About the little scrollbar arrows...

Sadly, no scrollbar arrows in Mountain Lion. Isn't there a secret Terminal command to get back the scrollbar arrows?

Without scrollbar arrows, there is almost no way to fine tune a scroll, especially (as you mentioned) in the little Adobe palettes. The only way to scroll is with the Magic Mouse, but that has a mind of its own and makes the screen jump all over the place (I think the CS6 apps may have solved this driver issue).

Hi Edac2, I agree with you about the Mighty Mouse. With giant documents on my 30-inch monitor it played too fast and loose for my liking. To swipe an inch on an iPad, my document moves an inch. That equals precision while also being plenty fast enough on a small iPad screen. But to swipe an inch on a Mighty Mouse my document shoots over my screen at speeds approaching Warp Nine. That equals a lack of precision.

I stayed with the Mighty Mouse for a few months because I wanted to get used to it, but in the end I was never able to learn how to make it work with the effortless precision that I prefer in some types of documents.

So I went back to Snow Leopard. Not just for the scroll arrows, but for a bunch of other reasons too (lightning-fast startup and shut-down, coloured sidebar icons, relief from from the constant Lion animated interface bouncing and so on.) I don't use scroll arrows all the time because I don't need the extreme precision all the time, but when I do need them I appreciate them a WHOLE lot more than I ever did before Lion.

Hi, I'm #200 in this thread. Count me as one of the many customers who are really ticked at the so-called 'geniuses' at apple. Another sick example of someone thinking they know what we 'want/need' better than us. Add to that the unmitigated arrogance of non-responses. apple - you have made it hard to be a loyal customer. Man up, take your pr lumps, and fix it.

Unfortunately, I'm thinking the only satisfaction I'm going to get out of this post is the therapy of writing it.

CT,

This is not helpful. The only solution to this available via Mac 101 is to do option key single line scrolling which is not arrow keys. If you can produce a script step by step where you show how the arrows can be re-displayed via some settings then that would be more helpful. Simply posting "Mac 101" comes off as arrogant and doesn't really address the primary issue.

I've noticed that Adobe Dreamweaver are now rolling their own scrollbars that do have arrows on.

You can see where this is going to end up - thousands of 3rd party OSX applications all with their own subtly different scrollbar arrows.

I despair!

That is because Apple are not here. Don't know how many times it needs to be stated in these forums. Contact them through Apple Feedback. Also Apple do not make Adobe products so it is up to them to make them work with the latest OSXs. But this will probably fall on deaf ears also.......again.

Good luck

Pete

at least microsoft windows people read these forums. I think there has been a major reversal from the terrible non-graphical interface from your grandfathers windows OS to be the graphical interface that apple could not maintain. it is sad to see the passing of cool out of apple's hands.

We know/assume that they're trying to make the OS X "experience" more like iOS, but for looking through large files in iOS it's almost impossible. Granted my iPod Touch 5th Gen never had scroll arrows, it sure could use them.

I watch mv4 or mp4 movies on my iPod Touch, and it's almost impossible to pause the video and go back 30 seconds (in a 2+ hour movie). Although the movie player has a grabable current-location-indicator, making it move 30 seconds versus 10 minutes could take 10 minutes, I just sometimes give up and re-watch 10 minutes. (Like when you want to be sure you heard what you thought you heard, or saw what you thought you saw.)

Looking through a large text document is bad too as you cannot grab the pill on the side that shows where-about you are in file (or web page) at all. In that respect, iOS is even worse than OS X which does have the grabable pill/elevator box, even though it's hard to work with as so many others have commented on.

It's definitely an experience - in frustration. (I don't feel I need to experience a hurricane either, but at least you have a choice to get out of the area.)

Just my two vents worth. (Pun intended.)

Possible solution for scrollbar arrows.

I installed wire shark yesterday and it requires X11 (which used to be bundled with OSX). At any rate it directs you to the web site to download X11. X11 is a public domain windowing system developed by MIT. It's been around for years and I would bet that the GUI in OSX was based on it originally.

At any rate, I decided to see if a window manager in X11 to replace the OSX one which is flawed (no scrollbar arrows).

