Teaching the Trackpad New Tricks?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm seriously considering buying a PowerBook. The design is gorgeous and OS X will give me a Unix-based operating system without having to sacrifice main-stream comercial applications. What's holding me back? The trackpad. I'm a fan of the ThinkPad-style joystick, but my Dell laptop came with touchpad drivers that provide useful features like the ability to scroll by sliding your finger along the edge of the pad. That was enough to make me switch to the touchpad on the Dell, but, I can't find anything similar for the PowerBook. I found references to Overdrive, but it appears to only work with USB devices. Are there any other drivers out there that add more functionality to the trackpad? If not, is that because no one has done it yet, or is it because the APIs do not exist to do such a thing? Thanks."

Comments

mouse

[liquidice5]

well, i dont know about the scrolling capabilities on the mac, but i say buy a mouse

I know it isnt what you are looking for, but even the scrolling drivers that i have for my synaptics pad dont do that great of a job, and end up being more hassle than they are worth

there are a lot of nice mice out there, including mini mice that do a nice job

Kensington pocket pro this mouse has a retracting cord, and it works perfectly

Whatever happened....

[Apreche]

Whatever happened to the track ball? (or atari trak ball). I remember laptops used to have an actual ball built in you could spin around to move the cursors with a button on either side. This was beautiful it allowed perfect control without adding a lot of space or forcing me to carry a real mouse around with my laptop. The mid keyboard "foam nubs" and the touch pads I find horrible. I can't control the mouse cursor with great accuracy at all. If it isn't sensitive and accurate enough to play a round of quake then it isn't much of a mouse or mouse replacement. Anyone know a modern laptop that still has the ball?

my Mac keyboard trackpad does this

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... I don't know about the laptops ( I suppose I should ask some co-workers ), but I thought I'd throw this out there before too many comments went by :

I have an Adesso "TruForm" keyboard with a built-in trackpad, under OS X, and it has the feature you describe. I threw me off at first, I was a little miffed that I couldn't use the full area of the pad for movement, but now I'm with you- being able to scroll via the right hand side of the trackpad is a great feature!

Note that "It Just Works". There are/were no drivers to install, nothing, just plugged in the USB keyboard and trackpad away...

Some advice...

[BitGeek]

I may be wrong but the "scroll area" on the side of the dell is a hardware feature, rather than just software. As such, I doubt it will make it to the powerbook, as it breaks the metaphor, and apple does not like to break metaphors.

However, I do suggest you rent a powerbook for a month. Should cost you a hundred dollars or so. This is a good investment because if you spend $2,000 on your next computer you don't want to get the wrong one (where wrong may be the powerbook or may be another dell.)

I think you'll find after a period of adjustment that the advantages in usability (much of which is from not breaking the metaphor) and other nice things about OS X will far outweight the lack of the "scroll touch pad".

For what its worth, I use an external 3 button mouse (Even though it breaks the metaphor-- I like it for games that don't have the metaphor to be broken) and the scroll wheel works fine.

In Jaguar there's even a new UI for setting the sensitivity of the scroll wheel. Apple totally supports three button and complex mice, but won't ship them for good reasons.

If there isn't a hardware component to the scroll-trackpad, then you could, theoretically, write a kernel extention to add this functionality.

I think,though, you'll find other things compensate for lack of this feature while mobile. (While not mobile, an external trackpad or trackball can be plugged in.)

Not gonna happen

[MasterVidBoi]

About a month ago I thought about writing a shareware product that would do things like that (scroll area on the side of the pad). After a lot of research, I've concluded that it can't be done...

Unless a lot of secret Apple documentation suddenly falls into my lap... if you have such secret documentation, please don't hesitate to send it to me ;)

A little background:
The Trackpad on apple laptops (as well as the keyboard), are pseudo-ADB devices. Still. Even after ADB was supposted to be dead years ago.
I say pseduo because Apple employees claim that the hardware really isn't ADB, but it acts like one as far as the OS is concerned (at the mouse/trackpad driver level. lower down, the situation may be different).

Because of this, from the level of the ADB Mouse Driver, it looks and behaves exactly like those old Apple Extended mice (except for a few additions, such as tap-click, drag, etc). The standard ADB Extended Mouse Protocol, (as documeneted in the Apple Technote 'Space Aliens Ate My Mouse'), only reports relative movements of the pointer, as a normal mouse would.

There is no mechanism for getting the absolute location of the users finger, rather than the relative movement. Without that, you can't remap part of the trackpad to be a scroll area.

Get the drivers

[SIGFPE]

(I think the MacOS X trackpad drivers are open source in Darwin).

Have a look at the code the reads x and y values from the trackpad. If they values sent from the trackpad are absolute x,y locations then it's trivial to patch the code. If they're relative you may still be able to set the trackpad into absolute mode. (I wrote code to do this for the Versapad under FreeBSD after obtaining details on setting it to absolute mode from the manufacturers - but the Versapad may have been unusual to support absolute mode).

Use the Command key

[Decimal Dave]

A good substitute for the simulated scroll wheel feature is to hold the Command key and then drag with the mouse/trackpad. In some applications this will allow the cursor to "grab" the page to scroll both vertically and horizontally. I use it quite a bit in IE and the Finder (under OS 9, haven't tried it with OS X). Unfortunately, many applications don't work like this.