Scrolling, Mad Bee Style

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

Traditional scrolling schemes require a fair bit of hand-eye co-ordination to use them well. The best I have yet encountered, the wheel-mouse scheme used in Opera, still obscures your text with a black target. I would like you to try implementing my scrolling scheme in a modified TextArea.

I call it mad bee scrolling, because the cursor bangs into the edges of the window, as if it were an angry insect trying to escape.

To scroll, you press the middle mouse button, then bang it into one of the four walls of the window. If you bang it into the top wall, you scroll up. The deeper you bang the cursor into the wall, the faster you go. As soon as you let go of the middle mouse button, or return the cursor to the central part of the window, the scrolling stops.

The difficulty is, I don’t think using only standard Java tools, you have the low level control of the cursor needed to confine it, and to control its motion while in the wall so that you have to move the cursor a great distance to penetrate the wall even a little. You would likely have to resort to native classes to commandeer low level control of the mouse. It might be best to tackle this project on a platform that supports mouse confinement.

You also might zoom in an zoom out on some point by pressing and holding the left or right mouse button somewhere on the image. The idea is you see some detail of interest, and can easily zoom in for a look witout fiddling around with scrollbars to try to find it again at the new magnification.

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