with phones will insist my preference is wrong and freaky and I don’t blame them because I think theirs is.
There’s no actual wrong or right here, just whatever collection of mental models built up since childhood our life paths caused us to form.
We arrived at the same conclusion, but for different reasons!
You see the wheel as moving the viewport directly (wheel down = view down)
I see the underside of the wheel as pushing the page/document/etc upwards (wheel down = content up)
Same preference but the mental model is different. Which is fine, and is really my exact point :)
This is why I’m a big fan of always giving options in games etc to invert the controls, and invert x and y independently and all that. You might think “what freak wants this crazy setup?” but SOMEBODY wants it, and if you can give the option then why not! Sometimes the freak might be you.
I prefer the direction apple doesn’t call “natural” and I don’t appreciate the implication my preference is “unnatural” because of it.
The whole point is that people have different mental models of these things.
I was using a trackpad before I’d ever owned a device with touchscreen, and so my concept for trackpad is based on mouse:
And as for why I think a mouse wheel itself should behave like that? It’s because my mental model of the mouse wheel from the beginning was that it’s a literal physical cog like a roller pressed “against” the view content - and so when the top of the roller moves down the underside of the roller moves the content up.
All the people who grew up with phones will insist my preference is wrong and freaky and I don’t blame them because I think theirs is.
There’s no actual wrong or right here, just whatever collection of mental models built up since childhood our life paths caused us to form.
This is where I am as well. I think of scroll direction as the way I move the “camera”. The direction of the wheel is the direction of the frame.
We arrived at the same conclusion, but for different reasons!
You see the wheel as moving the viewport directly (wheel down = view down)
I see the underside of the wheel as pushing the page/document/etc upwards (wheel down = content up)
Same preference but the mental model is different. Which is fine, and is really my exact point :)
This is why I’m a big fan of always giving options in games etc to invert the controls, and invert x and y independently and all that. You might think “what freak wants this crazy setup?” but SOMEBODY wants it, and if you can give the option then why not! Sometimes the freak might be you.