Scroll Reversal

I installed Mac OS X Lion on my computer at home, but we have been discouraged from doing so at work. Thus I’m in the position of going between Lion and Snow Leopard between home and work, and while they have some differences in features and functionality that I miss while I am at work, there is one that is tricky and hard to deal with.

Scroll reversal.

You see, in Lion, Apple is trying to bring the style of scrolling found on its touch screen devices (the iPhone and iPad) to its desktop OS. So when using your Macbook’s trackpad, or the mouse’s scroll wheel, the direction stuff moves on your screen has been reversed.

Previously we pulled our fingers down to scroll down a webpage, for example. But if you were using an iPhone or iPad, you would actually drag your finger up to scroll, because the touchscreen technology gives you the sensation of actually grabbing and moving the page.

You can switch the scroll direction back to normal, but I’ve decided to give it a chance and after a weekend of Lion usage I’ve gotten fairly used to where my stuff is going when I scroll. But when I go to work, I get messed up because you can’t reverse the scrolling in Snow Leopard – at least not without some help.

That’s where this gem comes in. It’s a lightweight menu bar item that lets you reverse your scrolling and quickly switch between the two if you wish. It’s perfect for me right now as I try to retrain my brain to reversed (or “natural” as Apple is either rightfully or wrongfully calling it) scrolling.

So go download it if you’re trying to learn to reverse your scrolling habits on a non-Lion Mac machine.