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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?"
Learn Ambidexterity. I am right handed but learned to do many things with ether hand. It's not that hard once you get used to it. If you really have a hard time, use both hands (ie, 2 hands on a mouse/pen) and change to just the other. You'll be using both soon. It can really impress people. :P
Great Intellect...
Scroll Lock, then use arrows. As a lefty, I tried seeking software solutions, but just like meatspace, learning to work around things is easier than stocking up on left-handed crap. I use my mousewheel, and I dare say I hit home, end, pageup, pagedown more often than most right-handers. As for the left-handed mouse having the buttons switched, WTF is that about? I haven't found a game where my middle finger can't cope with the clicks yet, is that the supposed benefit of the switch?
As another lefty, I know what you mean. Nintendo's Brain Age, which is centered around entering data via the touchscreen while reading text on the other screen, does exactly what you suggest -- it flips the screen upside down if you tell it you're left handed. Unfortunately, most DS titles do not offer this feature.
On Windows, if you are using a Right-to-left language (such as Hebrew) the scroll bar appears on the left side. It should be possible to customize any locale to put the scroll bar on the left. You'll probably have to resource hack your locale file.
http://brandonbloom.name
Then don't use the left side pages. It's worse to have to write all your notes on the backs of pages, and leave the fronts blank, or perhaps craziest of all, start in the back and work forward. It's like some sort of disgustingly watered down Da Vinci Code. "Oh, You'll Never EVER figure out what order the pages are in now!"
And then you get those terrible stadium-style desks, with the arm rest on the right side, so you have to support your elbow for an entire lecture, or leave your elbow jutting embarassingly out into the isle.
And lefties can forget about using any pen or pencil that smudges. Your hand drags all over everything you've just written, so not only is your writing deemed sloppy and messy and worthy of only the finest chicken huts, but the side of your hand gets covered with a inky splotch, something akin to an organic Jackson Pollock.
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
- The menus of all apps are on the top left, the furthest away from the scrollbar - just like righties have to use;
- The start menu for Windows/Linux distros that I've used are on the bottom left, the furthest away from the scrollbar - just like righties have to use
- The menus of most web sites are on the left, the furthest away from the scrollbar - just like righties have to use;
- I could go on, but everybody gets my point...
If you find compy interfaces tough to use, it's not because you're a leftie, it's because these interface wrinkles haven't been ironed out yet for righties OR lefties.Yes, everyone who uses Objective-C is aware of categories. And no, your shared object technique likely won't work in this case.
First of all, the user would likely be needing to modify a class that has already subclassed NSScrollView. Most significant Objective-C/Cocoa applications do this, so finding just the name of that NSScrollView subclass may not always be a trivial task. It may be possible to determine that classname using the strings utility, or nm (if the binary itself hasn't been stripped). But for closed source applications, it's difficult to ensure you're overriding the correct methods of the correct classes for the behavior that you want. Overall, it's not a task somebody who knows little of Objective-C, Cocoa, and UNIX development would want to do.
Another problem, when using categories, is that you need the header file describing the interface of the class you're adding methods to. If it's a closed source application, that's likely not at the user's disposal.
Even with what may be described as a "perfect" scenario, with NSScrollView being directly used by accessible source code, may be problematic. When it comes to using inheritance, as proposed by John, you again need the source code of the program in order to make use of the subclass of NSScrollView. You'd have to change all of the calls to [[NSScrollView alloc] init] to [[NostalgicScrollView alloc] init]. I'm sure it could be done by patching a binary, but that would be a rather time consuming task, and would require somebody with some skill.
Yes, Objective-C is better than many languages with respect to this sort of a problem. But it's not at all as easy to fix with closed source applications as you or John would like us to believe.
The solution is actually really simple. Just learn to write upside down.
I am strongly left-handed but when I was introduced to this new-fangled mouse thingy, I always moused with my right hand, probably because that was how my desk was laid out at first, and was not very comfortable mousing with the left. Unfortunately, after a few years of intensive Doom-playing (LH on keyboard, RH on mouse), I got a touch of RSI in my right writst which meant that mousing right-handed became painful and I now mouse exclusively with my left hand. (I only switch over when playing a FPS.)
Anyway, to the point in hand: I'm well aware of and irritated by the "dextrism" that pervades manufacures goods (numeric keypad on the right is my pet peeve) but honestly I had never given the position of the scroll bar a second thought until I read this article. It's just a waste of effort to have to acquire a left-handed version of every common product, and if you've got to the point where you're complaining about where the scroll bar is then you're just overdoing it. I mean, mouse pointer too far from the scroll bar? Give it a nudge and - look! - it's over there, near the scroll bar! Problem solved! Or use the wheel and forget about it. It's not even clear that this is a case of dextrism - the scroll bar has to be somewhere; this is more likely to be influenced by text reading direction than the majority dominant hand.
You have to be able to adapt to the environment you find yourself in. Putting up with default computing environments makes you more comfortable when using random machines and makes your machine a *lot* easier to use should anyone need to do something quickly on it over your shoulder. I've got a left-handed colleague who swaps his mouse buttons and I have to help him with stuff on his computer from time to time. Just can't adapt to it, no matter how many times I use it.
pi = 2*|arg(God)|
When your Windows locale is for a right-to-left language, the scroll bars, menus and everything is reversed and on the opposite side too. This works in pretty much all applications.
So, Windows does support it. The question is, how do you enable it in an English left-to-right OS?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC