Synaptic Touchpad

Did you know most, if not all, (PC) laptop on the market with a Touchpad has the ability to launch program, scroll, and manipulate windows like minimize and maximize? It’s not really a Touchpad hack per se because it actually comes with your laptop. This is true because most laptop these days uses a Synaptics Touchpad. Even if your laptop doesn’t have those special scroller marking, your laptop’s Touchpad can still scroll! On top of that you can also play the drum, theremin and more on your Touchpad. All this is just hidden under the control panel.

Control Panel > Mouse

How?!

All you have to do is open up “control panel“, and click “mouse“. If you don’t see the “mouse” icon, click “Printers and Other Hardware” then click “mouse“. From there select “Device Settings” in the tab and click “settings“. Then you will see a tree structure menu on the left where you can add a lot more functionality to your regular ol’ touchpad.

It is a very easy and simple to use software. All the settings are on the left tree menu. And all the settings and features are explain clearly on the text area to the left bottom of it.

Device Settings > Settings

Tap Zones

One of the coolest one is “Tap Zones” which is under “Tapping”. Tap Zones allow you to make the corners of your touchpad into a hot key. Just like “Toshiba Satellite A100″’s touchpad, It can do things like launch a program, do keyboard macro, simulate mouse key, launch and navigate the internet, control your media player and more. You can also resize the “zones” to your need.

I currently set mine, in clockwise order, to launch photoshop, minimize and maximize window, and to launch pidgin.

Touch Zone on Synpatics Touchpad

Scrolling Using Your Touchpad

While newer laptop these days have a special marking/space to scroll on its Touchpad, the truth is any synaptics touchpad can scroll on both the x and y axis. The settings are under “Virtual Scrolling“. Under there you can find “Long Distance Scrolling” which has some nifty option aside from your basic scrolling. “coasting” allows you to do iPhone like scrolling on your computer by using the swipe gesture. It will continue scrolling until you tap the mouse pad again. It is quite useful when navigating a long page/word document on such a small Touchpad. The second option is EdgeMotion which allows you to keep scrolling even when you reach the edge of your touchpad by leaving your finger there.

You can also set the size of your scrolling area and whether to scroll the item under the pointer or on selected item. Once you’re done setting it up, you can try it out in a giant maze. You can get there by pressing “Virtual Scrolling” and pressing the Practice button.

Scrolling on any Laptop Touchpad. Yay!

Touchpad’s Sensitivity

One other thing to note is the “Sensitivity” menu. From there you can use the “PalmCheck” feature that will stop you from accidently moving your mouse while using your laptop’s keyboard. And you can also change the “Touch Sensitivity” that allow you to adjust how much pressure on the touchpad is needed before the cursor moves.

While there are more settings and feature available, these are the ones I think are worth noting. Other features include “Pointer Motion” where you can manipulate your touchpad (ie. move in a straight line, slow-mo, etc.) editing additional mouse button if available and more.

More Awesomeness

If you would to play more with your Touchpad, Synaptics has a few program that you can download to play with your new found touchpad feature. This includes being able to drum on your touchpad, play Simon Says, play on a theremin, and sketching on it.

The Giant Synaptics Maze

Troubleshooting

If you can’t find any of this, or it’s not working, try downloading a new driver from your vendor. If that still doesn’t work, you can try to get a generic driver from Synaptics. Although there is a warning that says it might stop some of your Touchpad’s special feature from working. Although in my experience, it works fine and dandy.

If you are like me and on an Acer laptop where your scrolling does not seem to work (especially in Firefox), all you have to do is download a new driver either on the Acer’s website or get a generic driver from Synaptics.

More!

Still want more info? Try visiting DesignLine and Synaptics’ support section.

It’s been a while since I got a new monitor, so I’ve been stuck with a 15 incher. Sure it’s adequate, but sometimes I wish it just had more screen real estate. Since a lot of what I do involves Firefox, I decided to optimize it to get more screen space. And Since I’m feeling daring, I’ve decided to use Firefox 3 beta 2 for the project because it’s more of a lean mean browser than the old one. So here we go.

What you need

So first lets start with getting Firefox 3 and a few programs. I started by getting Personal Menu so I can hide the menu bar, and access it from a small button. Then I got myself ChromeEdit plus to auto-hide buttons and the bookmark bar when not needed. Now that we have the tools, let’s get cracking.

Personal Menu

Now, after you restarted your Firefox, we’re going to do a few tweak using Personal Menu. So right click anywhere in the tool bar to get the context menu. Then click the Menu Tool bar so that it disappears. If they give you some warning or message, just click ok. Now we’re going to replace the menu bar with a button. Right click again but click “customize…” this time. Now drag Menu and History to your tool bar for quick access. Also tick the “use small icons”. Then click the new menu button on your toolbar and click edit this menu. Below is my personal settings that I use for my menu button. Feel free to choose your own, but add ChromeEdit Plus for now, because you are going to need it later. The history button will give you quick access to your previously closed tabs. For me this is a priority, I seem to always close tabs by accident.

ChromeEdit Plus

 After you’ve finished with that, lets move on and customize the gui using ChromeEdit Plus. Click your menu and hover over ChromeEdit Plus and click ChromeEdit. Now copy and paste the following codes that I compiled from lifehacker. Be careful when you use the auto hide, every time you hover over the address bar, it will push the web page down which may annoy some of you. There are more hacks, but I feel this are the important one, and because of our Personal Menu add-on, it is unneeded.

/* ################################################## */

/* Pop-up bookmarks toolbar */

#PersonalToolbar {display: none;} #navigator-toolbox:hover > #PersonalToolbar {display: -moz-box;}

/* Remove Back button when there’s nothing to go Back to */

#back-button[disabled="true"] { display: none; }

/* Remove Forward button when there’s nothing to go Forward to */

#forward-button[disabled="true"] { display: none; }

/* Remove Stop button when there’s nothing to Stop */

#stop-button[disabled="true"] { display: none; }

/* ################################################## */

Conclusion

And that’s it, you’ve successfully created some more room for your browser. Isn’t it beautiful? If you want even more, you can also hide the status bar by clicking view > status bar. Personally, I like to know where a link leads to. I mean I wouldn’t want to click a fake, or a 2girlsand1cup link . Oh noes, did you click it?

So what do you think? Do you have any hacks to get more screen real-estate? Share with us below.

P.S

Remember if you ever need your menu back, you can always click Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S on your keyboard. Also if you want to edit your “new” menu some more, you can do so by clicking Tools > Add-on > Personal Menus > Option.