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Left Sided Windows Scrollbars?
Skin and Blister asks: "Years ago mouse manufacturers realized that not everyone is right handed and (thankfully) created the option of reversing the mouse buttons to accommodate left handed users. Now that laptops (and obviously tablets) have integrated touch technology, the new challenge for south paws is to use a stylus in the left hand to manipulate a scroll bar on the right side of an open window. Does anyone know if there is a way to move scroll bars to the left side of a window in Microsoft Windows XP Pro?"
Buy Nextstep...
Task Mangler
Most people would find such an interface difficult to use... particularly in countries where people read from left to right.
A left-sided scrollbar would require you to constantly drag the mouse back over the top of your working area, despite the fact the cursor is more likely to remain present on the right side of the screen when not being actively used for editing. This is also why you often see tool palettes placed on the left side of a working area, since you are likely going to be very near whatever in your work area required a tool change.
A similarly confusing configuration would be to have your application menus appear at the bottom of the screen and scrolling upward to select the option you need.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Left-handedness is an issue with mice. Some are curved to fit the right hand, or have extra button layouts designed to be operated with the right hand. But I fail to see any connection between left-handedness and the aesthetic issue of which side the scrollbars are on. Your left hand is equally capable of moving the mouse left or right. The desire (vs. need) to have the scrollbars on the left is felt by enough people that the X Window Sytem provides this, but I think it unlikely Microsoft will ever go to the effort of making it an option in Windows.
I was looking for some code that might do it....haven't found any yet, but here are some leads:
s p
Start with something like this: http://www.codeproject.com/win32/overrideparams.a
Then, override the creation of anything of class "Scrollbar" to be at position 0 instead of position X.
Just some ideas.
Layne
As a lefty, the best kept secret is that we have had the advantage for a long time now. Only we can point and click/drag things on the screen with our right hand while using a pen or typing with the left. Right handed people can't do that. For them, the right hand is the boss. It has to do the mouse, type, write, but can never do all at the same time.
Of course some of those bastards know this. That's why they add the option to swap the mouse buttons around. It's all evil conspiracy to mess with our heads and take away our advantage.
Oz
Scrollbars should die. They are a terrible interface for scrolling, and they should be replaced with something better. The arrow buttons on the top and bottom are useless, the bars are way too thin as mouse targets on today's high resolution screens, yet they take up two whole sides of whatever you're scrolling, the size of the scroller part is often too small, the changing size of the scroller is often inconsistent, the behavior of releasing the drag when the mouse moves too far away is braindead (only Windows does this thankfully), the pageup/pagedown functionality when clicking on an empty area of the scrollbar is unreliable because it stops working when the scroller reaches the mouse pointer, they are *not* at all intuitive (though people have learned to use them), I could go on and on.
The mouse scroll wheel was a step in the right direction but the implementation sucks there too. It should scroll continuously instead of clicking by lines, it should control the thing under the mouse instead of having its own weird focus rules (again Windows stands alone here), and pushing the wheel button should give scrolling control directly to the mouse Y-axis instead of that weirdo autoscroll thing.
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.
Actually they are not 'right' and 'left', they are 'primary' and 'secondary'. However, they are commonly referred to as right and left - but that's typical in a right-hand dominated society.
Even Wikipedia avoids the sidedness distinction in an article about contextual menus and this one specifically about mice.
Replacing the entire operating system just for one little quality-of-life feature is like replacing your entire house just for the new garage door opener.
(And you all thought I was going to drop a Bad Car Analogy on you.)
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