Thursday, May 13, 2010

MacBook Trackpad

Day 17

I want to focus a bit on the MacBook Pro's touchpad - or the "Trackpad" as they call it, which I think is revolutionary.  It almost makes the mouse unnecessary.  One finger on the touch pad works as you'd expect -- it's a no brainer; the mouse pointer moves all about the screen.  No big deal.


Two fingers, however,  and the application that has focus (i.e., the one that you are in) scrolls depending upon which direction you go.   This sure beats moving to the side of an app and grabbing a hold of the scroll region and moving the slider with the mouse or touchpad.  (Of course a mouse typically has a scrolly wheel;  a must have feature for mouse users).   

Swipe three fingers and you discover that if you are in app like Mail it moves up or down to the next item in the inbox; it navigates.   An app like Pages, which is a Word Processor for the MacBook, pages up or down in the document.  Keynote, which is a lot like PowerPoint, the three finger swipe allows you to move from one slide to the next slide in the slide deck.     

If you swipe "down" with four fingers the computer screen magically tiles all the apps and files that are up and running;  it gives you a thumbnail view of open files, which I've learned is called "Expose'".   Swipe "up" with four fingers and it returns to last app that was running (if you just swiped down to Expose) or it takes you to the desktop with all apps minimized.   If you swipe left or right with four fingers it brings up the task ribbon across the middle of the page to allow you to switch apps.  

I also discovered that the thumb and index finger gives you the ability scale the size of the content on the page; it zooms the screen!   This works for apps like Safari and iPhoto.   And after a little more playing, a twist of those two digits attached to your hand causes an app like iPhoto to rotate the image you have open.  

It's all very cool and, of course, something else to like about the MacBook.

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