As I wrote yesterday, my laptop recently had major surgery. That appears to have gone well but when I got the machine back I noticed that it had Snow Leopard installed instead of Lion. I knew they were going to wipe the drive so I wasn’t surprised by the fresh install but I was surprised that they had installed OS X 10.6 instead of OS X 10.7. I called Apple to see why they had done that but the tech didn’t have any idea why it happened. My guess is that the tech who did the work thought the machine was too old for Lion, although that is not the case.
In any event, it was easy to download and install Lion again so that wasn’t much of a problem but while I was working with Snow Leopard I noticed that the screen scrolling had reverted to the classical (pre-Lion) action—swiping down with 2 fingers moved toward the bottom of the screen etc. When I first installed Lion, one of the things that really impressed and pleased me was the new scrolling method. I really liked it and got used to it almost immediately. Now, here I was back with the old method and it really drove me crazy. It just seemed so unnatural. Irreal readers who don’t use Macs will wonder what all the fuss is about but I can tell you that once you’ve used the new method, going back to the standard way is torture. The metaphor of grabbing the screen and pushing it in the direction you want to go is very natural and fades into the background almost immediately. When I was stuck using the old method, it felt like I had suddenly been teleported to a Bizaro world where everything worked backwards.
I’ve only been using the new scrolling for about 10 months but it has become so ingrained that using something else is unsettling. Keep in mind that I’d been using the standard method for years and years but had no trouble adapting to the new way. Now going back seems like torture. That’s how we know Apple got this one right.