Magic Trackpad. Like a multi-touch trackpad, only not attached to a MacBook of some variety. Hell yes. Ordered.
I keep up a habit of asking my co-workers every time they get a new laptop if it has two-finger scrolling. According to this highly unscientific continuous study, the current state of the art is that, apparently, you can start scrolling in the “track” along the right edge and then continue the motion out into the trackpad proper. I think it’s now been a full five years since the first PowerBook got two-finger scrolling.
Let’s not forget about the slippery surfaces, weird bezels and buggy palm rejection schemes. Every other laptop or trackpad manufacturer is still a bunch of complete customer-hating loons.
That, and Apple’s patented the concept (not just the implementation).
By Jens Ayton · 2010.07.27 21:09
I’m sure the patent was “defensive”.
Even so, I supposedly just have to flip a few switches in xorg.conf to get proper two-finger scrolling on my new laptop’s trackpad, since it is multitouch. And then somewhere, the owner of a white fluffy cat will scream menacingly into the screens lining his electronic lair.
By n8 · 2010.07.27 22:34
Jens: So? Creative patented an MP3 player with a scrollable list. Successfully. You don’t think “scrollable, miserable track alongside one edge of the trackpad area” is patented? How about the scroll wheel?
n8: Luckily, only laptop manufacturers are sad loons who wouldn’t know usability if they caught it peeing into their gas tank. Not open source programmers.
By Jesper · 2010.07.27 22:48
I could get two-finger srolling on a ThinkPad running Windows.
It was kinda funny because at first that laptop didn’t supported multitouch, even with those “hacked drivers”, but after some time a driver from HP (that uses the same Synaptic touchpad) appeared and I could have multitouch. Oh, and needed an utility to have two-finger scrolling.
By Felipe Cepriano · 2010.07.27 23:16
Weird. That makes sense, but I haven’t heard of any HP laptops supporting it. Good on them.
By Jesper · 2010.07.28 00:01
“Every other laptop or trackpad manufacturer is still a bunch of complete customer-hating loons.”
Call me crazy, but I think the “glass trackpad” Apple introduced a couple of years ago was made by a bunch of complete customer-hating loons.
1) The customer-hating loons refuse to put in hooks to allow user customization of what actions get triggered by what gestures.
2) The customer-hating loons decided that users who prefer to work with “Tap to Click” are ignored. The glass trackpads introduced a massive dead zone in the middle of the trackpad that does not recognize taps on a regular basis. (Tested on multiple units.) The pre-”glass trackpad” units have never had problems with “Tap to Click” – in other words they reliably registered all taps.
By Chucky · 2010.07.28 13:47
Wow. It’s exactly because “tap to click” has never reliably registered every tap as a click that I don’t use it. I can never find the threshold.
I never said Apple wasn’t a bunch of customer-hating loons for a variety of reasons, but I did say that due to the perpetual, even more fundamental issues with their trackpad designs (not even a good surface), every other laptop manufacturer is. Apple has at least not made a skating rink with some sort of chrome ring making a trackpad well that you’re supposed to fall into, or not fall into as the case may be when palm rejection doesn’t work too well.
That said, you do get hooks for motion. There are system preference panes for doing what you want, and there are public APIs to do neat stuff with
the raw trackpad inputtrackpad input inside a specific view or with gestures.(I don’t know if the former use the latter when on 10.6.)There’s a public API to spit out touch events for your own views but you can’t monitor it globally using their hooks.You can’t hook some sort of script to “rotate left” wherever you are using Apple’s own preference pane, no, that’s true.
If the dead zone is the bottom-center edge instead of the dead center (heh), it might just be the “thumbrest” area, where it acts as a button. I don’t disagree with that design choice because it’s the place where the button is easiest to activate, but if you really do like using tap to click I see why you find this annoying.
By Jesper · 2010.07.28 16:01
“That said, you do get hooks for motion. There are system preference panes for doing what you want”
You had me very excited until I clicked thru.
