Drag lock

Back when I was a PC-Mädchen, one of my favorite things about my Dell Inspiron 5100 was being able to click using the trackpad. I’m not really sure why I never enabled the trackpad click feature when I got my first PowerBook; I think it must have had something to do with the one-button clickpad or that the keyboard and the track/clickpad were just so darn close that there seemed to be no reason to used the trackpad to click. Over the years I’ve developed my own computing style: all track/clickpad related actions were exclusively the responsibility of Mr. Right Hand–Mr. Right Hand’s Thumb and Forefinger to be exact. When mousing, I hold my right hand so that the thumb is just hovering over the click pad while my index finger does all the moving around on the trackpad. I keep my middle finger nearby just in case I have to do some quick double-finger scrolling. The angle at which I hold the thumb and the forefinger is exactly the same as the angle they’re held at when typing, where the thumb is resting above the space bar and my forefinger above the first key in the home-row (that’s h for me since I’m using the Dvorak keyboard layout, but for the QWERTY user, it would be j); thus, rapid mousing is easy to achieve.

This way of mousing is not the most efficient on all computers, however, as is made clear to me when I use someone else’s PC, for example. Having had to reformat my old Dell recently and realizing just how inefficient it is to use the clickpad to click, I decided to finally enable the option to click with the trackpad. And while I was at it, I figured I might as well go all the way and enable drag and drag lock.

Now, it’s only been a few days, but already I’ve made the silly mistake of forgetting that I have these features enabled and accidentally doing things like drag iTunes playlists into Mail. I’m not sure if I’ll become anymore efficient if I get used to using only the trackpad, but I have become somewhat enamored with the drag lock feature. It took me a while to figure out how to actually use it. Overt double clicking just does what double click usually does in OS X: it hides the window. But when you gently and swiftly double click a window, drag lock is activated. It’s hard to explain just how magical it feels when you’ve locked a window down for dragging, but I think the reason why it feels so good is because it evokes a feeling of intimacy between you and your machine. You are hitting its sweet spot in just the right way, and it’s letting you drag your iChat window every which way.

Nathan once said that the reason why Apple products were so great was because when you were using them, it felt more like making love than mere button pushing (e.g. the iPod’s Click Wheel). Now I don’t know about that, but I might just be persuaded to agree if I drag a few more windows around…