About the little scrollbar arrows...

I can only wish you good luck in your mission to hound Apple to fit them back into the coding of future OSXs. Who knows what 10.9 may hold if it arrives. Meanwhile, do remember that they are still available in Snow Leopard.

Cheers

Pete

I've sumarized below a few of the issues that I've had since upgrading to Mountain Lion, I'll be sending this to Apple later today via their contact links. Whether it'll do any good is hard to say, but there are other avenues of approach to having Apple behave in a polite and helpful manner toward it's users. Hopefully I won't have to go that path.

OS X Mountain Lion, Usability Issues

Several changes in Mountain Lion (and previously, Lion) have created usability issues.

1. Scroll bars have lost their arrows and the bar, or 'thumb' itself is thinner. Working on long text files sometimes requires fine vertical adjustment of the text, this is not possible with the scroll bar 'thumb'.

2. The hand tool is missing in Preview. With large sized files, moving around in the image is really inconvenient and requires several scroll bar moves.

3. Folder icons are now all grey with no option to modify. This hinders usability because you have to visually hunt for the right icon whereas previously unique, customized or coloured icons were quick and easy to identify.

4. Software Update now works through the App Store app.

This is a problem because currently there is no way of seeing the file size of each update download and worse, there is no way of pausing and restarting the download. Some downloads are very large, ie the OS X update was over 4 GB, losing the download whilst downloading means re-downloading and loss of monthly data plan capacity.

Other:

5. There is no way of reporting abuse on the Apple Support Forums. The result is that trolling is easy for perpetrators and annoying for forum users. Moderators need to be aware of this. We need a 'report abuse' link.

There are a lot of things I like about OS X Mountain Lion, but I think the above issues need addressing fairly urgently.

In summary, most of these faults have been obvious for some time and yet there is no response from Apple. Certain users, like handicapped people and professionals have written about their problems with these usability issues. As a writer I find text navigation in Pages really awkward, as without scroll arrows the text moves in jerks and jumps which becomes very tiring and tiresome over a long period editing. (I moved to Pages btw because MS Word had become extremely problematic, misbehaving bloatware)

Additionally, I do not have a trackpad or a scroll-wheel mouse and don't see why I should have to buy these devices (I have a limited income) simply because Apple has reduced OS X usability in order to promote a new tablet-like interface, legacy users would certainly have a very dim view of this.

drowningindata wrote:

but there are other avenues of approach to having Apple behave in a polite and helpful manner toward it's users. Hopefully I won't have to go that path.

What path would that be? I am sure there are other users who wish to contact Apple but are also not happy with the 'Feedback' page provided by Apple, so details from you of other Avenues available would be appreciated, I am sure.

Cheers

Pete

I work largely in Word (MS Office for Mac 2011) which is so badly damaged through "improvements" that it doesn't bear mentioning as a problem, but there too, after upgrading to Mountain Lion, I've lost the scroll arrows (the finely calibrated ones), which were crucial. In Word, though, I can use the up and down arrows. In Mac Mail, however, I can no longer scroll up and down through my list of messages with any degree of control. Using the up and down arrows means scrolling through unread mail which then becomes "read" mail.

Mac is starting to look very Micrsoftish with their indifference to user ease and functionality.

No they didn't. The only way this is going to be fixed is for developers to add the feature to individual apps, like Adobe has with some of their Creative Cloud programs (Illustrator, InDesign and others).

Chuck - No, Apple continues down the road of "improving" their operating systems by making them worse (a la iOS7)

Also, please don't feed the troll 😉 Remember the South Park World of Warcraft guy? That's him. lol.

The issue....

Try using the new style scroll bars if you have a disability affecting your arm control... I have cerebral palsy but am physically more like somebody with Parkinson's Disease. You try using a scroll bar with no up/down arrows, even with a big specialist trackerball....

Operating systems have always been a place of equality, but thanks to Apple, that is no longer the case. Try watching the assistiveware.com channel's videos on Youtube to see how important Apple ease of use is.

There are people in this discussion who want the old scroll bar and arrows back, and some who don't. That is fine. However,I would ask people to consider what I have said, and the fact that anybody can acquire a disability at anytime, AND more importantly, something that is accessible to disabled people is easier to use for ANYBODY.

If Apple created an option in System Preferances that let everybody choose which of the two scroll bar styles they want, everybody would be happy.

I fail to see what problem Apple have with this when I put it to them. I don't need my business management degree to know that a business can't afford to make such a major change, ignore many ****** off customers, and still expect customer loyalty and that wages come from sales revenue.