The FAQ sez: “Will MagicPrefs affect my macbook’s trackpad or other pointing devices? Nope.”
“Wow. It’s exactly because “tap to click” has never reliably registered every tap as a click that I don’t use it. I can never find the threshold.”
Did you ever have a Mac laptop pre-”Glass Trackpad”?
I’ve had Mac laptops ever since the Powerbook 100, and “tap to click” was 100% reliable in my usage on every single one of them. No dead zones. Intuitive threshold. And then the “Glass Trackpad” came along. At least in my usage, that’s where they willingly broke “tap to click”.
I actually thought Apple made a perfect trackpad pre-”Glass Trackpad”. And I’m of the opinion that the decision making process that produced the “Glass Trackpad” was much more about marketing than usage.
Or to put it another way, I thought Apple pre-2007 was notable in the industry for not being customer-hating loons. Things change. Cupertino may not exactly hate their customers these days, but a certain degree of contempt for their customers has appeared.
“if you really do like using tap to click I see why you find this annoying.”
Reliable tap to click was a joy for couch usage – aka actual “laptop” usage.
But Apple has pretty much abandoned doing even the minimum to support actual “laptop” usage, as is evidenced by the “sharp edges” design decisions. They should really change the company’s motto to “Just Don’t Hold It That Way”.
To sum up, I think we’ve only recently entered a brave new era for Cupertino where what the gear looks like in the Store and on the TV ad trumps usability concerns 100% of the time.
By Chucky · 2010.07.28 19:29
@Chucky
I’m with Jesper on this one, I don’t use tap to click because of the amount of accidental clicks I get. I have owned only non-glass trackpads, I have tried with the “ignore accidental taps”-setting on and off.
I do not dispute your experience and the change sure sucks for you, that is not necessarily how the general population saw it.
By Jussi · 2010.07.28 20:44
“I’m with Jesper on this one, I don’t use tap to click because of the amount of accidental clicks I get. I have owned only non-glass trackpads, I have tried with the “ignore accidental taps”-setting on and off.”
I have no doubt that a majority of folks have always disliked tap to click.
That’s why tap to click was always disabled by default on new laptops. And in my personal experience, when I’d either use or troubleshoot other people’s laptops, I’d guess tap to click was only enabled about 15% of the time.
In fact, when I’d use my laptop on a desk while sitting upright for long periods of time, even I disable tap to click.
But the all the ergonomics change when using the laptop in a recumbent position. You end up with hands on the palmrest in a rest position. (This is not good ergonomics for lengthy writing, but it is good ergonomics for web browsing and light typing.) And from the recumbent position, in my experience, tap to click was best experience.
Also, the 15% of other people’s laptops that I discovered tap to click enabled tended to all be frequent recumbent users.
In short, I think the usefulness of tap to click in the pre-”Glass Trackpad” laptops correlates strongly with the ratio of time your laptop sits on your lap to the time your laptop sits on a desk.
Which brings me to My Larger Point:
So, let’s say that Apple made a decision to stop supporting users who spend lengthy time using their machine in actual “laptop” position. Let’s say that that both the glass trackpad and the laptop sharp edges emerge out of that decision. And finally, let’s say this only screws 15% of their customers.
This produces a problem, IMHO.
If you are a Redmond user, you can pick and choose from hardware vendors. Being a Cupertino user has always had the downside of dealing with a single source of hardware. And the pre-2007 Apple has always understood that they thus needed to produce hardware that would at least make some basic efforts to satisfy a sizable but minority set of users who Don’t Hold It the Right Way.
The pre-2007 Apple would appease 15% of their users if there was a reasonable engineering path. The new Apple, on a wide range of design decisions, is simply unwilling to appease 15% of their users if it comes at even a slight cost to how the gear looks in the Store and the TV ad. Instead, the new Apple tells the 15% to Just Don’t Hold It That Way.
