Skinny Scroll Bars

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.

Sadly, this has also happened to someone I know admire a great deal. More than once.

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.
Scrollbars.gif

So, has Steinberg commented on this? The scrollbars are a major annoyance for me, they slow down work and make me angry.

99% of all programs have a standard width scrollbar, why did Steinberg get the idea of making them impractically small?

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.

So, is this ever going to be acknowledged by Steinberg? Does anyone have news on this?

+1

+2

+3

Trust me… it’s on my list of Annual Requests. Whether or not SB actually -reads- them? Well…

A link to it so we can easily up-vote it would be nice.

I don’t even bother anymore. They wore me out. Uncle.

+1 I agree totally.
Why did they design it like this when it makes working with the program slower.

I thought new versions were all about increased workflow and such…

There isn’t even a scroll bar in the Midi Clock Destinations menu of The Project Synchronization Setup dialog.

Hated these since the moment they appeared. Too fiddly by half. Proper Windows ones please.

…AND ANOTHER THING :slight_smile: 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 :open_mouth:

I like the way you think. Perhaps a Youtube video is the only way to get attention anymore.

*STEINBERG: FIX THE UI OR THIS CAT GETS THE DOUBLE-TAP! I’M NOT BLUFFING! I’LL REALLY DO IT!

Scream and drool for heightened drama.

—JC


*No animals were harmed in the making of this film.


This is not an outrageous, annoying request. :wink: It’s not only the scroll bars, but the zoom tools too.

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…