Scrolling in Lion

Let me take a time out from my usual intellectual musing for a brief rant.

I have just upgraded to Mac OS X Lion. I. Hate. The. New. Scrolling.



No, I don't hate the bit about how they reversed the scroll direction. I can get used to that, or I can put it back again if I can't. And I don't even hate the scroll bars that appear and disappear again, depending on what I'm doing, what input device I'm doing it with, and the phase of the moon, making the UI much less consistent and explicit about how much content exists and which part of it I'm looking at. Once again, I can get used to it or I can change it back.

I hate the lack of scroll arrows. It's absolutely crippling. Crippling. I feel like a UI hand I've had for 25 years has been cut off.

I use a track ball for ergonomic purposes; mice cause me debilitating tendonitis. It is now impossible for me to scroll through a large document slowly and smoothly. I have the following choices:

1. Click and drag the scroll thumb. This is now a smaller and lower-contrast target than it was before. And in a long document (I'm taking time out from a 60-page doc to write this), even a very short drag on the thumb is a long jump in the document. This scaling problem makes scrolling very jerky, and it makes scrolling by a line or two nearly impossible to control.
2. Use the arrow keys. Doing this has the side effect of moving my insertion point, which I don't want. And in a document that's paginated, every time the insertion point reaches a page boundary, the document suddenly jumps two-margins'-worth of vertical distance instead of one line.
3. Page up and down. Scrolling a page at a time is disorienting, as it's hard to track the moving window contents with my eyes, and it's impossible to position the content I want to look at precisely on the screen. And did you know that Microsoft Word 2008 will sometimes crash when you page up while in Outline view? Not all the time -- just some of the time. And not when paging down, only when paging up. Yes, true story. It's the same whether you hit Page Up on the keyboard or just click the scroll bar. The bug's been there for years, and Microsoft has never fixed it. It makes me ever so happy that every time the app crashes (4x today by my count), that little dialog comes up, mocking me, asking me to report the crash to Microsoft.

It's seems pretty clear to me that Apple has made a quasi-religious decision that all interfaces shall be touch-based, because navigating Lion without touch is so very painful. Another example: Mission Control shows your Spaces above and the contents of the current Space below. How do you move a window from another space into the current space? You have to scroll sideways in that lower area of the screen. A touch gesture seems to be the only way to do it.

...All of which means that I need to make a decision: replace my track ball with an Apple track pad and hope I don't injure myself, or downgrade back to Snow Leopard -- losing iCloud calendars and reminders and the other Lion features along the way.

What makes it so much more frustrating is that there is no good reason for any of this. A desktop machine is not an iPad, and scroll arrows have a legitimate purpose there. That purpose is not met by any other UI feature, and it is not met by the non-touch input devices that millions of us use with good reason. The arrows are not obtrusive; they take up no extra screen real estate when compared to the scroll bars themselves -- how hard is it to simply draw the arrows whenever you're drawing the scroll bars anyway?