AppFlow

With swiping and sliding, everyone is always telling us that the mobile platform is a ‘better way to interact with the web’.  Whether or not this is true is a debate for another time, but when pondering this point I did notice that on the iOS, scrolling is awesome!

Everything from the way you can flick the screen, down to the way it slowly comes to a halt is well designed and you cannot debate the fact that it looks good!

Now, while the standard MacBook doesn’t have a touchscreen, it does sport a rather nice trackpad.  Having played with Dan’s new MacBook I know the aluminium ones are awesome and my trusty several-generation-old black MacBook is not bad either.  The point being – trackpads!

Scrolling Features

Smart Scroll is a nifty little app that brings the scrolling of an iPhone to the trackpad of your everyday mac user.

That’s not all it does though! Oh no, the scrolling controllability does not end there!  Smart Scroll lives up to it’s name by providing five separate methods of scrolling, along with some other useful features alongside!

Super Scroll

Those of you lucky enough to own a new iMac, where your only method of scrolling is the Magic Mouse, may skip this feature!  Super scroll does what the Magic Mouse drivers calls “Scrolling with momentum” (Called “Coasting” in Super Scroll).  This is very similar to the iPhone scrolling, and Magic Mouse momentum, with one exception:  Customisation!

My favourite feature on here is to scroll faster when holding option.  This is very useful for quickly scrolling through a large document/PDF to the bit you know is somewhere in the middle!  This feature can also enhance the Magic Mouse experience, as well as be applied to a Multi-Touch Trackpad, or a Standard Scroll wheel.

Auto Scroll

Auto scroll is a feature designed to make reading an article a more pleasurable experience, with a lot more reading and a lot less scrolling.  This works with the new “Safari Reader” in Safari 5 and also with Quick Look.  Simply Open an article, tap the option key, and the page begins to scroll.

The speed can be adjusted while your article is scrolling and you can also skip forward, and jump back using the down and up arrow keys respectively.  This is a nice feature, although I still haven’t got the speed set right for my reading speed, and usually get annoyed because it is too slow/fast.  I can, however, see how this would be a very handy feature.

Hover Scroll

I’ll be honest, I like hover scroll!  It is at times very annoying, but when it works, it works so well I hardly notice it!

Hover scroll quite simply scrolls the page if your mouse is near the edge, be it Top, Bottom, Left or Right.  The closer to the edge you are, the faster it scrolls.  Using this is incredibly easy and, most of the time, works exactly as you expect it to.  Occasionally, however, your mouse is too close to the bottom of the screen by mistake.

As is becoming a theme with Smart Scroll, the margins can be customised to suit your needs.

If you suffer from RSI, this feature could potentially be really useful for you, reducing the strain on your scrolling finger where it is not needed.

Grab Scroll

Trackerball users, did you think the guys at Smart Scroll had forgotten you?  Well fear not, for I can see no reason to use grab scroll, unless you have trackerball! (Or a mouse with no scroll wheel.)

Once activated, grab scroll turns your cursor into a little hand that can be used to ‘grab’ the page and move it around (X and Y axis support).  You can also coast in grab  scroll  by flicking the page.

For the purposes of testing, I located a trackerball and can confirm that it makes scrolling much easier.  I also found hover scroll useful while browsing with a trackerball, although not as easy as the grab scroll option.

Scroll Keys

As the name suggests, scroll keys allows you to use combinations of your control, command, option and shift keys to scroll around a page.  I can see this being useful if you only had a keyboard… but why are you buying this app if you only have a keyboard?  Sure, the controls it gives do extend the use of the arrow keys and the tab key, but I can’t see it being that useful.

Additional Features

The most useful additional feature is to be able to set up completely different configurations for different apps.  This turns this ‘nifty little’ program into a very powerful one, that pretty much irons out a lot of it’s own faults.

For example, Super Scroll really doesn’t work at all well in iTunes.  It makes it jump all over the place and almost makes iTunes unusable.  This feature can, however, quite easily be turned off in Smart Scroll.  Simple feature – yet brilliant!

Conclusion

Smart Scroll is an application that gives you much more power over your scrolling.  It installs as a system preferences pane and has scrolling methods for many different needs, including trackerball friendly grab scroll, and RSI friendly hover scroll.

It is available from it’s makers at Marcmoini.com.  It costs $19 (Roughly £12.50) and a free trial is available.

A big big Thank You to Florian Gimps who submitted today’s app for review via our new Submit an App feature!