Ready to scroll

You may have noticed by now that Apple has upgraded it’s PowerBook line. You may have noticed the new feature that allows scrolling using the trackpad, just like with a scroll well on a mouse. You only have to put two fingers on the trackpad at the same time and move them. That looks interesting!

Now, try this small experiment on your own iBook or PowerBook: put two fingers on the trackpad and move them. Then go to the Keyboard and Mouse system preference panel and click on “Ignore accidental trackpad input” in the Trackpad tab. Retry the experiment.

On my iBook, when the box is checked, I cannot move the pointer with two fingers. When the box is unchecked it’s perfectly possible. (This is on a iBook is from September 2004.)

What does this means? It means that my trackpad is already able to detect if you touch it with one or two fingers. It means that all that is missing for my iBook to work like this new PowerBook is the appropriate software driver.

So, does this means that the next Mac OS X update will enable that on my iBook? Or could Apple reserve this feature to new PowerBooks using a firmware lock-in like for the dual head mode on the iBook?