About the little scrollbar arrows...

The beta program is invite only, but you can ask nicely for an invitation...

I was offered a spot a couple of years ago but could not risk having to reformat my hard drive at that time (I am not a Time Machine user).

Just adding my voice to the all around clamor and taking it a step further. I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Yosemite yesterday and I am so bummed not to find an option for the classic scroll bars with up and down arrows in the general preferences pane! In many programs (e.g., accounting software), the slider isn't precise enough to move line by line. Even a slight drag usually jumps at least a few lines (the equivalent of several accounting entries). Why remove the arrows? Seems simple enough to just leave them there. My desktop iMac is not an iPad, Apple!

Yes mail is impossible to navigate now! without marking them all as read which is what happens when you use the arrow keys. Mac is evil.

How about that new file search that takes 8 to 20 keystrokes to do what use to take 3 and you still don't get the right search. You think this was an oversight too? What would mac's ultimate goal be here? well let's use logic: If you keep making your product less and less usable but slowly enough the people keep using it anyway and just accept that that's all they can do, eventually you will be able to sell your customers a turd in a box and they will buy it. I know it sounds crazy but can you explain why a company would make their product worse with each upgrade?

<Edited by Host>

Numbsain wrote:

well let's use logic: If you keep making your product less and less usable but slowly enough the people keep using it anyway and just accept that that's all they can do, eventually you will be able to sell your customers a turd in a box and they will buy it. I know it sounds crazy but can you explain why a company would make their product worse with each upgrade?

<Edited by Host>

I thought we were going to use Logic? My business now runs 18 Macs, let alone our personal machines and our workmate has improved since these little scroll Bar Arrows disappeared almost three and a half years ago. If you personally don't like them, then restore your Mac to whatever OSX you were happily running before from the backup you made. That seems more logical. 😉 A fetish with turds does not.

Pete

petermac87: I'm curious re your statement that "our personal machines and our workmate has improved since these little scroll Bar Arrows disappeared." How did the presence of the arrows interfere with your productivity? I am weeks into the change, and as an editor, I am still finding no easy way to work in my large documents, where I frequently need to move line by line. I am using the arrows, but it is simply not as intuitive. I've also run into problems in my accounting software where, within transactions, I need to move line by line, but the arrows move me from transaction to transaction. My question is sincere: I am just having a hard time imagining how they got in the way of your efficiency previously. Thanks.

I purchased Track Pads for each Mac. The presence of the arrows never interfered with my work flow, but we adjust quickly like most others, and now after 3 1/2 years everybody on my staff have forgotten there were ever scroll bar arrows and work more efficiently with the Track Pads.

Cheers

Pete

Interesting! That must mean that trackpads are more sensitive than the remaining scrollbars. It sounds more intuitive too -- it's something I find I want to do with the mouse. I'll give that a try. Thanks, petermac87.

And what business are you in petermac87? because, as an illustrator, trackpads are nearly impossible to use and why should i have to buy a trackpad I can't even use in my work just to do a few operations that are essential but constitute about 10 percent of my activity? do you like the way "search" works now as opposed to say snowleopard? Maybe you have a solution for that too but I spend literally 10 times as much of my workday trying to search things. What sense does it make to default to "name matches exactly" when i could type in the first few letters and my file would pop up before? and even if i type the name exactly it gives me 40 thigs that don't match the name at all! before my file. That works for you? Or is there something else i have to buy? There are dozens of little things that have made the system much more inefficient for me. If you call buying a new piece of hardware for every station "adapting quickly" Then no I can't afford to pour more money into my office every time mac decides to do something stupid like this. And the whole idea that, as busy as I am, I have to relearn basic procedures just because I upgraded my system is ludicrous. It's not like I'm buying a new program. An upgrade is supposed to be an improvement not slow you down and make you spend more money on things to clutter your desk. Have you tried to use bezier curve with a track pad?

<Edited By Host>

Numbsain wrote:

And what business are you in petermac87?

