Life hack #37: how to make a great touchpad

[mrnuke]

To manufacturers of Chromebooks,

Sorry guys, I have a chromebook myself, and its touchpad is appalling. I've 
also tried the chromebooks in stores and they aren't much better.

But have no fear, Alex is here, and has the perfect recipe on how to squash 
such hardware bugs early on. Following these steps, you are guaranteed to 
never make this mistake again:
1. Go to your favorite bidding site
2. Enter the following search terms: "HP Pavilion M6 1035dx"
3. Find a matching listing
4. Purchase full laptop
5. When you get it, observe its touchpad
6. Notice the big, easy to hit buttons
7. Notice the surface area
8. Notice the smoothness of the surface
9. Notice the ease of moving the pointer
10. Notice the tactile feedback from the buttons
11. Notice the evenness of the force needed to engage the button
12. Notice the fatigue of repeatedly pressing the buttons (hint:there is none)
13. Play with its touchpad
14. Play some more with its touchpad
15. Now play with the Unreleased(TM) Chromebook's touchpad
16. If it seems inferior, it probably is

You'll be making perfect touchpads now, won't you?

Alex

[David Hubbard]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 9:45 PM, mrnuke  wrote:
> To manufacturers of Chromebooks,
>
> Sorry guys, I have a chromebook myself, and its touchpad is appalling. I've
> also tried the chromebooks in stores and they aren't much better.
>
> But have no fear, Alex is here, and has the perfect recipe on how to squash
> such hardware bugs early on. Following these steps, you are guaranteed to
> never make this mistake again:
> Go to your favorite bidding site
> Enter the following search terms: "HP Pavilion M6 1035dx"
> Find a matching listing
> Purchase full laptop
> When you get it, observe its touchpad
> Notice the big, easy to hit buttons
> Notice the surface area
> Notice the smoothness of the surface
> Notice the ease of moving the pointer
> Notice the tactile feedback from the buttons
> Notice the evenness of the force needed to engage the button
> Notice the fatigue of repeatedly pressing the buttons (hint:there is
>
> none)
> 13. Play with its touchpad
> 14. Play some more with its touchpad
> 15. Now play with the Unreleased(TM) Chromebook's touchpad
> 16. If it seems inferior, it probably is
>
> You'll be making perfect touchpads now, won't you?

Agree 100%. On a slightly related note, the touchpad identifies itself as
"SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad," though I'm not 100% sure it's a synaptics
device.

I foundnd the mouse moved ever so slightly when I touched or released the
pad -- so I changed the expected finger size:

xinput | grep 'SynPS/2' # to get the device id, should be 11
xinput list-props 11

# change "Synaptics Finger (271)"
xinput --set-prop 11 37 42 0 # 37=min size of a finger, 42=max size of a
finger

# the previous value was: xinput --set-prop 11 25 30 0

David

[Stefan Tauner]

Alex, you have missed something very important here:
0: Look at any Chromebook, notice the lack of a trackpoint, facepalm :P

[ron minnich]

well, you may not like the missing trackpoint, but a couple million
chromebook and macbook users are doing just fine.

It's all about the numbers.

ron

On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 2:52 AM, Stefan Tauner
 wrote:
> Alex, you have missed something very important here:
> 0: Look at any Chromebook, notice the lack of a trackpoint, facepalm :P