Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Flip the screen upside down!
As a lefty, I experience these sorts of problems on a daily basis. Spiral notebooks are a pain, scissors are impossible, and I worry about my efficiency on my Nintendo DS. I lose a substancial number of Bells every day in Animal Crossing. Such a waste!
Those little things no righty ever thinks about. Heck, grab your favorite pencil or pen, hold it in your right hand, and read the markings on the pencil. If they're right side up, you've got yourself a right handed pen. Switch to the left side, and the letters are upside down! How disorienting.
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
Left-Handed Linux could get ~10% of the desktop market!
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
But the original submitter was hinting at using a tablet PC and a stylus, which would cause trouble if your left arm is blocking the screen while reaching across it to move the scrollbar.
- Move "Sig". For great justice!
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)|