a bit of navigation experiment

Yesterday, I tried submitting a link to Rita to /r/scifi. Two of the three comments I got were basically “I hate horizontal scrolling because my brain is hardwired to flick the mouse wheel”.

I’d had similar comments before, and the ‘smooth scroll to next page on click’ is an attempt to fix that. But evidently it doesn’t. So I’m trying something new: you can still use the scroll bars or a two-fingered scroll on your Mac trackpad, but you can also click and drag with your mouse.

If you’ve got a moment to spare, would you have a look at the first chapter and see how it works for you? Thanks!

(Current status of next page: no progress, still dealin’ with stressing about book 2 printing.)

11 thoughts on “a bit of navigation experiment

  1. Well, I don’t have a mac, so I can’t scroll sideways. And I can’t click and drag (it just drags a copy of the screen). Clicking shuffles it forward 1 page, and left and right arrows work. I can also grab the bar and click and drag that, if that’s what you mean, but I can’t drag the image.

    My difficulty/problem is that I have to scroll up and down to see the whole page, and then scroll side to side to get to the next page, making it difficult. So I’d never scroll sideways, because it would be too annoying to switch scrolling up/down then sideways over and over. I’d just click, and scroll up and down to see that page, and then click again.

  2. Clicking and dragging sometimes tries to drag and drop the image and sometimes drags the page. Sometimes when I let go, it stops dragging and sometimes the page stays linked to the mouse pointer.

    However, never go back from the horizontal format to the “single page” format. You can’t see the connections between the pages in the isolated single-page format.

    Running fully-patched Chrome under Linux.

    • It is possible but that might be kind of unwieldy to distribute! Right now my plan is to print the omnibus at a larger size, with two landscape pages side by side, rather than the “one landscape page = two printed portrait pages” arrangement I have going on right now. If you’ve seen the printed version of “Battlepug”, pretty much exactly like that except with less barbarians and dogs involved.

      I also suspect that an unusual format like that would cost an arm and a leg to print. And this thing already costs twice what it normally would because of the spot gloss throughout the whole book.

  3. Firefox on Mac, also having the weird tries-to-drag-the-image-sorta-gets-into-a-scrolling-state issue that others have reported.

    • oh, also, click-to-drag-scrolling isn’t particularly universal or ergonomic or whatever, and I don’t think that will really help anything. People really just want to use the scrollwheel to scroll, because that’s what they’re really good at.

  4. Look. This is why God invented arrow keys. They work just fine. The whole mouse scrolling problem is really unnecessary.

  5. (Windows 8.1) In Chrome it works pretty smoothly, although shift+scroll also works, which is very nice. In Firefox 28 and IE11, it’s pretty glitchy – keeps trying to drag the images instead of the page, jerks around a lot.
    Arrow keys do work fine (unless you have a laptop without them).

  6. yea just clicking on the arrows works fine also i just want to say i love your webcomic it is amazingly awesume and so well writen :) when do u undate also dont let other people tell you how to make your webcomic it works great with the way it is poeple will get used to different things hapens all the time

    • Thanks! The official schedule for this comic is “aim for two pages a week, don’t fret when life gets in the way”, so basically subscribe to the RSS feed or the twitter or facebook and you’ll know when new pages happen.

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