It looks like this IS possible. Google OSX X11 window manager.

Enlightenment came up as a hit. I've used Enlightenment before on Sunos (Sun unix workstations) and in Linux and its great.

There is some home brewing to do, but it looks like it will work. There are several window managers available, but I happen to like Enlightenment as it is the most customizable. You could even likely make it look like OSX.

I'll report back after I get this working. For the computer savvy running an X11 window manager will likely be the fix for Apples bad decision with OSX.

The current solution appears to require building c code. If I can get it to work I can post binaries somewhere and post to this thread where to download. At this point the fix is too much manual tweaking for most users I expect.

Do pcs have scroll bar arrows? I am so mad they are gone I am considering buying a pc. Have been a life long 20 year mac user and hate the lack of arrows so much I can't take it. I wish I had my 6 yr old mac back but it died. The display on my new mac is great but I don't watch a lot of movies on my computer. Using it mostly for work I can't see why a pc can't do the same things. You are turning a die hard life long mac user into a person who is waining on their support for you. Hope to see them back in the next update if not then I just won't be using my computer as much. Yes a little thing like scroll bar arrows matters this much to me. It boggles my mind why you couldn't just turn them off by default but let us have the option to turn them back on. Someone said the OS started going downhill in 2011. Maybe because Steve is gone? Anyway It would make my work much easier to have them back. Angry!

O pm how wrong you are, Apple are most definitely here.

I replied to your post with a suggestion to repeat what Freehand users did when Adobe hijacked their wonderful programme and killed it off.

Mentioned the 'p' word and it was binned asap.

Thank goodness for this post. It was driving me crazy that the only way they would show up was to click on the up or down navigation arrows. I thought it would have been in preferences in the applcation itself. In any case, thank you for solving this issue.

This does NOT turn the arrows back on. It only displays the baw with a tab that cna be grabed and moved. This is very impresise with large files, documents, graphics and databases.

WE NEED THE ARROWS BACK!

Pete,

The apps you mentioned are not for code development iOS/JAVA/C/C++ or are the for circuit design or PCB design review. These tasks often require close detailed comparison of two complex datasets. I used to use my iMac for these tasks that are otherwise done on Linux or Windows platforms.

Having fine per line mouse control of screens was something Apple learned from the researchers at Xerox Parc, but this was also available on engineering workstations from Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Wang Labs, and others.

Now that we are appealing to mass consumer markets for operating systems, it is becoming apparent to me that the communities that developed these technologies for the masses will have to return to niche software platforms to find the utility the need to get their work done.

I for one, will no longer suggest an iOS or Windows platform for industrial computing tasks as a result of the shift in focustabloids markets without continuing to support legacy behaviors.

Although I would be proud to consider myself the only one asking for this capability, there are likely other engineers doing similar work. I know there are handicapped users negatively impacted by this change. So let's assume that there are three of us, two engineers amd one physically disabled person wishing the arrows had remained.

I looked into porting E17(Enlightenment) as a window manager, but OSX no longer runs X11 natively. X11 runs as a service inside OSC, as a result, there is no way to use open source solutions to "FIX" OSX and get the pointers back.

For the tasks I used to use Xcode on iMac for, I now just remote desktop Win XP.

I have fired up my old G3 PPC mirror door Mac Pro to work on my Quicken files referee databases and other large files that need easy line by line viewing (either for comparison or for ease of finding information). For large graphic files (120+ MB) I am kind of stuck with my newer iMac as the processor speed is better on the iMac. I only went to the newer Mac OS because Apple stopped supporting MobileMe and stopped the calendar and contact syncing with the older PPD computers (I won't go into my feelings about that here).

My wife IS handycaped. For her there is no way for her to be able to grab the slider in the scroll bar and move it to where she needs it. Especially with the trackpad. She uses a MacBook Pro. I have limited her access to applocations and have modified the Dock and other functions to help her out. A wireless mouse really helps her. But, the Magic Mouse is beyond her. To find what she wants she has to use the mouse's scroll wheel to move through a document or web page to find what she wants. This works poorly.