To end my rant here before I use up all the pixels on the interwebs, I’ll note that I find it a scary situation to be reliant on a single hardware vendor that seems to no longer be willing to even try to appease sizable but minority sets of users. I’ve been a heavy user of Macs for close to two decades, and have been quite happy to never learn Windows. (I’ve had virtualization software, but it generally gets fired up only for extreme edge cases.) But a couple of months ago, I installed Windows into a Boot Camp partition for the first time. And I’m trying to use it for a couple of hours every week to familiarize myself. I still love OS X. I have no plans to shift over to Redmond anytime soon. But my trust in Apple as my sole hardware vendor for the “trucks” I rely upon has plummeted. So, the for first time I’m trying to prepare an evacuation plan for future contingencies.
By Chucky · 2010.07.29 13:28
No, I’ve tried it on every single laptop in my possession, and in most I’ve worked longer than two hours on, and it’s never worked. The threshold for tapping, and the point at which the start of a plain simple lingering movement can turn into an inadvertent click has been impossible to find.
I’ve seen movements across the desktop turn into selections halfway through and the “tap” cease momentarily with such timing that the icon (and thus all icons) was subsequently picked up and promptly thrown in the Trash, which is where I was steering. Read that sentence again if you’d like; it’s a piece of twisted elegance that I wish I was making up. It’s gotten to the point where I steer around stuff that might have any dangerous side-effects when I have to use laptops where I know it’s enabled, if I don’t just skip to System Preferences or that hideous Synaptics heat-map tray icon to disable it first.
For the longest time, I attributed this to the lack of tactile feedback, which it still might be, but I have no issue using an iPhone, which I am admittedly also staring at while using.
I will repeat that if you for some reason never do run into those problems, then a zone where it doesn’t work would be annoying. And there’s nothing about my personal, industry-wide incompatibility with this feature that should magically prevent you for retaining it, should it turn out to work for you.
I suspect so. But I always use my laptops in couches (or, to be honest, in chairs or beds), and I have seen nothing of this reliable tap to click anywhere. For me it’s the glass trackpad that feels more comfortable (and thus ergonomic), not the previous model.
I wouldn’t draw that line there at all. More than the metaphorical 15% want to eschew iTunes to get music to their iPods. It has also always been the case with Apple that they’d like for things to work one way, and preferably only one way.
In this way, the Magic Trackpad itself is interesting because it stands as an “equal footing” alternative; if you’d like a multi-touch input device for your desktop, Apple is now able to offer you the question “a or b?” and know that your particular taste will decide. Beyond simple color choices, I don’t see anything like that anywhere else in Apple’s many line-ups.
By Jesper · 2010.07.29 20:22
I can vouch for what Chucky is saying about the newer trackpads. I grew to love tap to click (and triple tap drag lock–what up!) back on my 10-inch powerbook and then 14-inch macbook pro. On my new (company) macbook, tap is shockingly bad. Every time a tap is missed (maybe 1 out of 5), I just stop and stare, waiting for something to happen. Honestly it’s weird. Apparently it is a subset of people (with particular finger conductivity profiles?) who were happy as clams with the old trackpads, fine. But I haven’t heard anyone compliment the tap behavior of the new ones.
And that’s not even what I came back to say. It’s that I just tried two-finger scrolling with my lenovo u160 in Mindows, and WTF it works! Everything is shocking with trackpads these days. It hasn’t missed a tap click yet either. Of course, its tap to drag behavior is unacceptable because it doesn’t lock. Not in windows anyway; I think synaptics can do that in linux. If I can ever get my damn video working over there.
By n8 · 2010.07.30 04:27
Holy crap the windows synaptic driver supports drag lock.
By n8 · 2010.07.30 04:39
Hasn’t basically every Synaptics trackpad since the dawn of time supported drag lock?
By Jesper · 2010.07.30 11:08