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It's Time For Laptop Companies To Switch To Precision Touchpad (arstechnica.com)
A new Windows 10 insider build (version 14946) comes with a new interface for configuring touchpad gestures. In the recent months, Microsoft has also improved the detection of two-finger gestures and clicking on Windows 10, and also added new four-finger gestures. These are welcome changes, and something that many would find useful. Except they won't because their computers likely don't comply with Precision Touchpad spec. ArsTechnica has an opinion piece today in which journalist Peter Bright is calling on all the OEMs to do the needful changes moving forward. From the article: Precision Touchpad made its debut with Windows 8. Co-developed between Microsoft and touchpad company Synaptics, the spec changed how Windows works with touchpads. Traditionally, touchpads masqueraded to Windows as essentially USB- or PS/2-connected mice -- simple two-dimension, single-input devices. Features such as multitouch and gestures were handled by a combination of the touchpad firmware and proprietary drivers. This meant that Windows itself had no ability to add new gestures or refine the finger-detection algorithms; it was all an opaque feature of the third-party drivers. With Precision Touchpad, the raw touchpad input is exposed to Windows itself, allowing the operating system to choose how it handles the complex multi-finger inputs. The gestures, the disambiguation of taps and swipes -- these are all now performed by Windows, not a third-party driver. Unfortunately, many PC OEMs haven't been equipping their laptops with Precision Touchpads. As such, they can't take advantage of the new Windows capabilities. As far as we can tell, it would normally be straightforward for an OEM to make the switch; touchpads from Synaptics, for example, can work as both Precision Touchpads and "legacy" mouse-emulating touchpads that use the Synaptics driver. It's just up to the OEM to pick one option or the other.
Macs have had this distinct advantage over Windows-intended laptops for a long time. Dell, Lenovo, I'm looking at you...y'all trackpads SUCK.
Honestly, I have a $150 chromebook that has a trackpad that is 100x better than all 3 of my $1k+ Windows laptops. Not having proper support in Windows has driven a lot of that, so it's Microsoft's fault. But also, the drivers that implemented these gestures made by the touchpad companies sucked.
This is just another example that if you leave it to OEMs, they basically suck at everything. Microsoft, Google, etc are all learning that they need to drive the bus here, because otherwise the OEMs find ways to cut costs, even on their highest end laptops, and as a result we are getting a lot better hardware here.
Generic PS/2 is the pinnacle of keyboard/mouse interfaces.
When I used windows enabled laptops I was never able to use a touchpad or clit, I just couldn't. I always carry a mouse with me. Then I changed to a MacBook and I learned to use their touchpad. I though it was of necessity that I learned, but recently I had to use a Windows laptop touchpad and figured out that the problem wasn't me but the touchpads. Will this make Windows laptop Touchpads similar to Apple's?
Hear, hear! It's about time we got support for more and fancier trackpad gestures! I wholeheartedly appr--
[Accidentally scrolls the Slashdot comment interface off the screen due to an errant flick of the trackpad.]
[In a reflexive effort to correct that mistake, changes browser zoom level to 350%.]
[Panics, begins to flail, accidentally submits the comment as is, and somehow manages to open four Outlook windows and MS Paint.]
I turn off all the gesture and scroll support. All I want is a mouse interface and hardware buttons, anything else is too annoying.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"Our old API was shit and didn't take account that touchpads existed, thus forcing mouse emulation and proprietary third-party drivers that don't work on anything else.
After 20 YEARS of laptops having touchpads, we've exposed the underlying data of the devices in question and made it an API that will fuck up the second "3D touchpads" or whatever come along.
Despite having had touchscreens for all that time too, and smartphones for much of it (with capacitative screens, hover, etc.) and entire other OS being designed to take account of those kinds of input devices as the primary input."
And they're supposed to get congratulations for this?
You can also guarantee that the API will be incomplete or difficult to manage, or not backward-compatible breaking all your old laptops, thus still ending up with third-party junk to do the job for us that doesn't work for any other manufacturer.
I'm STILL waiting for the day when the whole keyboard surface is flat-but-springy (like, oh my god, a touchscreen!) so you can type on it, hold a pen on it, or use it as a giant trackpad in the keyboard layout of your choice (numpad or trackpad? Trackpad below and center or off to one side? etc.).
Tech moves SO SLOWLY in this regard until someone spots it after many years and puts out a mass-market device like that and everyone goes "at fucking last".
"do the needful"
You will not find these words in TFA.
Whipslash has some 'splaining to do. I've suspected Manish was an outsourced editor, but this new guy is obviously so fresh he still nods sideways.
I hear the Mountain Dew billboards in India advertise "Dew the needful!"
Bollywood is making a version of the Big Lebowski - the central character will be "Dude, the weedful"
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Seriously... who EVER thought adding all the touchscreen phone gestures to a touchpad was a good idea?
Oh, yeah, Apple. Who's trying to move everyone to just using their mobile OS entirely for years now, and succeeding.
All I want a touchpad to do is move the cursor on-screen, and possibly support two-finger scrolling.
And ESPECIALLY stop with the god-damn Tap To Click, and stop with turning off the god-damn thing if I hit a key in the last second by default. No. Fuck you! Put real buttons so I can actually click with PRECISION if you want to talk about precise movements, then you don't need cockamamie bullshit like disabling it when typing to avoid the wrong gesture, you dumbfucks.
To be usefully close to use they're by definition too close to the keyboard to avoid errant touches, which means all these added gestures? They get triggered by accident if they don't go the 'no touchpad if you touched a key' route. And that makes the device as a whole LESS useful than one with far fewer gestures that can be enabled 24/7.
- WolfWings, too lazy to reset his password, but still here on /. from time to time!
I've watched most users with multi-touch devices. They almost NEVER use the features. Why? Because pointing and pressing is so goddamned easy.
Get with the times. the most I see people use multi-touch is pinch/spread to zoom. Rarely do I even find a use for more than that.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Glad to see someone's already covered Fingerworks. I'm still sore at Apple, though, for shutting them down and sitting on so much of their gestural vocabulary. My TouchStream keyboard let my wrist RSI heal, and I still miss it (it eventually failed after a number of years). If I could buy another, with support, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I see a lot of people here complaining that "trackpads suck" and "gestures suck" and "tapping sucks", because (apparently) their trackpads suck. I'm totally happy with my Macbook Pro's trackpad, with one push-to-click surface, which I only use for dragging; taps for everything else. But, yes, using the trackpad on an HP laptop was physically painful.
Fingerworks did a remarkable job of getting gestural and zero-force input right. Apple didn't completely ruin it when they bought out the technology. It would take a lot to independently engineer a system that works as well, but if anybody has the resources to do it, it's probably Microsoft.