I know I was going to move onto software this week but I haven't decided how properly put my disdain for the dock into words yet. As a result, I'm gonna do a followup to my trackpad review. It looks like a good a few things wrong and a few things right.

First of all I was wrong about the two finger swipe behavior. I was annoyed and frustrated because Firefox rarely detected the side swipe gesture correctly. This makes navigating back and forth between pages a hassle. I tested the same thing in Chrome and it works pretty well. I wonder what the deal is? You'd think the OS would have a gesture detection API built in so that the behavior would be pretty consistent.

I was also an idiot for omitting its terrible right-click detection. As a developer, I rely on using context menus constantly so this needs to work. Control-click is pretty lame and two finger tap is somewhat better. I've noticed this thing intermittently decides that it doesn't want to detect this type of click anymore. I can't figure out what's going on but it's simply unacceptable to have this fail. I've downgraded to the two finger tap behavior.

Lastly, I got a lot of heat for describing how poor the industrial design of the trackpad is. I decided that the best way to illustrate my point was through, er, illustrations. Take a look at exhibit A:

http://i41.tinypic.com/213f68j.jpg

Here we have the underside of the trackpad. Notice how ridiculously small the rubber feet are. They provide almost no traction at all which causes the device to slide away from me when I'm scrolling up. Two more pics to better illustrate just how little surface area they cover:

http://i39.tinypic.com/b7xcec.jpg
http://i42.tinypic.com/f2n3b.jpg

There are a few ways to solve this problem. The most straight forward would have been for Apple to spend a few extra cents to make the feet larger to increase their traction. They could have also designed the pad with an additional 'leg' to add even more traction. Of course they'd never do this because it would add a few cents to the manufacturing process and cover up the oh so hip logo that they embossed on the bottom. What a disgrace.

An alternate approach is to make the pad level to the desktop instead of angled. This would require less padding but is less comfortable to use.

One last picture for show and tell:
http://i43.tinypic.com/4ixypv.jpg

Pop quiz: where does the left click zone begin and the right click zone begin? Trick question! It varies! I even experimented with hitting the pad in the very, very lower right corner of the pad. This still gave me inconsistent results. What a piece of shit.

They should really redesign this thing. You can tell that a lot of usability and functionality was sacrificed in order to make something that'll look good sitting on your desk.