Mac OSX Lion recently came out and one of the things that people either love or hate about the OS is the reverse scrolling. Apple took years and years of mouse knowledge and literally reversed it. In Lion you no longer scroll the scroll wheel on your mouse down to move the page down. You scroll up.
A lot of people hate the new way of scrolling (and, for those people, Apple has made a preference to go back to normal scrolling), but I think, given time, they will see how much sense it actually makes. When you look at a computer screen and really think about it, scrolling the scroll bars really makes no sense. Why are you scrolling bars and not the actual content?
That’s exactly what Apple is thinking with their barless approach. The meat of your computer is the content. That is what you should be focusing on, and not the scroll bar. When you move your finger down on a scroll bar you’re moving the content up, just like you do on phones and tablets. You’re interacting with the content, not a scrollbar. In my opinion this is the way we should be looking at the computer. Computers are no longer tools that spit back information. They are interactive devices, and we need to start thinking of them that way. With multitouch devices such as the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, you really are interacting with computers in a whole new way.
After using the reverse scrolling for a couple weeks, I’m completely used to it. I did have some issues in the beginning because I use Windows 7 at work. Thankfully, someone on Google+ posted how to get reverse scrolling on Windows. It really is quite simple. Just place the script in your Startup folder and now you have reverse scrolling whenever you log into Windows. Scrolling any other way would feel unnatural now.