My main machine, at the moment, is a 27 inch iMac. It came with the Magic Mouse, which is an optical mouse that has a multi-touch surface on its top shell. It’s a great mouse and I really like it but I have a glass desk which means that I need to use a mouse pad for the optical tracking to work. That’s a problem because with that giant screen I was always running off the edge of the mouse pad and would have to pick up the mouse to reposition it.
So last weekend I bought a Magic Trackpad. Until I got my MacBook Pro I had always hated trackpads. For some reason the designers of every laptop I had ever used before the MacBook thought it was a great idea to have a tap on the trackpad represent a click. It’s one of those things that sounds good and natural but is terrible in practice. Terrible because it’s very easy to accidently trip the click simulation and yank focus away from whatever window you were working in. Say what you like about Apple but they think about stuff like this so their trackpad implementation was intelligently done. My MacBook is an older model so the trackpad had only limited gestures: a two-finger swipe was a scroll and, of course, the scrolls were inertial to make it easy to move large distances. The Magic Mouse added a gesture that would page forward and backwards in Safari and photos.
The Magic Trackpad has a full set of gestures and is much larger than a laptop trackpad as you can see in the picture.
It’s really easy to move around with it and it doesn’t take up as much room as the mouse pad did. All in all, it’s a giant win for me.