trackpad
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Dear Apple: stop leaving your early adopters out in the cold
Dan Lurie from The Apple Blog pointed me towards an early MacBook review at Macworld in which Jason Snell points out the new MacBook's ability to right-click when you have two fingers on the trackpad. It's a setting you can toggle in the MacBook's System Preferences, and it apparently also exists on the 17" MacBook Pro (and possibly on the revamped 15" models; reports pending).But not on the 15" MacBook Pro that I bought three weeks ago.Dear Apple: please stop leaving your early adopters out in the cold. I realize you're a company whose purpose is to make money. That's fine, in fact: I can't think of many other companies I'm happier to give my money to. That said, tiny new features like this which you aren't even bragging about on your product sites obviously aren't crucial selling points designed to sell X many more MacBooks and 17" MacBook Pros. They're small but important innovations that all MacBooks to date should have, especially when you consider the fact that right-clicking on a Mac has been a topic of geek controversy since someone first took a side on the Mac vs. PC debate.Apple, if you're listening (of course, you aren't), please give your early-adopting MacBook Pro buyers (what I'm hoping is) a simple software update so they can right-click with the rest of their MacBook brethren.
Apple needs to fix their PowerBook DL trackpad software
Ever since I picked up this 15" PowerBook DL (Dual Layer SuperDrive) about a month ago, I have occasionally run into situations where I see the kernel_task in Activity Monitor spiking to about 60% CPU usage, grinding my machine nearly to a halt and making it generally unusable until I restarted. None of the typical maintenance tasks seemed to help matters, and since I was planning on wiping the book clean this weekend for the upcoming semester anyway, I simply chalked it up to some little utility I had been playing around with. Oh the troubles I go through for you readers...Well after wiping the book this morning and getting everything reinstalled (huge time-saver tip: keep all your 3rd party apps in an Applications folder in your Home folder, this way OS X can still find them, yet it's easy for you to back them all up), I found I was still having these kernel_task issues - even before I installed all my extras. Getting frustrated, I finally decided to do some googling and discovered that, once again, MacOSXHints had already gotten to the bottom of this issue.As it turns out, this kernel_task usage problem is a result of Apple's own trackpad software horribly misbehaving on these latest PowerBooks, even on a 100% clean system, which I verified this morning. MacOSXHints did find a 3rd party solution in the form of SideTrack, a shareware trackpad software replacement for PowerBooks and iBooks that has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. While I can verify SideTrack fixed the issue on my PowerBook, it alters the behavior of two-finger scrolling and, of course, costs money ($15). I also can't stand some weird thing it does to mouse movement and acceleration; it feels and acts differently than Apple software, and these two dings caused me to uninstall it and take my chances with keeping kernel_task happy again.Moral of the story: Apple needs to fix their PowerBook trackpad software, and soon. This kernel issue destroys productivity, usability and battery life, and also causes a PowerBook to get pretty hot. If you're running into issues like this (or any other kind), I urge you to add your voice to the pile at apple.com/feedback.
