Having and working with a few hundred Mac add-on utilities I tend to be judicious about those I use everyday. Whatever the utility, it must add something to my moment-by-moment experience, it must be reasonably priced, and it must be stable and dependable. Three of the basic features in Smart Scroll fill my requirements.
Scroll What? Where?
Scrolling is a basic function of Macs and PCs in the 21st century. Most of us scroll down on web pages, email messages, documents, spreadsheets, and so on. Scrolling down is natural. We do it every day.
Some applications may require us to scroll left and right as we zoom in on images, or move back and forth across a large document. Apple’s Mighty Mouse makes scrolling up and down and left and right rather easy with the scrolling nipple (I just had to say it that way).
So, what does a scrolling utility do that Apple doesn’t already do? Fair enough question.
Smart Scrolling
Smart Scroll is a utility which adds functions to your mouse and keyboard. It actually improves the scrolling effort on your Mac, and makes it similar to the finger-tipped scrolling on an iPhone.
That’s what the Super Scroll feature does. It even works with Mac trackpads with separate trackpad and wheel controls.
Super Scroll works with trackpads and any regular scroll wheel mouse—any mouse that the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane can see.
Hover Scroll makes scrolling easier for Cocoa applications (read; modern Mac apps). Point to the top or bottom edge of an open window in your Mac and the scrolling begins. No clicking. No scrolling nipple.
You can choose how far from the edge scrolling occurs, and you can set the highest speed to scroll at, when the cursor is closest to the edge. Horizontal scrolling via the left and right edges is also available, with its own independent speed and hover zone size.
Grab Scroll gives your the standard Mac grabbing tool to move a window’s contents up, down, left, right, and throw it all away. Included are Universal Scroll Keys (keyboard shortcuts), trackpad controls, and the ever important accelerator.
Grab Scroll works with any kind of mouse, pen & tablet, trackpad, trackball… With a 2-button mouse, set it to use the secondary button and you can drag to Grab Scroll, or click without moving the mouse to get the usual “right-click” menu.
In short, Smart Scroll simply enhances your Mac’s scrolling, mousing, trackpad experience with sophisticated controls and options. Tools let you manipulate the coasting, trackpad, scroll wheel with sliders and buttons.