What drives me NUTS is not just the skinny scrollbars, but the absolute -waste- of space.
The actual scrollbar is a paltry 16px. Barely larger than standard reading text.
But what takes it to the criminal is that right next to it is this fat, border area which is EVEN WIDER and does -nothing- but sit there looking ‘rounded’.
The easy solution is simple: Get rid of the vanity border.
The beauty of this solution (all modesty aside) is that it doesn’t require re-positioning or re-drawing -anything-. All ya gotta do is give up on that ‘chrome bumper’ to make room for the proper sized scroll bar.
I doubt many users would even notice the difference at first glance… except that ‘somehow’ the program had instantly gotten easier to use.
This could mean that they get rid of any dead space used to actually be able to focus a window. Some the whole program will be a wall of clickable-ness.
MixConsole is already that way. But that has nothing to do with the scrollbars. It’s a UX rant for another day.
Basically, all the UX issues with Cubase come down to one thing: touch. They want Cubase to be ‘touchable’. And it’s impossible to reconcile the needs of keyboard/mouse users -and- touch users in one UI… at least not for a complex program that requires constant interaction. Just ask Microsoft.
Completely agree. The scrollbars are too small and not consistent, design-wise, with anything else.
And you’re right, it’s an obvious attempt at diminishing them in preparation for touch, but I think it’s the wrong approach.
Even with touch, the user will want to touch the scrollbars, as drag-scroll in an Arranger with all its features, will be like walking on eggshells when you just want to scroll.
Sure, the OS is supposed to capture the difference between a scroll and tap before it’s passed to the app, but it’s not perfect and Cubase will probably have to invent some of their own touch libs (or extend them).
They should make them bigger and touchable.
It’s why Safari hiding scrollbars on OS X desktops is a poor, irritating design choice.
(At least they’re not hiding the scrollbars like Safari! Be thankful for that.)
This, combined with the fact the Arranger’s track area won’t “just scroll” via the mousewheel (it will stop on dropdowns – and even inadvertently change values of automation) makes scolling in the arrange window not effortless.
Clean and uncluttered is good, but not when it removes a basic feature like scrolling.
The irony is that those fiddley little 1px hairline scroll tracks + little rounded scrollbars (that are slightly translucent for no reason) are neither clean looking nor uncluttered.
They’re too high contrast and scintillating, too.
They show no percentage of what’s off-screen information.
And where there’s tons of fussy rollover states in the Mix Console, the one place a rollover state would actually be nice, is on the scrollbar and scroll track (and it’s not there).
There are way too many 1 pixel hairlines in the Arranger; scroll tracks, beat divider lines, track separators, automation, arranger chain label frames.
I think making the scrollbar just bigger would bother no one negatively, there is so much space wasted for fancy looking edges and whatnot, and the one thing you actually have to work with is skinned down to almost nothing. On today’s 24inch screens, I think we GOT to have the space for a scrollbar that you can actually hit with your mouse easily. Please, ergonomics before style, or ergonomics with style, but not style before ergonomics.
