CodeBubba

Originally Posted by KickStart

I too am left-handed and don't understand why this simple concept of scroll bars being assignable to left or right as desired, has not been solved by third party developers. Right-handed folks, don't you find it irritating to have to cover the screen when you move your hand over to the left side of the screen to select from the Today menu? This should be a standard feature of all Windows versions, as it affects those with disabilities - those having use of only one hand. Do you think Microsoft will offer this in future Mobile versions, or even Vista, for the 10% of the population that is left-handed, plus those with disabilities? Don't hold your breath... It's one of those simple ideas that Microsoft has chosen not to implement in 20 years.

Hmm ... you know, I've never really thought about that. Obviously, being right-handed myself, it never occurred to me (even as a developer) that someone would want the scroll bar on the left side - but it makes a heck of a lot of sense.

Since scroll bars are typically part of a custom control rather than being a control by themselves (though they exist as separate custom controls as well) their location is dictated by whoever developed the custom control. It is amazing, though, that this wasn't thought of in the early days when the GUI systems were developed. Even SPARC (the ancestor of modern windowed UI's) was right-handed. I doubt that it would have been difficult to develop the controls so a property could be set that would determine the side of the client window that would have the scrolling region. Doing a retrofit of the code now, though, would be a herculean task I'm sure.

I guess there hasn't been enough feedback from the left-handed community to have made this an issue. It's odd that an entire industry would overlook something this fundamental if it were a real problem.

-CB :approve:

PorkRind

Originally Posted by CodeBubba

*snip* Even SPARC (the ancestor of modern windowed UI's) was right-handed. *snip* -CB :approve:

You are probably thinking of X Windows, and the window managers for it (Motif, twm, olvwm, etc). SPARC is a processor architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and used on their hardware.

Interestingly, many X Windows-based applications allowed the user to move scrollbars to the left; one very common application, xterm (a terminal emulator) supports this in virtually all implementations. EMACS, a programmer's editor (and a way of life) also supports the relocation of scrollbars.

Of course, this is all a bit off-topic. As a lefty myself, I'd love to be able to reposition the scroll bars on my X51V.

crispinr

Support for Right-To-Left (RTL) in Compact Framework
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2005/03/rtl-problem.html

Could this information here help?

I'm not a developer - so would love it if somehere could translate into plain-english :)