As many of you know, I got a new Macbook Pro not long ago. The default pointing device on these is the track pad.

I've never really been a fan of track pads. Always preferred my good old mouse.

But now, with the iPhone and iPad using touch screens and the convergence of Mac OS with iOS, it appears that a touch style interface is becoming more important. When you consider that the upcoming Mac OS X release called Lion is going to rely much more on gesture based input, a touch style interface gains even more significance.

For whatever reason, I don't care for the placement of the touch pad on my Macbook Pro. It's down between my hands and to use it, I've got to take both hands off the keyboard. For me, it's a little inconvenient.

So, I went and bought myself a new toy. One of these:



The juries still out on how much I like it. It's definitely taking some getting used to. For instance, with a mouse, if I want to go to the previous web page I was looking at, I'd just hit the back button in my web browser. With this, I can just use three fingers and a quick swipe to the left does the same thing. It's going to take a while to get used to it.

Time will tell....

Tom (... he's changing? Unheard of!)