As Apple has happily announced that there were over 1 million downloads of its OS X 10.7 Lion update in the first day itself, I’m fairly sure that there are several thousand people who are pulling their hair out over the change in scrolling direction. If you haven’t found out yet, Apple has switched the scrolling direction in Lion, which mimics the scrolling direction of iOS devices, calling it natural scrolling. While it makes sense of touchscreen devices, it feels a little weird when you’re not actually “touching” the document that you’re trying to scroll. If you want to switch the scrolling direction back to what it originally was, all you to have to is go to “System Preferences->Trackpad->Scroll & Zoom->Scroll direction: natural” and uncheck it (as seen in the picture above).
In my view, this is a typical “Steve Jobs knows best” move by Mr. Apple himself. The move itself can be seen as being very arrogant, or a daring visionary, and I’m fairly sure Steve Jobs has been called both. Then again, since Apple is now richer than the US government, you can’t really say that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
To be honest, while it’s a little confusing at first, I’m slowly getting used to it, so I don’t feel the issue so much anymore. That being said, it’s still very confusing for me in Excel and TweetDeck, especially horizontal scrolling in Excel, but I suppose I’ll get used to it.
Hopefully this makes your Mac experience a pleasant one!
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