Despite being a heavy cell phone user for more than 25 years, it only recently occurred to me that vertical navigation on most phones is inverted when compared to traditional computers. You swipe down to navigate upward, and up to navigate downward. I recently spent time using a MacBook, which apparently defaults to this “natural” scrolling (mobile-style), and I was completely thrown off by it.
I’ve been using natural scrolling on a couple of my own desktops ever since, mostly as a mental exercise, and I wondered…how many of you folks prefer this method?
I noticed this in video games rather than on-screen text scrolling. Some of them had a weapon selection, but instead had mouse-wheel-down “decrease” the weapon slot, and mouse-wheel-up “increase” it. However, the game also used the mouse wheel for other things, thus changing it to my preference had some unexpected side effect.
In any case, mouse-wheel to scroll view works because of the mouse-pointer paradigm. Move both mouse-wheel and mouse in the same direction, and the pointer is further along the content. Move them in opposite directions, and the pointer tends to hold position relative to content.