http://www.osnews.com/story/9853/SideTrack_Adding_a_New_Scrolling_Dimension_to_Mac_OS_X Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:16:26 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? OGM! That's a revolution in user interfaces!!!! Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you don't need(or want) all the cool features that sidetrack gives you(or just plain cheap), iscroll2 is a replacement driver, for some Powerbooks, and ibooks. You do need a specfic model trackpad, and the install will tell you if you can use it.

If not your only option is Sidetrack.

Note I didn't provide a link on purpose, Just google it. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I got one of the new 17" Powerbooks with the built-in scrolling, and it does not work as expected, especially when using firefox. One accidental move and firefox jumps through pages, etc. Also I think it needs to be slowed down slightly.

I installed Sidetrack on my older PowerBook 12" and it is much better, unfortuatenly it is not compatible with my new Powerbook. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? If you don't need(or want) all the cool features that sidetrack gives you(or just plain cheap), iscroll2 is a replacement driver, for some Powerbooks, and ibooks. You do need a specfic model trackpad, and the install will tell you if you can use it.

Jippie. This smal driver is really great. scrolling with the touchpad was definetly the one thing missing on my ibook. and it's free..... Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? When you can have iScroll2 for free? (With full source code.)
http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/
There's even a new release today. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Peragrin had the decency to respect Trackpad's review and not post a URL of iScroll2. You didn't.

Besides, to answer your question, A LOT of people would need SideTrack instead of iScroll2 because it has more features.

Also, $15 is not expensive. It's a good price considering the amount of work the developer has put into this. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Why should I care that Peragrin feels that posting the URL is somehow wrong?
And IMO $15 is expensive when you consider that other input device drivers with advanced features like IntelliPoint (for mice), iScroll2, uControl, or DoubleCommand are free.

It's the comments section here and I posted an on-topic comment about an alternative and my few on SideTracks shareware fee. So? Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yeah that'it ...
And OSNews should really stop publishing urls to Linux because of all the work that went into making Windows and proprietary unices great OSes !

I'm sorry but proprietary software is a dead end and people writing it should be aware that their business model is stale.

That said I haven't tried sidetrack but it looks like it has a quite different featureset than iScroll2 so its author can still hope to make a few bucks from it. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I know it's a pipe dream and will never happen but I really wish Apple would just give me two buttons. That said, I will try the software and if I like it $15.00 is "chicken feed" and I will gladly pay it. Thanks for the article. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This program has been known about for a long time now. Maybe OSNews should change the tagline to "Exploring the past of computing"

Slow news day or nothing interesting to rip from Slashdot? Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is not a news item, this is a REVIEW. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Maybe this is common knowledge and I'm just being repetitive but none the less:

If you are in a window with a horizontal scroll bar, holding down the CMD button while scrolling with a mouse wheel (third party mouse) will scroll the window view horizontally rather than vertically. I thought that was pretty cool, and it works in pretty much all the windows I've tried.

I wonder if it behaves the same with the various scrolling software alternatives. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? No, it doesn't with SideTrack. I guess you can email the author to add the feature. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:16:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? First you don't post links to Linux distro's or Apple computers when talking about Windows. You don't point to MSFT when you are talking about Apple unless it deals with both.

It's called respect for topic on hand.

Second. Sidetrack and iscroll2 do have horizantal scrolling on the pad.

Third. Sidetrack has features, and fine adjustments that iscroll2 doesn't. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was recommended SideTrack a while ago, and shortly after installing it, I got my first kernel panic. This repeated a couple of times a week until I reinstalled the OS (uninstalling SideTrack didn't seem to do anything to fix it). This experience was mirrored by a couple of friends of mine who tried it at around the same time. Since then, I have avoided SideTrack like the proverbial plague. Are newer versions more stable? Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It's rock solid here, I use it for 4 months.
If you get kernel panics it seems that you have lots of drivers/hacks installed and something goes wrong. On a clean system like mine (I try to keep my OSX clean), there isn't the single problem. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've used this scrolling feature with my Synaptics TouchPad on my non-apple Laptop for quite a while, now... as I'm sure many others have. Now, the mapping multiple buttons to the trackpad seems to be nice, for apple users.. but hardly amazing or worthy of throwing dollars at. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? i liked sidetrack until it became a for-pay program. now it is just annoying because it pops up its annoyance box WAY too often. even usb overdrive only shows it on boot.

