Okay so this is old news, but it's one I keep under-appreciating and thinking 'yeh, that's pretty cool, must blog about it one day' but hopefully one or two of you may find it useful.

As you know, my current sidearm is a MacBook Pro. Love it. It rocks. It really really rocks.

I also love scrollwheels on mice. They just save so much mousing over to scrollbars to get to where you want to go. I also like right-clicking, so at each location I have either a Logitech or Dell (rebadged Logitech perchance?) mouse parked nearby. But what happens when you're truly mobile and either don't have a mouse or a flatish surface to ride it on? You use the trackpad of course. Okay so you need to make some compromises... or do you?

Q. Where's the right-click!?

A. ctrl-click (you knew that one, right?)

Q. Where's the scrollwheel?

A. This one isn't obvious unless you actually RTFM. The answer for current MacBooks/MacBook Pros is you're looking at it. That's right, your trackpad is the scrollwheel. Just glide two fingers down (or across) the trackpad and you get silky smooth scrolling.

Q. Scrolling across!?

A. Yup, works left to right too. And if you're using a real scrollwheel mouse you can do the same by just holding shift down while wheeling.

Q. You smug bastard, my PowerBook's too old for that!

A. That wasn't really a question, was it?

Q. That wasn't really an answer either.

A. Okay got me there (I'm blogging to myself to save latency...) but the last couple of generations of PowerBooks have trackpad hardware smart enough to track two simultaneous touches too, the OS just doesn't enable this functionality. So third parties to the fore: have a look at Sidetrack for scrolly PB G4 goodness.