iPad interface gotcha (updated)

This is another example, in a different app (GoodReader), of an interface flaw (in my opinion) in the otherwise excellent iPad interface. It seems to be system-wide rather than app-specific.
The flaw is that when you see the pop-up menu...

[Update: the photos are not representative of the iPad's screen quality. Of course the lines are straight in real life, and the tones/sharpness much better!]

... You can't see anything hinting that the window can scroll and contains more options. For space reasons or maybe aesthetics reasons, the very thin grey line which appears when you actually are scrolling, disappears when you're not doing it.

You can see here that there are actually more options below when one scrolls:



What I'm doing here could be seen as useless complaining or "bitching", but I just find interfaces interesting both in their good and bad aspects. And also, if nobody at all mentions these things, it's less likely that flaws get fixed.
And heck, I might even help some iPad owners to look for extra options in their apps which they might otherwise never have found. (I only found out about this thing two weeks after I very angrily and erroneously had reported that Pages For iPad did not have options for changing font type and size.)

Update:
Philocalist said:
Being not at all Apple - orientated, something immediately catches my eye here, though it could just be a quirk of your image capture (or, indeed, my eyes!)
In the top image particularly, the pop-up window that you show appears to be badly skewed / out of true, i.e not perpendicular ... which would irritate the life out of me if it is indeed part of the (lack of) design in the app ... just looks like a sloppy end result.

God, no, this is just because I did not hold the camera exactly parrallel to the screen surface, and because it's taken with a zoom.
Additionally, as you may know, photographing any electronic screen often results in moiré errors and generally oddly reduced quality of the image. The screen looks much better in real life than these photos. You can be sure that visually the interface as well as the screen on the iPad is very good. Outstanding, in fact.

Update:

Anon said:

I agree that this is not intuitive, and it naturally works the same way on the iphone. Space is definitely one of the reasons they've chosen to do it this way.

But I think they may have felt that a traditional scroll bar would be confusing in a touch interface. Clearly you just use your finger to scroll, and if there was a scroll bar, people might get confused and think that you can't just drag anywhere with your finger to scroll, but that you have to go to the scroll bar, because that is so ingrained in our heads.

I suspect that they couldn't find a visual cue that overcame this "you have to touch here" syndrome. For me, I've just gotten in the habit of wiggling my finger a little if I think there is a chance there is more info than fits on the screen...

Eolake said...
That's a good point, thanks.

(Hmmm, maybe the thin line indicating how much of the menu is visible could stay on the screen even when you're not scrolling. Maybe most people would not take that as the only area you can scroll. Not sure.)