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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.
The lenovo clit is better than a touchpad anyway.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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.
...and it's RED because it heard you call it that, and it's blushing!
It's actually called a TRACKPOINT. Conversely, the "touchpad" is referred to as a GLIDEPOINT.
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.]
Many years ago Apple acquired Fingerworks and got the best engineers of touch-pad and gesture-navigation in the business... And it shows. PC manufacturers are largely buying the cheapest, oldest tech they can for wherever they can get away with it, so they can race to the bottom on price and still hope to have some kind of margin... And pointer devices are one place where it shows.
A million times this. I just started a new job, and got a Lenovo Thinkpad, and the touchpad is awful. I can turn off some of the worst features, but it just plain sucks.
I have tried the touchpoint, but I just can't get it. I know a lot of people love it, but I just can't use it effectively. And my last Windows laptop, a horrid HP, was truly awful. Both this lenovo and the HP had advanced "touch gestures" but they don't work well.
My Macbook Pro and Macbook Air are a joy to use, I don't get that "thumb" weirdness while typing, and the gestures are second nature.
I have a logitech mouse that I carry everywhere for this Win10 laptop, just so I can get any work done at all.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Yep. IBM Thinkpads started that years ago. A lot of people hate it but those track pads are just where the base of my thumbs are and I hit the damn thing and the focus goes somewhere else and it's so fast I don't where it went. I've blown away a lot of work because as I was typing away, the base of thumb grazed the damn pad.
At least with the 'clit' (I like that), if you nudge it, the cursor isn't too far away and the focus doesn't go somewhere else.
So just disable that feature.
Personally, I disable all trackpad features other than 2-finger scrolling. I don't want different behavior because of which side (or corner) of the trackpad I just touched, nor do I want a double-touch to become a double-click, nor do I want a single tap to move the focus.
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!
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.