Hardly rocket science hey Apple? You need to sort your CORE values out. Sorry, that pun about core values... Not bad...

Regards.

Sarah

scoobydoo99 wrote:

Chuck - No, Apple continues down the road of "improving" their operating systems by making them worse (a la iOS7)

Also, please don't feed the troll 😉 Remember the South Park World of Warcraft guy? That's him. lol.

South Park? I was wondering where you gained your computer knowledge from. A highly technical arguement you put forward there. 😁

Cheers

Pete

SarahD22 wrote:

I don't need my business management degree to know that a business can't afford to make such a major change, ignore many ****** off customers, and still expect customer loyalty and that wages come from sales revenue.

So you want Apple to cater their market to a minority and survive in the world of Tech Sales? That is ridiculous. And this scroll bar arrow thing was dropped over three years ago. They are not ignoring 'many'. They are ignoring a disgruntled few (extremely few) of their many, many millions of customers. If you do not like their direction, you have always had options.

Cheers

Pete

Pete.

Operating systems have many different options that people can have on or off. The fact that a low percentage of customers may use them is irrelevant, especially when the facility was there, but was taken away.

The percentage of Apple users who need to use VoiceOver will be quite low, but do you think that Apple should cut that out too?

Sarah

SarahD22 wrote:

Pete.

Operating systems have many different options that people can have on or off. The fact that a low percentage of customers may use them is irrelevant, especially when the facility was there, but was taken away.

The percentage of Apple users who need to use VoiceOver will be quite low, but do you think that Apple should cut that out too?

Sarah

No, I do not. But that is a completely different feature. All this 'we should have the option to turn it on or off' always leads me to the question 'Do you know if that is even possible in the coding of the newer systems to have this option for arrows?' Anybody who has purchased a Mac in the past three years have never even seen these arrows, yet the many many millions of them use the last three systems with no problems.

Cheers

Pete

Thanks Pete, but you're being very unhelpful and actually reminiscent of Lily Tomlin's Ernestine, the embodiment of the phone company's "like it or lump it" approach. "If you don't like our service, try using two tin cans and a string," she used to say with a snicker.

More to the point, and possibly of some actual help to the people who are frustrated (and rightly so) about the loss of fine motor control on say a single document of 100,000 words (something I deal with regularly) or any other application where the small arrows were VERY useful, there IS a workaround, thought it's one that Apple benefits by monetarily (surprise surprise). I've purchased a magic trackpad, and the two-finger gesture allows me to have all the fine motor control that I used to get from the small arrows. I do resent having had to lay out money for that when the corded mouse was perfectly adequate in every other way, and having to buy batteries and then put them in the landfill. But as Pete might say, like it or lump it.

However, for those who are frustrated and have the cash, buy a magic trackpad. It took care of the problem for me at least.

And Pete, please be aware that in your attitude you're very close to a standard moderator type on these message boards. "No there is no problem." "You're just being a complainer." "You can always buy another product." "No one ELSE is complaining]." It's a little bit of a laughable stereotype.

Considering you user name here. You are a very poor translator. Obviously you haven't adapted after three years too. But tell Apple, I'm sure they will listen to your compelling g arguement and return the arrows.

Good Luck

Pete

No, i'm a first-rate translator. I don't know what part of my message would make you think I wasn't. What is your role here? Are you in fact a moderator? Would you not be interested in the one piece of information that might help people like SarahD and myself, people who are frustrated about a seemingly arbitrary elimination of a very useful feature? Or are you just going to call names? As Ben Stiller put it so memorably: "Those are baby keys for a little baby. So have fun playing with your little baby keys, little baby monkey."

Then why is the address to the site discussions.apple.com? It will do nothing but you could try a petition online. But a lot that Apple has been doing recently I don't like. Also more people than complain hate that the scroll arrows are gone. My mom doesn't have time to email Apple but remarked that the new Maverick can't be any worse. She does not like the current system. I said yes it can be look at system 7 for the iPhone. It's not just her. No one I know is GLAD the arrows are gone. They are just not people who care about things enough to think that complaining would ever work. Apple is a huge company but we are not Lemmings that will just say everything they make is great. Obviously complaining here does nothing but what is this message board for. Even if you think it's useless complaining here it's nice to discuss with other people who are annoyed that this feature is gone also. It is discussions.apple.com. We are discussing with each other how to fix the problem we have. I do not have money for that trackpad but will check it out. I do a lot of Excel work with big files and that would help a lot.