Trackpads are a dime-a-dozen in today's laptop saturated world, but Apple is one of the few companies that's managed to squeeze some innovation from the age-old design. Four-finger swipes and pinch-to-zoom are just some of the multi-touch magic that the Mac's most recent pointers are packing, and they greatly improve the OS X experience too. However, smug Mac users won't be smiling for long; call it catchup or technological evolution, but some of your favorite Windows PCs will be getting their own four-finger functionality soon enough. And in most cases, all it takes is a bit of software to make it happen.
First, understand that not all trackpads are created equal. Most recent Macs are based on multi-touch hardware, capable of sensing multiple fingers as distinct points of input. However, not all laptops are that precise, with some limited to fewer points of contact for your gesture-happy digits. But that's not to say older laptops are excluded from all that multi-touch goodness — new drivers and technologies from Synaptics (the company behind almost every laptop trackpad on the market) can teach your old trackpad new tricks.
Apple's fancy multi-touch trackpad, pictured here doing the three-finger swipe.
While it's easy to build hardware that senses multiple inputs with ease, the real challenge is interpreting that data into something usable by the OS. Complex algorithms take all that raw sensor data and use it to map finger positions on the trackpad's plane. With recent multi-touch systems from Apple and Synaptics, this is relatively simple, as raw data is returned for each distinct point of input, making gestures easier to identify. But on older trackpads, where only one or two inputs can be tracked at a time, things can get a little more complicated.
Adding another finger to a single touch trackpad doesn't register as two distinct inputs, but often as a middle point between the two. The trackpad still realizes there's another finger present, it just can't accurately determine where it is. Naturally, this can prove problematic when attempting to interpret complicated gestures like pinch zooming or rotation, but for gestures like two finger or circular scrolling, that ambiguity is acceptable. As a result, Synaptics has been able to extend popular gestures to older machines that you wouldn't otherwise classify as multi-touch.
Scroll forever with Synaptics ChiralScroll gesture — one of the awesome features you can enable on your old touchpad.
For the Windows 7 crowd, this can have lots of advantages. A multi-touch trackpad or driver gives you access to two-finger scrolling, as well as pinch zooming if your hardware supports it. And that's just by default. Applications built specifically for touch can make use of the Windows Touch Platform to define more application-specific behavior, or even interpret raw touch data. You can try this functionality out right away with 7's new jump lists. Drag upwards on top of an application in your taskbar and watch as it produces the same behavior as right clicking.
If you've got a Synaptics trackpad to play with — and lets face it, you probably do — it's easy to teach that old trackpad of yours some new tricks. Lifehacker has a
great guide on installing some custom drivers to unlock your trackpad's hidden potential, including all the swipes and scrolls you've come to expect. Not every Synaptics trackpad will support multi-touch drivers, but it's worth a try if you have an Asus or HP laptop.
So go on and give your fingers an extra workout!
