Jan 1 2012
The Trackpad Double – A Mini-Tip
I’ve been fiddling around with my Macs over the Christmas break. Nothing huge, just minor configuration tweaks, adding some stuff to better gain access to my data from my iPad and so on.
But in the process I found the Magic Trackpad I’d put aside to use on my Mac mini (which shares my desk with my iMac). I’m still using the Magic Mouse on my Mac mini at the moment. As much because I felt I should be at least a little familiar with it in case I need to provide support but also because my two Macs live side by side, monitor-wise, and I’ve been using Teleport so I only actually need one keyboard and mouse to drive both computers.
Finding the spare Trackpad got me thinking.
I wonder if I can use both Trackpads on one Mac?
Actually, I knew the answer to this without even checking. You can connect multiple Bluetooth devices with no trouble at all.
But will having two Trackpads be more efficient and useful?
Ah, now that’s a whole different question.
In order to find out I’ve set them up.
Because they’re both the same shape and size they fit well together and your fingers naturally move from one to the other without any real problem.
As you’d expect, multi-touch gestures don’t work across Trackpads – all “touches” have to be on the one Trackpad. Interestingly, though, you can click-hold (e.g. to move a window) on one Trackpad and as long as you hold that click both Trackpads will behave consistently. This has let me move a window from the right hand side of my 27″ iMac all the way to the left end of the 19″ LCD also running on my iMac without having to pick up my fingers and shuffle back again. Nice.
As your finger moves from one Trackpad to the next there’s a slight pause (I guess the sensors don’t actually work all the way to the edges of the surface after all) but the movement keeps going where it left off. It’s not like the mouse pointer jumps to a new position or anything.
After a few hours of playing with it I’m not sure I can see enough benefit to keep it but it certainly makes moving the pointer from the extreme left of my screen setup to the extreme right a far easier task.
I admit it, for the last fifteen years or so I’ve been almost exclusively Windows-centric. I’m sure there’s a Mac-specific term for this but I haven’t found it yet. So, I’ll use sysprep for now.
