That's right, today there is a useless goddamn piece of shit touchpad that ISN'T attached to a MacBook. In fact, it's worse than the Mac ones, which appears to have taken a fair bit of design effort. Our offender? HP.
This is the touchpad and part of the keyboard of a brand new HP Paviliion dv6:
I mean, we'll leave aside things like their bold decision to stick a "calculator" button where CTRL is supposed to go and where most laptop-UI-fail morons stick the Fn key, or their mislocation of the \| key to the *wrong goddamn side* of the keyboard.
Take a look at that touchpad.
Those look like buttons, don't they.
They aren't.
Those are part of the touchpad.
Those white lines are raised and can be felt with your fingers so you can tell when you enter those zones without looking, which is the ONLY good thing about this pad. Everything else, well, let's get started.
#1: Moving your finger on the "button" moves the cursor.
#2: Placing your finger on the "button" is detected as a multi-touch, a move of the cursor, AND a tap. And you haven't clicked yet. If you took your first finger off the touchpad, it's only detected as a move and a tap.
#3: Leaving your finger on the "button" as you move the mouse is sometimes interpreted as a multi-touch, sometimes as a move of the cursor from your main-pad finger to your button finger, sometimes as what you ACTUALLY wanted to do which was move the cursor while just leaving your finger on the button without clicking yet.
#4: The *entire touchpad*, not just the buttons, is clickable. Which is nice, in theory - however, clicking the main portion of the touchpad does nothing AND is not configurable in software. What happens when you click either "button" zone is configurable, which is kind of nice - but what happens when you TAP the button zones is not. That's always left-click or right-click, depending on whether or not it thinks you have one finger or two fingers on the touchpad at the time. Bonus: "tapping" the right button left-clicks, because "one-finger tapping means left-click".
#5: The "button" zones are imprecise when clicking. The touchpad will often register a click near the border of one of the zones as being in the next zone over - so, left-click instead of right, no-click instead of left or right, or a click because you accidentally pressed too hard when moving the mouse on the touchpad zone.
#6: Disabling tapping is possible, which is a positive since tapping is terrible and constantly provides misclicks and false clicks. You can also declare zones of the touchpad with different functions - adding a scroll zone to the side or top, all that standard stuff that all touchpads do. Sounds good, right? You're wondering why this is in my list of crap anti-features? YOU CAN'T DISABLE OR REBIND TOUCHPAD FUNCTIONS FOR THE BUTTON AREAS. Those are ALWAYS "moving the cursor, multi-touch detecting" zones. They're tap-detecting too if you're an idiot who hasn't disabled tapping, but at least they disable THAT properly.
Congratulations, HP. You have made a laptop touchpad interface WORSE THAN APPLE'S. You have defined the new gold standard of terrible laptop interfaces. You get a banana sticker. BE PROUD.
(PS: Compaq Presario CQ61, also dropped on me this morning: simple multi-touch touchpad, separate clickable buttons. See, HP, you DO know how to make non-shit touchpads, GO DO THAT INSTEAD.)
This is the touchpad and part of the keyboard of a brand new HP Paviliion dv6:
I mean, we'll leave aside things like their bold decision to stick a "calculator" button where CTRL is supposed to go and where most laptop-UI-fail morons stick the Fn key, or their mislocation of the \| key to the *wrong goddamn side* of the keyboard.
Take a look at that touchpad.
Those look like buttons, don't they.
They aren't.
Those are part of the touchpad.
Those white lines are raised and can be felt with your fingers so you can tell when you enter those zones without looking, which is the ONLY good thing about this pad. Everything else, well, let's get started.
#1: Moving your finger on the "button" moves the cursor.
#2: Placing your finger on the "button" is detected as a multi-touch, a move of the cursor, AND a tap. And you haven't clicked yet. If you took your first finger off the touchpad, it's only detected as a move and a tap.
#3: Leaving your finger on the "button" as you move the mouse is sometimes interpreted as a multi-touch, sometimes as a move of the cursor from your main-pad finger to your button finger, sometimes as what you ACTUALLY wanted to do which was move the cursor while just leaving your finger on the button without clicking yet.
#4: The *entire touchpad*, not just the buttons, is clickable. Which is nice, in theory - however, clicking the main portion of the touchpad does nothing AND is not configurable in software. What happens when you click either "button" zone is configurable, which is kind of nice - but what happens when you TAP the button zones is not. That's always left-click or right-click, depending on whether or not it thinks you have one finger or two fingers on the touchpad at the time. Bonus: "tapping" the right button left-clicks, because "one-finger tapping means left-click".
#5: The "button" zones are imprecise when clicking. The touchpad will often register a click near the border of one of the zones as being in the next zone over - so, left-click instead of right, no-click instead of left or right, or a click because you accidentally pressed too hard when moving the mouse on the touchpad zone.
#6: Disabling tapping is possible, which is a positive since tapping is terrible and constantly provides misclicks and false clicks. You can also declare zones of the touchpad with different functions - adding a scroll zone to the side or top, all that standard stuff that all touchpads do. Sounds good, right? You're wondering why this is in my list of crap anti-features? YOU CAN'T DISABLE OR REBIND TOUCHPAD FUNCTIONS FOR THE BUTTON AREAS. Those are ALWAYS "moving the cursor, multi-touch detecting" zones. They're tap-detecting too if you're an idiot who hasn't disabled tapping, but at least they disable THAT properly.
Congratulations, HP. You have made a laptop touchpad interface WORSE THAN APPLE'S. You have defined the new gold standard of terrible laptop interfaces. You get a banana sticker. BE PROUD.
(PS: Compaq Presario CQ61, also dropped on me this morning: simple multi-touch touchpad, separate clickable buttons. See, HP, you DO know how to make non-shit touchpads, GO DO THAT INSTEAD.)
