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Two-Finger Scrolling For Older Mac Laptops

Posted by Zonk on from the let-your-two-fingers-do-the-walking dept.

Michael Stroeck writes "Want that nifty scrolling on your portable but have an older one? No problem, Daniel Becker has written a free alternative driver for older PowerBooks and iBooks that works like a charm. It is based on Apple's AppleADBMouse-209.0.10 driver from Mac OS 10.3.7 that is available as part of the publicly released Darwin source code. As such, the driver is covered by the APSL (Apple Public Source License)."

4 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Insensitive clod by musselm · · Score: 5, Funny

    I only have one finger, you insensitive clod.

  2. Re:Umm by Durin_Deathless · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those that didn't RTFA, it's any machine with one of the new 'W Enhanced' touchpads. As far as I can tell from personal experience, all iBook G4s have it, and a variety of AlBooks as well. My friend's AlBook that is a bit over 18 months old doesn't have it, but I suspect his younger sister's does, as her PB is younger than my iBook, which does. It works like a champ. It replaced SideTrack for me. I'd recommend the one that is XY only, as the rotational thing doesn't seem all that useful and just made the XY scrolling jumpy.

    --
    You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
  3. another trick by peteforsyth · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's a useful trick that works on every trackpad I've tried, Apple or Windows:

    For getting the cursor all the way to the other side of the screen (say, from right to left, for a right-handed person): put your middle finger on the right side of the trackpad; then put your index finger on the left side; then remove the middle finger.

    Because the track pad only recognizes one point of contact, it interprets this as your finger moving "really fast," and moves the cursor all the way to the other side.

    --
    Pete Forsyth
  4. Precompiled driver appears to not work with 10.3.8 by JQuick · · Score: 5, Informative

    I ran a few tests.

    1. I configured the source to build for only XY support.
    2. I ensured that my newly built driver and the preconfigured driver each had appropriate permissions. (root:wheel).
    3. I wrote a script which unloaded the system version of the driver and loaded either the prebuilt or the newly compiled driver based on an argument.

    results:
    Each time, the prebuilt dirver would panic the host and require a hard reboot. Note that this was immediate, and did not require me to touch the trackpad to trigger the failure.

    Conclusion, since 10.3.8 was so recently released the developer probably did not know to rebuild the pre-compiled distributions.
    If you have already installed it, and are running 10.3.7, you may be at risk when upgrade to 10.3.8. Either upgrade from source now, or revert to the stock driver and wait for new binary packages.

    The freshly built driver appears to work as advertised.

    Test system:
    1 GHz Aluminum 17" powerbook with 1GB memory.
    OS, stock 10.3.8 with no third party drivers installed.