SideTrack for your Trackpad

From the developer's site:

SideTrack is a replacement driver for the trackpad (touchpad) found on Apple PowerBooks and iBooks. It brings many of the trackpad scrolling features found on Windows laptops to MacOS X. Most Windows laptops implement trackpad scrolling using drivers made by Synaptics. Although Apple PowerBooks also use Synaptics trackpads, the standard Apple driver uses none of the extended features.

SideTrack supports these features:
* Vertical scrolling at left or right edge of pad.
* Horizontal scrolling at top or bottom edge of pad.
* Map hardware button to left or right click.
* Map trackpad taps to no action, left click, left click drag (with or without drag lock), or right click.

This is free while in beta, but I will gladly pay for this when it is final!

I cannot stand that the Mac (desktop and laptop) comes with only one mouse button. Its worse with the laptops since you can't buy and install a 2 button trackpad :-P.

When I am not at my desk, SideTrack is so nice to have. Having a right click and vertical scrolling is just so wonderful. But being able to scroll horizontally? That is just insane.

Apple should have the features of this SideTrack mouse driver built into OS X. Of course I say that about a lot of shareware and freeware avaiable for both the Mac OS and Windows. But if the hardware supports it (in this case the Synaptics trackpad) then the Operating System should also support it "out of the box." In this case, it would benefit laptop users.

This reminds me of when I posted about the firmware to double the speed of the SuperDrive in the 15" PowerBook. If the hardware supports it, why in the world would you cripple it.

This is by far a must have for any Mac laptop user who is tired of using the friggin' Control key when away from the desk and a multi button mouse. SideTrack works great!

Originally posted on Breaking Windows.

Article Author: Ken Edwards

Ken Edwards is the Gaming Editor at Blogcritics, and calls Breaking Windows home. Ken works part time for Student Publications at BGSU as the Webmaster and System Administrator. He is also a freelance web developer.

Visit Ken Edwards's author page — Ken Edwards's Blog