When Apple released OS X Lion the scrolling direction changed, they call it “natural scrolling”. Natural scrolling is based on the touch based scrolling used in iOS on the iPhone and IPad. There is an option to change this back to the old direction, despite this, there is a lash back that produced a plethora of articles on how “wrong” it was.
I personally like change. If something new is presented to me and it does not go against my core values then I tend to give it a shot. Having used an iPhone since June of 2007 adapting to natural scrolling has been easier to do. My motor functions still want to scroll the other way from but I have begun to look at natural scrolling in a new way.
Yesterday I started to think about scrolling and how it might apply to the physical world. This led me to think of viewing a paper when the field of view is smaller than the item being viewed. Natural scrolling changes the item being scrolled; before you moved the scroll bars in the direction you wanted the document to go. Now you move the document in the direction you want it to go. With OS X Lion hiding the visual scroll bars unless you are need them, like the iPhone, you no longer have them to move. So moving the document does become the more natural thought process.
