At the risk of making myself look like a complete noob once again, I am bearing my soul here in an effort to help someone else not willing to be as forthcoming as myself. I know that someone of my intelligence and experience should have discovered this LONG ago, but for some reason, it has completely eluded me. (Did I mention that I don’t claim to be a Mac expert by any stretch of the imagination?). Here’s the story…

I usually use a mouse with my MacBook, but the other day, I was without my mouse and forced to use the trackpad to navigate around my desktop. Since switching to Mac back in November, one of the little differences between OS X and Windows that I was forcing myself to “deal with” was the mousepad or “trackpad”. I have since acclimated to the one button method, but the ctrl-click thing and not being to tap the pad to click, was downright annoying. I kept tapping my trackpad out of PC habit to no avail, then I utter a slight “hrumpf” sound and resort to the big wide button below the pad. (stay with me here, all you Mac experts, my stupidity will be soon revealed for all to see)

Finally, my angst got the best of me and I did a Google search to find trackpad options. By sheer accident, I slide two fingers down my trackpad and the window scrolls down. “Oh My gosh!” I think to myself and I test with the opposite direction (2 fingers sliding up) and sure enough, scroll away! I am amazed! Especially since my PC didn’t do that (…that I know of). I click on a link in the search and discover an amazing thing:

Yep! The only reason I was frustrated, was because I never even looked at the trackpad preferences window. There’s all sorts of cool stuff in there, like the tap/mouseclick thing and a two-finger tap, horizontal scrolling, dragging and the like. All I can say is… “Lesson learned, note to self: spend some time in the prefs pages.”

I’m sure no one else has EVER experienced this first hand and I am the only one bearing my stupidity in front of the entire world, but just in case I am not alone or “that friend you have” was wondering, I hope this helped!

Okay everyone… be gentle in the comments (grin)

Brent