I was never much of a fan of the trackpad that comes built into most laptops. I am, however, a huge fan of my Wacom pen tablet. The only problem is I’ve never been able to get over the hurdle and use the Wacom table for anything more than photo and graphic editing.
All that has changed. Enter Apple’s newest toy, the Magic Trackpad.
Right off let me say, if you get a Magic Trackpad for your Mac and you don’t turn on the touch settings you’re going to be disappointed, hate the thing, and yearn for your old fashioned mouse right away. The hard click is annoying. Having to press down on the whole thing until you hear it audibly “click”. You need to turn on “Tap to click”, secondary tap, and set Three Fingers as “dragging” before you do anything else. Me, I also upped the tracking speed for when I’m coding but I turn it down when I’m doing photo editing or clipping out photos, that’s just my preference.
Once you do that all you need to do to click something is tap lightly on the trackpad. You don’t even need to push down hard enough to hear it click. Just tap lightly.
Want to double click? Tap twice.
Right click to open a contextual menu? Two finger tap.
And now for the Pièce de résistance, say you’re typing a blog post, like this one. There’s a section of a web page you’d like to cite in your post. Position your I-beam over the start of the paragraph you want to copy. Now, using 3 fingers, drag the I-beam until the paragraph is highlighted. Two finger tap, select copy. Go back to your page, two finger tap, paste. And you’re done!
So in case you missed it, using 3 fingers on your trackpad will let you navigate around a page that’s too large for your window. On a browser, it lets you select as if you were holding down shift and dragging.
Pretty cool.