Re:Asus replaced the touchpad on its new ZenBook Pro with a ...
by Deinos on Saturday June 09, 2018 @09:28AM
(#17272912)
Razer something similar about 5 years ago.[1] I personally really like the idea. Feels more functional than a bar and should be easily dropped into "dumb touchpad" functionality if the user wants to save battery life or just doesn't need it. Would be nice to see this migrate across the entire laptop pc segment.
[1]https://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pc...
Re:Asus replaced the touchpad on its new ZenBook Pro with a ...
by nrjames on Saturday June 09, 2018 @09:33AM
(#17272929)
I would be shocked if Apple didn't prototype this while working on design for the Touch Bar.
It still has the problem where you have to take your eyes off your screen in order to interact with it, so I imagine there'd be some effort involved in getting used to actually looking at the touch pad while you poke at it. That said, if there are good app integrations that are intuitive and turn the thing into more than a pointing device (and not just a Spotify controller or some such), then I'm interested to see what those could be.
It'd be quite nice, for example, if it allowed notifications to pop up on a part of the touchpad instead of obscuring what you're working on, allowing you to tap that part of the touchpad to open it up instead of moving the pointer to the corner of the screen.