Side Track is a replacement driver for apple ibooks and powerbooks. It adds much needed functionality to the apple trackpad. Coming from the 5 button scrolling mouse on the pc, I was very frustrated with the trackpad on my powerbook. The worst thing was that if I set the trackpad for ‘tap to click’, and tried to type, the cursor would jump all over the place. Side Track includes a checkbox to ‘ignore trackpad while typing’.
Other things:
- Set vertical and horizontal scrolling to edges of trackpad. You can also control the size of the area on the pad that is used for scrolling.
- Set trackpad button to either regular click or ctrl-click (right-click)
- Set each corner of the trackpad to a different mouse button or keystroke combination. For example: I have bottom left corner set to ctrl-click, bottom right corner set to ‘hide’, top left to ‘back’, and top right to ‘forward’. Very handy.
- Custom settings for applications.
Requires OS X 10.2 or higher.
Shareware – 30 day free trial. $15 to register.
Some people have experienced the ‘cursor freezes on wake from sleep’ bug. So far, I’ve only had one problem. After installing 10.3.8 OS update and turning off computer, cursor was frozen when I turned it back on. I had to turn it off, and back on. Since then, all is good, but I haven’t turned my computer off again since then.
Side Track does seem buggy at times, but still worth using, even w/the bugs. Messing with the settings can help some (or make things worse!).
It may take some time to get used to using it, but if you have any frustraton at all with the regular trackpad, side track may fix things, as well as adding a bunch of other very useful features.