Tap Click

Sometimes I drive the Boss crazy. That's ok, though, because sometimes she drives me crazy too. When we were dating, I helped her get her Macbook and was going through the process of setting it up. She made the off-hand comment, "How come I can't just tap and click it?" A wave of fear flooded my body. I hate tapping on the trackpad. Sure, it seems convenient but it gets in the way of doing other things. Like dragging and dropping. I hate it when you're trying to drag and drop something and then all of a sudden the computer decides that you wanted to open the file instead of just dragging it to the trash to delete. Or when you want to just select something but instead you end up dragging it. Sigh. So I helped her set it up, but in the back of my mind I asked myself "Why would anyone want to do this!? It doesn't make sense!"

That is, until, I got this netbook. One observation that I had was that a lot of PC users used tap-click. I think it's because it is enabled by default on most Windows PCs but you have to actively activate it on the Mac. In any case, I got this netbook and, to my horror, I found that I started using tap-click everywhere! What is happening to me!? After I calmed down and discovered a couple things about a Windows PC that made it clearer why people use tap-click.

1. Most PC laptop trackpad buttons are harder push and more cheaply made. My thumb starting hurting a bit after pushing the trackpad button a lot. I found that it was easier just to tap-click than to push that button with my thumb. I also found that the Mac trackpad button was easier to push and had a more solid feel to the button. I hated using the netbook trackpad button.

2. I do less drag and drop on a PC. It don't know if it's because it's not as easy or because there are fewer opportunities to, but I find myself using the keyboard more to access things that I normally would have used the mouse to. So there's less need to try and drag and drop things using the trackpad and, thus, the trackpad becomes the place to tap and click.

Thanks to the netbook, I now understand the Boss much better. I recommend everyone getting one! :)