Apple’s explanation (and seemingly, justification) for this atrocity of a feature is that “content should move in the same directions as your finger”. Now that’s all well and good, except for one thing; there is no “finger” when using a mouse. Touch- and mouse-driven are distinct input paradigms.

Apple is correct in that in a touch-driven system content should indeed track in the same direction as the user’s finger moves. If a hypothetical touch-based interface were ever released which scrolled content in the opposite direction of the user’s finger, then people would say that it was broken. And rightly so. Moving content in the same direction as the touch is the intuitive operating mode of a touch interface.

Similarly, moving content in the opposite direction of the scroll (or more accurately, moving the scrollbar in the direction of the scroll) is the intuitive operating mode for a mouse-driven interface. And it follows that Apple’s mouse-driven interface in Lion is just as broken as that hypothetical touch-driven interface would be. By Apple’s logic scrollbars themselves should also be inverted, tracking from the bottom of the scrollbar to the top as the content scrolls from top to bottom. Confused yet? Apple’s blunder here is that they have conflated mouse-driven input with touch-driven input, without bothering to translate properly between the two.

As an interesting aside, a comparable analog to touch-style scrolling does exist in the mouse-driven paradigm; the drag operation. You’ve probably seen it in things like Adobe PDF documents, and it can also be observed on any scrollbar. In the drag operation you choose an anchor-point, and then that anchor point moves in the same direction that you move, and it all intuitively makes sense. The problem with scrolling using a scroll-wheel is that it has no anchor point from the user’s point of view (they have done nothing to nominate one, and the UI does nothing to indicate that one has been chosen). In the mouse-driven paradigm, scrolling is a distinct operation from dragging, and by conflating the two Apple has broken their interface. At least until they start incorporating a touch-screen into every computer they sell.

If Apple’s position is to be taken seriously, then we must accept that the current cursor position must always represent where the user’s “finger” is. There’s one major problem with that, however. With a mouse and cursor, the cursor never leaves the screen. And if the user’s finger is in constant contact with the screen, then why should there be a separate scroll operation at all? It would logically follow (since mouse-driven == touch-driven and cursor == finger in Apple’s world) that since a touch-point exists, and since it is moving, the content (all of it, everywhere) should simply scroll whenever I move the mouse (all the time, everywhere). But of course that is nonsense, and so is Apple’s “natural scrolling” mouse behavior. The mouse cursor is not a finger, it does not represent a finger, and its location is not where your finger is touching. Mouse-driven and touch-driven are different modes of operation, with different intuitive behaviors.

Thankfully, you can turn off “natural” scrolling and rid your OS of its nonsense. I’ll be happy to turn it back on when my mouse is replaced with a touch-screen display, but until that day comes you can forget about it. Apple, please stop trying to convince me that moving my mouse cursor around the screen is supposed to be the same thing as dragging my finger all over a touch screen. It isn’t, and I’m not stupid enough to be convinced that it is.