The lion and the trackpad

Apple has released a version of the next version of Mac OS X, code-named Lion, to developers. That’s a fairly standard step on the release road for the company’s OS updates. In an article at AppleInsider, though, I noticed this interesting tidbit:

The new multi-touch gestures are designed to take advantage of the larger click TrackPads on more recent MacBook models, which could make them more difficult with older notebooks. Another strange quirk, people familiar with the developer preview said, is two-finger scrolling is reversed: to scroll down on a webpage in Safari, users must push up with their fingers, which is the opposite of how it works in Snow Leopard, but the same directly as scrolling on the iPad.

I’m pretty sure that nobody at Apple, or AppleInsider for that matter, reads this blog. Anyone who has read my previous post on scrolling from March of last year, though, will know that the change doesn’t feel like a strange quirk to me. It feels like the right direction to go, and Apple is clearly addressing the collision between old and new interaction paradigms.