The skinny scroll bar is not only hard to use, but can lead to disasters in your mix, it happened to me once.
Trying to horizontally scroll in my MIXER window I accidentally dragged and dropped all settings from one track to another and BAM, overwritten all settings and plugins from that track.
And since there is still no UNDO function on mixer I had to mix that track all over again.
Having just recently bought Cubase 8 and I must say I find the scrollbars so thin that they are nearly impossible to use. Being a Samplitude user they have scrollbars nicely implemented, not only can you use them to scroll left and right or up-and-down but also you can grab the edges in order to zoom in or out.
like many steinberg UI issues, i think it may be the gap between the creators (who aren’t fulltime users of their program) – and those 12hr/day users where each extra click or mouse movement counts and starts to add up.
…AND ANOTHER THING there are a few of us who have been loyal Steinberg customers since Atari/Pro24 days and we’re knocking on a bit! Our eyesight isn’t what it was. Even with my 40" main screen and 1600/900 resolution I’m finding the scroll bars fiddly to deal with and sometimes I take my frustration out on the cat. Why can’t we adjust them? PLEASE SAVE MY CAT. And my poor old eyes
I think the most important thing that Steinberg GUI designers need to realize is that most of us don’t have the screens very close to us. My screens are about 120 cm away from where I sit, as I want to avoid them becoming obstacles acoustically - and I consider my setup to be tiny compared to what many others use.
I think the GUI designers need to consider sitting about 120 - 150 cm away (think of consoles, controllers, and the reasonable distance from the speakers for mixing) and imagine the users to be doing long hours (their attention level won’t be very high toward the end of the day). IMHO, the GUI should be designed so that we can let our minds be somewhat lazy. Needing to tip-toe around GUI to avoid accidentally clicking on something we are not intending to is very taxing on mind while we want to concentrate on our creation.
If we take the scroll bar on mixer as an example - the users are interested in accessing the channel xx, and that’s the reason why they grab the scroll bar on the mixer. The “grabbing the scroll bar” part is not their goal, and therefore most of them won’t slow down enough to be very precise on something they are not focusing on.
Please think about the goal of the users first when designing the GUI, and not only how nice it looks.
Totally agree.
Good to hear that there are many others who are equally annoyed with the scrollbars. Those, along with a bunch of other GUI things, are unfortunatly what is still making me stay away from Cubase 8.0.20 most of the time and use 6.5.5 instead.
It would be interesting to have a Q&A with the GUI design people at Steinberg some time to get a grasp of what is actually going on in their minds when they make certain (bad) decisions…