Scrolling Track Pad on my PowerBook!
Mon Feb 14 23:45:15 2005 EST (-0500 GMT)Two weeks ago Apple released the latest revision of their PowerBooks. I bought mine at the end of the summer, and I don’t feel like I missed out on this update. I’m happy with the 1.3 GHz processor I have, and the speed-bump of 1.5 GHz that my machine would have got doesn’t bother me. That said, the feature that makes want to trade up is the scrolling track pad.
The idea is you get the functionality of the scroll wheel on many mice, but you don’t have the dead space you have on PCs with a scroll section. Just place two fingers on the pad and drag them in the direction you want to scroll.
Thanks to the Open Source core of OSX (called darwin) your too can compile (or download a pre-compiled) version of the driver that makes the new systems work. I found the hint on MacOSXHints.com at 11:30PM and had it running by 11:33PM.
Here’s the MacOSXHints.com
article, and Daniel Becker’s actual description of how to do it.