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Intence - The scrollbar era is over(asvd.github.io)

8 years ago from Catalin Cimpanu

  • Dmitry Prokashev, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

    Hello everyone.

    I am the developer of Intence. Actually the web-page is not fully finished, but I am happy that someone has revealed the project and has been inspired enough to share it :-)

    Some comments on the feedback.

    1. First of all (this is actually the most typical feedback I am getting so far) considering the absence of scrolling controls. There are two concerns about scrolling: controlling the scrolling position, and indicating of that an area is scrollable. The scrollbar provides the solution for both of them, and therefore this is something what is naturally expected from a scrollbar replacement. But Intence is only about indication and does not provide any controls, and this was done intentionally. The last two paragraphs on the web-page explain it, but I will repeat myself here. The idea is that controlling the scroll position is performed by other means. On my personal opinion, in most cases there is no need provide any additional controls, since scrolling with a mouse wheel / touch screen should be enough (we will see soon if I was wrong). But of course there might be some special cases when additional controls may be suitable, or when more exact information about scroling position is demanded. The solution is suppposed to be searched by a particular application developer. Currently they avoid searching for alternatives, since ordinary scrollbar does the job somehow (like a shit on my opinion). Intence is designed to take no space and be transparent to mouse events.

    2. The indicator must not be bright and annoying. See the example with code, and with the map. Scrollable area is indicated not by a highly contrast image, but by a content fading out. On the web-page I used highly contrast images to take attention of a reader.

    3. Considering the issue of when you start scrolling the page, and then your pointer gets into an inner scrollable area and starts scrolling it instead. This is not actually related to Intence, but of course should be avoided by an application developer. On the web-page of Intence I could not find a simple solution, because I needed to show many scrollable areas. In other applications the solution could be to simply avoid nested scrollable areas (like either a big scrollable page with static content, or an application split into several scrollable frames / areas).

    4 points
    • Joe Blau, 8 years ago

      Intence is designed to take no space and be transparent to mouse events.

      In the example, Intence blocks more of the screen than any scroll bar in Chrome, Safari of Firefox. Scroll bars in standard browsers also disappear while Intence doesn't. Can you explain what you mean by "take no space"?

      0 points
      • Dmitry Prokashev, 8 years ago (edited 8 years ago )

        Sorry, I think I was not precise enough. It takes significant space visually, for the user to be able easily evaluate it without directly looking at it. But it is transparent to mouse events, and only hovers the area without taking any additional space (moving other blocks and components around).

        Besides it's responsive (the indicator is getting smaller for small areas), so that it will never take over much space making the content inconvenient to read. Resize the page and see how the indicator is shrinked.

        1 point