828 One of the things I still miss about the Classic OS is Eden Sherry's wonderful Scrollability add-on (it does still work in OS X Classic Mode with Classic applications only). Basically, Scrollability allows you to scroll through documents and other open windows without touching the mouse button -- a facility that is a non-trivial blessing when you have mousing and typing pain issues to contend with. The beauty of Scrollability is that it just runs unobtrusively in the background, adding automatic scrolling to any application that you don't deliberately exclude.

I've tried several OS X scrolling utilities, but none has come close to the slickness and usability of Scrollability — until now.

Etienne Henri's ClickScroll 1.0 is the latest entry in the field, and while it quite doesn't duplicate Scrollability's functionality, it is the most satisfactory alternative I've encountered yet.

ClickScroll provides cursor commanded scrolling. The default setting for ClickScroll is to be enabled only for multi-button mice, by clicking on the scroll wheel. If you have a single-button mouse, you can setup a shortcut that will trigger ClickScroll with a simple click.

When you toggle ClickScroll, a floater appears in you application window with up and down arrows. When you move the mouse cursor above or below the floater, the document will scroll in the respective direction automatically with no clicking necessary. Scrollability works this way too, but without the floater. You just configure the program to auto-scroll when the cursor enters the top or bottom X% of the document window.

In some ways I suppose ClickScroll has an edge, especially for folks who find global autoscrolling annoying in certain circumstances. I've been using scrollability for so long that it is just second nature for me, but being able to turn the feature on and off with a click is convenient.

ClickScroll worked fine in every type of document I tried it with — text, email, browser windows, etc, toggled by a scroll wheel click from my MacMice Mouse. Scrolling is slower, and not quite as smooth as with Scrollability, but that may be an OS X issue.

Nice work Mr. Henri, and I hope development will continue with perhaps more features and configuration options.

System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.3 or better

ClickScroll is a €5 shareware. The evaluation version can be used for 30 days.

For more information, visit:
http://www.macgu.net/clickscroll/index.html

Charles W. Moore

Tags: OSX Odyssey ï

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