Trackpad

I've been quite surprised by how little I really need to use the right mouse button, but perhaps that's not really all that hard to understand given the system is made to primarily support a one button mouse. I was missing my scroll wheel terribly. I have a small notebook mouse to attach until I find a suitable Bluetooth mouse, but that's not practical for when I'm using the iBook in my lap rather than on a table or desk. I came across a neat replacement driver for the trackpad called Sidetrack. This gives the feature of using the side of the trackpad as a scroll wheel like many PC laptops can. It also allows for some othe things like tapping a corner for a right click. I am loving it. Hopefully, when the beta expires, it gets developed some more.

I am having some issues with the trackpad's tracking of my finger. It can be quite jumpy at times. Sometimes it's obviously that there's some dirt or a crumb on the pad, but it can still be tricky at other times sometimes jumping wildly. I'm trying to see if it's my touch, and if I just need to maintain a consistent pressure and finger orientation.

After a liitle playing around, it seems the problem is when my other fingers get close to the pad surface but don't actually touch it. There seems to be enough of whatever the pad is detecting before I tought the pad for it to think I'm pressing it in two places, which causes it to not really know where I'm pressing it at all, so the cursor moves around wildly. This is not easy to avoid since both thumbs want to naturally rest in the area. Even the fingers adjacent to the one I'm using to point with have to be kept at a distance. I'll see if I can develop a finger posture to minimize the problem.

Update: it seems that the scroll wheel emulation of the trackpad may be giving me pain in my finger I use for the feature. I'm not 100% sure that's the cause, but it seems likely. I suppose I do use it a lot, even when I shouldn't, like scrolling many pages down quickly when I should use page down.

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