Scrollvetica

Scrollvetica is a free app from my friend Jim Correia, which he wrote while using the developer seeds of Lion:

If you spend part of your time living in the future, with default Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad settings, you may find it difficult to switch between the future and the present and maintain any sort of input device sanity.

Scrollvetica is a simple hack which inverts all scrolling events on Snow Leopard such that the effective scroll direction is in the direction of finger movement.

My number one Lion tip: No matter how wrong it feels, stick with the new trackpad scrolling direction. Give it a week. At first it will drive you far crazier than you expect, but then you’ll get used to it.

I tested the Lion seeds on my secondary Mac, a then-brand-new-but-as-of-today-not-so-new 11-inch MacBook Air. The inverted trackpad scrolling drove me nuts. But after a week or so, it felt right. If you’re going to be using both Lion and Snow Leopard for now, running Scrollvetica on Snow Leopard will help you switch.

(There’s also Scroll Reverser, a free app from Pilotmoon that pretty much does the same thing. And if you’re stuck using Windows, maybe this will work for you there.)

★ Wednesday, 20 July 2011