How much do you think about scrolling windows on your Mac? Until Mac OS X Lion, probably not much. The scroll bar goes up. The scroll bar goes down. Click on the bar with a mouse and it goes where? Up or down, respectively. Ditto for trackpad swiping. Mac OS X Lion is the first real scrolling change to hit the Mac in years. And yet there’s even a better way.
The Scroll Gets Smart
Smart Scroll is a Mac app that provides extra functionality and improved functions to scrolling. How can you improve scrolling?
How about this. Hover the mouse pointer near the top or bottom of a scrollable window. It scrolls up or down, respectively. Smart Scroll also has a built-in, hands-free scrolling, which is perfect for long articles in Safari Reader or long PDFs (you set the speed of the scroll).
Smart Scroll also gives iPhone reverse scrolling to non-Mac OS X Lion users. It also seems to feel like a smoother scroll than Apple’s own scrolling efforts.
Controls are a bit complex in Smart Scroll. Set up Super Scroll and adjust the coasting and speed. Hover Scroll is edge sensitive. Move close to the edge and the window scrolls up or down faster. This feature alone is worth the price of admission.
Auto Scroll takes some getting used to. Open a page and it scrolls automatically when the option key is hit. But you can adjust the scroll speed, up or down (you can go backwards, too) by using the up or down key on your Mac keyboard.
Grab Scroll is a function specifically to grab and move a window up or down, left or right. It’s like swiping, but for mouse users.
Smart Scroll has a few more features which you’ll find useful, but one thing is missing, and that’s the ability to precise scroll in Lion. By default, Lion’s scroll bars mimic the iPhone, which has a reverse scroll effect from the Mac in Snow Leopard. That took a week to get used to, but feels fine now.
What’s missing is the small arrow keys at the top and bottom of the scroll bar which made for precise scrolling, instead of the jerks and fits which is the way in Lion.
Smart Scroll brings some of that back in Hover Scroll and Super Scroll, but I miss the arrow buttons.