i'll have to try out iscroll2. $15 may not seem like a lot, but i dont think sidetrack is worth more than $7. maybe i'm cheap. maybe the author is greedy. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 18:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've tried it, and I like it. For the first time the trackpad of an Powerbook seems to behave in a way that I expect (being a nearly full-time PC user), thanks to the "Redmond" mode. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 19:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've used both and I prefer the iScroll2 software. Not because it is free but due to its design methodology. I don't like the way that SideTrack subdivides your trackpad. It gets very annoying when you make movements beyond the designated areas.

iScroll2 is not perfect by any means but the steady release of upgrades will soon make it a solid choice.

My $0.02

P.S. Who cares if someone made a link to a competing product. We're on the web! The internet's sole function is to make information interconnected and easy to get to. It's ignorant to think that we owe any one product some kind of loyalty. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 19:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I got a new 12" PB with the scroll, and it works great.

FireFox is the one with the problem, any Cocoa app works fine, I think that Mozilla is a Carbon app which is why it has the issue. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 19:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The problem is Firefox deals with horizantal scrolling as backwards, Forwards for pages. To change this to scrolling

in firefox go to about:config (type it in address field)
change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines to 1

Not sure what the other settings give you. But this was posted to slashdot a few weeks ago. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 20:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In firefox go to about:config and change the following key (I believe) to false:
mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines

This turns off firefoxes infinite acceleration on scrolling to something that a human can use. That is the most annoying default setting in firefox for the mac. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 20:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Always thought someone should make a replacement trackpad for the highend power books that had three mice... but looks like this will work too. I mean if you pay 3 grand for a laptop I am sure you would pay $150 for a better trackpad with 3 buttons.... Tue, 01 Mar 2005 21:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Instead of mucking about with Firefox's about:config settings, you could just turn off horizontal scrolling in System Preferences. Tue, 01 Mar 2005 22:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? does anyone happen to know if iScroll works on the 667mhz DVI Powerbook? Tue, 01 Mar 2005 23:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I happen to find horizontal scrolling very useful and would rather NOT turn it off. Wed, 02 Mar 2005 01:10:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've seen this in a mac browser, dont remember if it's firefox or some other, and i'm not a mac owner currently, so a bit hard to check..

I think it would make sense to allow a click and hold (without motion) to mean a double click, eg. if you click and hold a link in a webpage, it makes sense the app opens up the context menu as if you've been right clicking.

I know about sidetracks corner clicking abilities, but it doesn't feel as natural. Maybe a savy programmer could add it to iscroll2? Wed, 02 Mar 2005 03:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? this might interfere with applications that already support that by themselves. It might create new bugs. Wed, 02 Mar 2005 04:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Personally I prefer double-finger/three-finger right/middle clicks. As far as I can tell these only seem to be supported by the Linux Synaptics touchpad driver, although detection is done in hardware.

The hold-to-click thing isn't a bad idea, but it's a bit slow since you have to have that pause - and if Apple built it into their touchpad they might be seen as admitting that one button wasn't enough :-P Wed, 02 Mar 2005 04:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? you laptop fiends need to try cocoa gestures.

it will make browsing especially super fun.
like hold down "fn" and slide your finger to the left to go back.

cocoa gestures work on all cocoa apps
.... duh

oh yeah it is free.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18404 Wed, 02 Mar 2005 10:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Wow, 28 comments in and no one has mentioned what I'm about to say...

The new trackpads aren't all that 'new'. Apparently they've been included on ibooks and powerbooks as far back as a year and a half ago. There exists a driver you can install that will enable the new two-finger scrolling on older laptops. I don't have the URL with me at the moment, but I've seen it in action and it's pretty slick. Wed, 02 Mar 2005 15:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Wow, 28 comments in and no one has mentioned what I'm about to say...

Are you being sarcastic? That's what half of the comments here were about.

And, staying on topic, older versions of SideTrack did give me KP's. But, I recently tried the newer versions and it is rock solid. Definitely a great product and worth $15 for the extra features.

That being said, I just use iScroll2 since I really never used any of said extra features anyways. Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments