JeffRutan's Profile

I have used many different laptop computers since the late 1980’s... I have yet to find one that has a truly comfortable and efficiently usable built-in pointing device. I have tired everything from little balls to eraser heads to rolling rods to various sizes and textures of touchpads with a variety of extra features. Of all of these, I like the touchpad on my 17” PowerBook the best. The touchpad is bigger and smoother than the one on my old 15” Ti PowerBook, and I love the 2-finger scrolling. I also prefer the one button to any multi-button design (where I regularly hit the wrong button). This may seem strange since I will only use a 4+button trackball or a 3+button mouse at a desktop. The ctrl-click trick does suffice most times for most Mac programs, but not always... Some Mac software (especially dual-platform professional applications like my LightWave 3D) use ctrl-click to do something else so this trick does not work. The same is true for Windows applications running under Virtual PC. For any of this kind of serious work, I have to drag out my trackball or multi-button mouse. It would be great if I could do all this work without moving my hands from the laptop surface. All of this said, I believe there is an elegant solution that everyone will like… Keep the Apple touchpad just as it is, just make the button touch-sensitive as well as mechanical. This should not be a big technical challenge given that iPods have touch-sensitive mechanical buttons. The button would still have to be mechanically pressed to function, but the button number would be determined not by where it is pressed but by how many fingers (or thumbs) were sensed doing the pressing. Software configuration could allow 1-2-3 or even more buttons to be supported this way (and assignment to various functions). The default would be just one button as before and those who love it that way would never know the difference. The rest of us would enjoy a much richer and more powerful device that would be more intuitive and more comfortable than anything else out there. No fumbling and hitting the wrong button as you flow along the large touchpad, just click with the appropriate number of fingers. -Jeff