Seems like there are a couple 'complaints' about infinite scrolling that really have nothing to do with the actual scrolling function. 1) "What if I want to jump to a specific..." I use Amazon and NewEgg all the time. When you sort by price, Lowest to Highest, do you actually jump to page 7 to see what "mid range" prices are? No. You use the price range facet on the left to narrow to what you're really after. The fact that you can't jump to a specific place when doing infinite scrolling means that the designer/developer didn't think about what her users really want. You can have this problem with a paginated interface. 2) "I hate how I can't get to the bottom of the page" Actually, I hate this about Facebook's news feed too. This isn't a scrolling issue, it's a UX issue. The manual "show more" link is a mitigation but the solution is to not have to force people to go to the bottom of the page to do something useful (ask why would you want to in the first place). 3) "It will lag the browser" This is more of an implementation issue and is the one thing I wonder about for these "infinite" scrolling solutions. I totally agree if I scrolled for the equivalent of 20 pages, won't my browser eventually grid to a halt with all the memory? I think the solution of popping off results near the top is a good approach, but technically this seems pretty difficult; also what happens to the scroll bar in that case? 4) How do I figure out where I am? This is context-specific, I feel. If you are sorting alphabetically, you should provide a quick way to jump to specific letters (like a dictionary). If you are sorting by date, a timeline-esque jumper works just as well. If you are sorting by price, a range works well. I am in the midst of redesigning one of my sites. I want to implement "infinite" scrolling because it is browsing a collection of items I (the user) own. What I am worried about is what do I do with previous results? The last thing I want is to hang the browser. I like the idea of removing previous items, but my worry is how the user can "immediately" jump back to the beginning of the list when you've removed them from the DOM and effectively need to load/request them again. I think a "virtual" scrollbar would work, if done correctly, one that knew the context of its environment (how many items, where you were, an 'index' of the content to jump to specific points). Sorting alphabetically? Pick a letter on the 'scrollbar'. Sorting chronologically? Pick a point in time to jump to. I would be interested in doing a demo of how this would work.

I remember my grandparent's IBM clickey clacker. Worked darn well but damn was it ugly. I don't know if I'll spend the same amount on a keyboard than my new video card... but maybe sometime. I like my Logitech G15; it's still pretty loud for a "modern" keyboard but I love the backlight and LCD screen.

For anyone in the Minnesota area, the team I worked with (myself included, as far as I know) will be doing a session on Informal User Testing at MinneWebCon (http://www.minnewebcon.umn.edu/) where we will talk exactly about how important usability was to us on our touch screen directory application (hint: in a week we revamped the home screen about 5 times). Since I started at this job as a student, I've become a huge proponent of usability and usability testing... glad to see I'm not the only one! It's all thanks to my supervisor who really hammered home accessibility design and usability concerns whenever I worked on a project.