Two Finger Scrolling Rocks

Every so often something comes along that completely changes the way I use a computer. My new MacBook Pro has provided one of those: two finger scrolling. The concept is just so simple; to move the mouse you slide one finger across the track pad, to scroll you slide two fingers across the track pad. You can scroll vertically or horizontally so it beats a scroll wheel mouse hands down.

It’s particularly interesting that I’ve taken to using it so heavily, so quickly, because I’ve never taken to tapping the track pad to click. I’ve always found it easier to just keep my thumb hovering over the great big single mouse button that Macs have so it wasn’t worth the annoyance of accidental clicks that come with enabling the tap to click function. I’ve always really liked the fact that Mac laptops only have one button because it makes clicking so much easier – the split button on Windows laptops has always annoyed me and made clicking (both left and right) much slower.

For those that want two buttons though, the new Mac trackpads do have another cool track. Place two fingers on the trackpad and click the button and it treats it as a right click. If  you like the tap to click function, you can just tap with two fingers to get a right click. I think it’s a pretty awesome example of designers knowing better than users and sticking to their guns. For years people have asked for a second mouse button on Apple laptops but the Mac designers wanted the simplicity (and efficiency, since most clicks are actually left clicks and a single big button is much faster for that) of having just a single mouse button. It turns out that you don’t really want a real second mouse button, you just want an easily accessible, one handed modifier for your mouse click. The two finger click turns out to provide just that without making single clicking harder.

Course, people will still complain – just watch the comments…