Open Windows

The fundamental of MicrOSX is the window. While they are functional, they do not do the best job of maximizing usable area. My fundamental problem with them is the amazing amount of space given over to scrollbars and titling. Scrolling and identification are transient functions -- most of your time behind the screen is spent using and reading, not in scrolling and orientation. Therefore the elements involved in transient tasks should be as tiny as possible.

The End of Scrollbars

In a large window, especially in a large screen, this is not as painful, but in small panels, this becomes excruciating. A subpanel with a title and scrollbars can lose a third or more of its visible area to sprue!

The other thing I don't like about scrollbars is that because they scale to the length of the document, the larger the document (and by definition, the more you need scrollbars), the less useful the scrollbar is, even (especially) for slower navigation. That is why the arrows are there, as a mechanism for allowing slower (absolute) scanning.

In my view the scroll widget should be a corner item. An eyeball seems an obvious choice. The iris substitutes for the visual feedback provided by the elevator.

When dragged, it acts like a video editing "shuttle dial" -- as you drag up or down, it scrolls up or down; the farther you drag from the center, the faster you scroll. When clicked, it "fisheyes" the display, showing three to five screen's worth of information at once. (three screens for subpanels, five or seven for full scren windows) The peripheral screens can be clicked to center upon them. Clicking the center screen moves you out of fisheye mode.

The Eyeball mechamism is nice because it is absolute-sized: it doesn't take up a percent of screen real-estate. In smaller screens it could reduce to an icon 1-2 ems tall, and perhaps be nearly invisible unless rolled over.

Also, the best navigation doesn't require any interface at all. If you want to "scroll around" a video game, you just slam your cursor against the edge of the screen. Why not do this for documents as well? This could have a slight delay built in, to prevent accidental scrolling. But if I hover my mouse at the edge of a document for a while, odds are I want to see "What's down there." So give it to me.

I'd also point out that mice have had scroll hardware built into them for quite some time -- I don't know anyone who hasn't figured out what the srcoll wheel is for by now. And of course, there are keys on the keyboard for scrolling -- at least on windows keyboards. So devoting any interface mechanism is kind of overkill.