Today's complete touchpad UI failure: Strangely, not Apple!

[theweaselking]

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.)

Comments

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

Apple's latest touchpads are uniquely awful because the mousing surface is also the clicking surface- the goddamn entire surface clicks down and back up again, so I hope you were as close as possible to the center of what you're clicking on since the skin of your fingertip spreading out as you apply pressure to the touchpad will move the cursor. It's as if you had to jiggle the mouse to register a click.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

At least they're clickable. Could be tap-only.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

You can use another finger to click, which avoids this problem just fine. There is occasionally one of the problems described above, where it interprets it as a gesture or something because you have two fingers on the trackpad, but it's relatively rare because at least the thing is well made. (I have a half-second issue with this maybe once a day.)

For the record, I'm a fan of dedicated buttons like they used to have. But at least the thing works well for what it is. Just TRY to click and drag with the CR-48's trackpad, which has the same design. It's damn near impossible; you really do have to do it all with one incredibly awkward finger.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't using a second finger to click be interpreted as a right-click since you now have two fingers on the touchpad?

(No, seriously, this is a real question. I've never dealt with a CLICKABLE Apple touchpad, only non-clickable one-buttons and non-clickable no-buttons like the iWhatevers)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also: How do you keep it from thinking you're tapping when you add the second finger, before clicking?

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

Except you have to push down on the surface to click. The motion of your skin on the clicking surface produces cursor movement. That is bad.

(Also tapping a touchpad is design so terrible that going back in time and aborting its inventor would be a morally positive act.)

[publius1.livejournal.com]

Weird... until this entry, I've heard nothing but good things about Apple's touchpads.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You appear to have forgotten your "I am trolling" icon.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

No, seriously!

[publius1.livejournal.com]

I hate all touchpads and trackpoints equally, so I have no dog in this hunt.

[maelorin]

i hate touchpads on laptops. they push the keyboard back, and are shite as 'mouse'-type controllers. they're too small, sensitivity varies too much, and they're just shite to use.

at least with the ipad you're able to just drag the gorram thing you want to move.

though not having a cursor is a pain in the arse when you're writing/editing text. sure you can hold down and get something *like* a cursor. but it's *under* you damn finger, innit. half the time you can't even see where it is until you let go. i'm getting used to it, but a free cursor would be awesome.

the dell i'm using to write this has a touchpad with two separate physical buttons. and the whole rig - pad and buttons - can be customised through software.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That's fairly standard. I'm using a Fujitsu with two buttons, customisable trackpad, and a middle fingerprint sensor that works as a middle button and scrollwheel.

[thornae.livejournal.com]

One thing I absolutely love about my Toshiba is that it comes with a nub mouse.

It has a trackpad, too, if you're into that sort of thing.

(Reassuringly, Toshiba nub mice still retain that endearing habit of occasionally losing their centering and making the pointer drift off into a corner.)

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

*reads the description*

Aaaaaaaa!

Why, why do people meddle with what's not broke?!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

today I am much with hate.

Just DOESN'T Work

[senorcameltoe.livejournal.com]

I have to echo the magnitude to which the Apple touchpads suck. When multi-touch became the Next Big Thing(tm), Apple removed the sensitivity adjustments from OSX in order to enable multi-touch. As soon as they did this I became a swearing, maniacal beast because I'm constantly plagued with phantom mis-clicks when I'm forced to use the touchpad. Thanks for that Apple - I've found exactly ZERO useful multi-touch gestures for the work I do, but the one thing that the touchpad is supposed to do regardless, allow you to mouse and click, no longer works. Thanks...

I've been an anti-Mac person for the greater part of two decades. After listening to one of my tirades and losing patience, a fanboy friend asked how much time I had actually spent using a Mac. Muttering to myself and realizing he was right, I went out and bought a MacBook Pro as what I now refer to as The Great Failed Experiment(tm). Having used just about every version of Windows over the years, as well as several flavors of UNIX and Linux, I can safely now report that Apple users are suffering a mass delusion of cognitive dissonance. It Just Works is a wonderful marketing slogan, but it is 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag. Try to do something useful in a mixed environment and you'll pound your forehead flat on the closest hard surface.

OSX is just as flawed as every other OS, even though the exact problems are subtley different. I include the widely loved OSX user experience in this claim. The real problem is that when other OSs are flawed there is usually some configurability to fall back on to help. Apple instead dictates how it shall be done and Stevie thinks any other way is wrong.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

All software sucks. The trick is finding the software that sucks in the way you can deal with best.

Every time I have to use a Mac I'm always stuck working around some intractable annoying problem that would be simple in *Linux*, let alone Windows. It's been that way since the System 7 machines I was first exposed to.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Lord. I'm still waiting for the the great tide of chicklet keys recede and get some ergonomics back in my keyboard, then they start rearranging the damned keyboard layout.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I want a laptop with a split keyboard. There's plenty of room! Stick the fucking trackpad *at the top of the keyboard*, in the space you created by breaking the keyboard and bending the center down.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

These are the current generation of Synaptics pads. They're not the best, but they're relatively easy to get used to (I have something similar on my HP tm2t...).

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

Blanket apology for typos. I'm doing this with Swype on my Nexus S.

[the-trav.livejournal.com]

sounds like their biggest failing is a lack of customisability...

For all the raging out re mac touchpads, I believe several things are customisable about them (thumb clicks, tapping, whether you need to be in a region to right click or need to do a two finger click)

I've always found it to be perfectly intuitive to me, haven't felt like I needed to learn a new way of moving my hand, haven't had mis clicks, don't get cursor movement when I click (and I click and tap from all over the place, I'm not terribly consistant in UI operation)

I'm no surgeon when it comes to hand control, but my hand doesn't obviously shake, I'd expect I'm fairly common in that regard

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

sounds like their biggest failing is a lack of customisability...

That's a major one. In fact, being able to make changes to the "button" region - make it insentive to touching and tapping, make it click-only, making the clicks more selective so it doesn't mistake an out-click for an in-click and vice versa, would eliminate just about all of my complaints about this touchpad.

Which is to say, I want the ability to USE BUTTONS. That work LIKE BUTTONS.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I can think of at least one way it could be worse. As it stands now I presume that it can be disabled entirely and you can plug a real mouse in to work with. Just think of the annoyance if the click was also an absolute turn me on signal making tghe trackpad active anytime you bumped it.

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

I know your deep seated hatred of all things Apple, which more or less mimics my deep seated hatred of all things Microsoft Windows. That being said, I use Apple products at home. I like them for the simple fact that, generally speaking, they do just work and for what I require of my home computing they do what I want.

Conversely, at work, my preferred operating system is Linux. I'd rather use Ubuntu, but since we have security procedures that are written to RHEL I run Fedora. I inherited an Apple MacBook Pro from a departed coworker who used it as his development box. I have tried to use it, and hate it as a Java software development OS.

I also have my Mac setup to dual boot Windows for when I want to play games that aren't available for MacOS. I'd prefer a standalone windows box, but since I can't afford one right now, it's a workable compromise.

Different tools for different jobs. As always, mileage may vary.

To the original subject at hand, I have yet to meet a track pad that I like and despise them and disable them whenever feasible.