It seems to me that if I want to zoom an image in and out I would move the scroll wheel forward to “push” the image away from me, making it smaller and pull the scroll wheel toward me in order to enlarge the image.
However, this is wrong in just about everything, starting with 3D games in the early nineties.
Is there a magic setting I can use to fix this? It is most frustrating and non-intuitive.
Well the other way is also intuitive, you increase the magnification by “increasing” the scroll wheel. That’s how it works in gerbview, gerbv, the online tracespace.io viewer and also online maps. It all depends on what you are used to. But no, I don’t know of a switch to reverse. Perhaps there is some app launcher setting that can change the mapping per application.
Edit: Looking at it in UX terms, I think the difference stems from which object you regard the wheel as operating on. In the game version, you regard the wheel as operating on yourself, pushing you away as you push the wheel forwards. In the other version, the wheel is operating on the object and increasing the wheel increases the “size” of the object.
Surprisingly, thinking of it this way helped me instantly. I think I can deal with that. If not I can add the feature to an AutoIt script that already performs various hotkey functions on my system.
Thanks for your comment.
I zoom in by pushing the scrollwheel towards the monitor, so it’s “closer”, and zoom out by pulling it back.
To scroll a web page up you pull back on the scroll wheel - the web page screen moves in the same direction as the front of the scroll wheel - this is intuitive. Document scrolling works the same way. I can’t get my head around Google Earth and so many other apps which are non-intuitive when it comes to zooming. Up/Down buttons in numeric input boxes are nonsensical too. Apparently this is just me. It’s only been nineteen years for Google Earth, eventually I’ll get used to it.
It’s seldom used but handy once in a while when the alternative is to edit the number when you just want to increase or decrease it a little.
I was viewing a weather map. If you push the wheel forward you ‘dive’ just like you would with the stick on an airplane. I don’t want anyone confusing my pilot with alternate views. It’s all relative. 
I use a Mac.
I too prefer (and will only use) mouse with Zoom and Scroll in direction that makes sense to me. To solve this, I UNCHECK the Scroll Direction to Natural
That’s interesting. Not available in Windoze 7 of course. I imagine this would then break some of the actions which already seem natural to me, or not. Moot, as I will never have a Mac.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
