Because I got the Developer Preview of Lion, I didn't get the warning dialog that most people got about the "new and improved" scrolling direction. For weeks, during the preview, I thought that the upside-down behavior was because of my old Macally trackball. Then I tried an Apple mouse and found that it was backwards too! I couldn't find anything in System Preferences ▸ Mouse. Finally I called AppleCare and was pointed to the checkbox…
What in the world does that mean? After a few seconds I guessed what they meant by content, then activated the engineering side of my brain, and visualized it moving as described. "Oh, oh! Now I get it." Apparently I had skimmed over that checkbox, thinking that since it was so complicated it must not be what I was looking for.
Especially with early versions of BookMacster, people have commented to me that the control names, tooltips and other text "strings" as we call them were too long, too technical and hard to understand. I've been working on simplifying those, trying to be more like Apple. But with this checkbox, I see that Apple is going in the other direction. I told the rep on the phone that the title of that checkbox should have been something more understandable like this…
Seriously!
Anyhow, due to a bird attack while I was out of the room, I had to buy a new keyboard a couple days ago, so I went to the Apple Store at Valley Fair in San José and asked one of the young folks there to demo the Magic Trackpad for me. I tried real hard to forget my age and learn something new. After he left, I played with it for about 10 minutes. I surfed to apple.com and read about how to do gestures. So when you swipe left of right you can scroll through history in Safari and it has cool animations. Very cute. Tap with two fingers and it's a secondary click. Nice. But it frequently did things I wasn't expecting.
With only 1 moving part, it should be more reliable than my trackball. But for $69 USD? In the end, I made my decision based on the fact that Apple has 80 billion in the bank. They had not convinced me that they needed 69 more, at least not yet.
I'm still using my Macally trackball. I've written to Macally requesting that they update the driver for it, so my button programming will work and I can have my one-button double-click back. In the meantime, I've regressed to double-clicking the old-fashioned way.