I run a secret Government Lab hidden in the underground caves of Rawanda where we brainstorm ways to annoy particular Apple Users like yourself. We also stockpile scrollbar arrows as a future blackmarket item for those same annoying individuals.

Don't tell anyone! 😉

Pete

It amazes me that Apple has not accepted overwhelming feedback that there are cases when scrollbar arrows are important. My use case is running Outlook on Mac.

When I have the Reading Pane displayed, I have two (or three) scrollable regions on the screen. The arrow keys on the keyboard are associated to whichever window/region/pane is currently selected. Selection of an email message lets me scroll up and down with arrow keys among different messages. I want to click up/down arrow gadgets in the Reading Pane, so I can scroll the actual message. But the selection is in the other pane and there are no scrollbar arrow gadgets. So I click in the message itself at the bottom. Now I can scroll by small amounts with the arrow keys.

Now I want to shift to a new message. I have to click a message in the top pane in order to switch messages. I don't want to look at every message in detail. I want to find another message important to what I'm doing right now. I want to just move down the list looking at the summary info for each message but only seeing the detail for a message I select. Instead I have to select each message in turn. Luckily I've turned off the option to mark messages as read automatically. Else, I'd be even more unhappy.

I imagine there are two warring armies in the Apple Usability committees. The laptop/desktop folks throw things at the tablet/iphone folks, and vice versa. In the end, the tablet/iphone guys get their way because their business is growing faster. Good usability techniques (or at least ones that hundreds of people post wishes for, multiplied for dozens or more of different pages and sites) get printed and rolled up into substitute nerf arrows and launched across at the tablet/iphone guys. Eventually the committee head says "hey, no arrows" and the views of hundreds or thousands of people get dropped in the trash can, never to be debated or considered again.

At the end of the meeting, there are hundreds of Apple developers huddled outside, many with their mac laptops at their side, and also with there tablets/iphones in their hands. The meeting breaks. Half the attendees walk out with their heads hung low, shaking their heads slowly side to side. The huddled masses outside sense immediately what has happened... again. Their heads are now also hung low, shaking slowly side to side. They walk back to their desks and set down their tablets and iphones. They open their laptops/desktops, and start scrolling awkwardly through their email messages, and get back to work. Less productively.

In the end, who wins? Noone, certainly not the user of a mac laptop who has been saying how much he loves using Macs, better than Windows, better than any of the Linux variants (can you say "gnome"), etc.

Give us back our option to turn "scrollbar arrows" on. And heck, give the subchoice of selecting whether they're together at the bottom of the scrollbar or split with up at top and down at bottom. Please! Please! P-LEASE!!

Alan Carwile

It is truly disturbing to see a post from 2011 still be relevant today, and here I am today in 2016 searching for a way to put the arrows back on the scroll bars.

It is a question of functionality, that is arrows do have a purpose under certain circumstances that make their use a time saver. Offering users 'time savers' make them more productive and happier, able to do other things with their life rather than wasting it moving a document up or down in the dysfunctional ways offered (like clicking on a hand and moving the document as much as the window allows, then having to click on the hand again in order to continue to move the document).

The scroll wheel, perfect for zooming in, especially with CAD or photoshop, the scroll bar itself for moving in significant ways, but the arrows are useful for continuing to move when the scroll bar runs out of space as it can do in large CAD files. I need this tool back. There was no reason to remove it in the first place except for an inconsequential aesthetic consideration.

Also, make the scroll bars wider too... on my iMac(s) they are too narrow and hard to click on.

And, the lower right corner to make a window larger or smaller, the area to click on is TOO SMALL. I use accessibility features to make certain things larger, to see, and for mouse movement, so your aesthetic considerations are having a real impact on my productivity, my level of frustration.

You're Apple, just make these features optional already.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Send your feedback at the above link!

<Edited by Host>

Here is another example of the missing scroll bar ARROWS, which is what we are trying to discuss here.

As far as I know, there is no way to get them back.

since then.

I love this one CT 😁 and so relevant to this three year old thread.

Pete

Mac 101