A wit said of Google Wave “if your project depends on reinventing scrollbars, you are doing something wrong.” But occasionally, just occasionally, one gets to do exactly that.

Under the Ayatana banner, we’ve been on a mission to make the desktop have less chrome and more content. The goal is to help people immerse themselves in their stuff, without being burdened with large amounts of widgetry which isn’t relevant to the thing they are trying to concentrate on. And when it comes to widgetry, there are few things left which take up more space than scrollbars.

For example, I spend plenty of time in a full screen terminal, and it’s lovely to see how clean that experience is on Natty today:

…but that scrollbar on the right seems heavy and outdated. We took inspiration from mobile devices, and started exploring the idea of making scrollbars be more symbolic, and less physical. Something like this:

Of course, since the desktop isn’t often a touch device, we need to think through pointer interactions. We wanted to preserve the idea of keeping content exposed as much as possible, while still providing for pointer interaction when needed. We also decided to drop the “one line scroll” capability, while preserving the ability to page up and down. Take a look at the result:

Overlay Scrollbars in Unity – implementation from Canonical Design on Vimeo.

The design work behind this has been done by Christian Giordano, who worked through the corner cases (literally) and provided a mockup for testing purposes. And the heavy lifting for Natty is being done by the indefatigable Andrea Cimitan, who is currently polishing up a gtk implementation of the concept for the release. Christian put together a blog post on the subject, and a great video which talks through the design process and a few of the challenges and solutions found:

Overlay Scrollbars in Unity from Canonical Design on Vimeo.

Code is available on launchpad, bzr branch lp:ayatana-scrollbar and in a PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ayatana-scrollbar-team/release; sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0

LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=foo gnome-appearance-properties

Well done, guys.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 at 4:57 pm and is filed under design, free software, ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.