It's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20101222190833/http://www.micros...
Now I’ve just gone over to Apple’s trackpads for 100% of my cursor needs.
[1] http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/1/0/B109F931-70E2-4...
Apple is very opinionated about all the parts of User Interfaces (including inputs), it's great if you agree with their opinions.
https://downloads.steelseriescdn.com/drivers/tools/steelseri...
The trackpad, it's the opposite.
Years ago I had this argument with a coworker, and I tried to take the position that the Windows curve is better for games. He politely disagreed, I implied that he was a casual gamer, and he gently told me of the year his Quake III team won the world championship. We spent the next while watching demo videos of him doing 360 noscopes with the rail gun against a target in the air.
I handily lost that disagreement.
I have never even noticed a difference, let alone registered a preference.
(I think libinput breaks that -- or at some point did break it -- and I solve it by removing libinput. Coincidentally, I started having issues with my trackpad when someone somewhere made libinput the new default. I fixed that by removing libinput)
Is there something else you'd like to see?
It is annoying in other OSes that you have to jump through hoops to disable that stuff.
I would argue that it does enhance the precision if it's correctly implemented. (I haven't used Windows in a decade, so I can't comment on that point.)
Example: on a laptop, move the cursor to the bottom left corner of the screen. In one very slow continuous swipe, drag your finger from the bottom left to the top right of your touchpad. How far across your screen do you get? In my case, I get only about 1/3 of the way across the diagonal.
Assume I have no acceleration feature on my touchpad driver. This means I have two options to make the touchpad usable. Either (a) I can get used to dragging across the entire touchpad 3+ times to get the cursor across the screen, or (b) I can turn the touchpad speed way up. Suppose I do the latter.
Now suppose my cursor is 10px away from some target and I want to hit that target with a quick movement on the touchpad. Because of the very high speed required by the previous change, my accuracy is greatly reduced. I have trouble hitting small targets with tiny movements on the touchpad.
On the contrary, acceleration gets me the best of both worlds. With one quick swipe, I can get the cursor all the way across the screen. This is the "expected" behavior most people have for a laptop the first time they pick it up. On the other hand, when I'm trying to hit a small target with a slow cursor movement, I have a much easier time doing that. This feels like "enhanced precision" to your average user - the cursor moves more slowly and accurately when I need it to.
Different input modalities deserve different affordances.
Apple’s Magic Trackpad is over 6 inch, the latest MacBooks have a trackpad of over 5 inch.
I think mousepads are mostly an artifact of pre optical & laser mice, if someone uses one today it's either because they have a glass desktop or they want wrist support.
Or they just want a good surface where the mouse glides smoothly, without any rubbing or scraping or pits that affect tracking..
I've never had a desk that felt good without a pad. I imagine glass would be smooth as long as it's clean.
Even the original Mac, with its 512 pixel screen width, had a setting that enabled mouse acceleration (fairly rudimentary. It doubled distance travelled when the sum of horizontal and vertical displacement exceeded 6 pixels).
I think the discussion is more about tuning the acceleration curve than about whether to have one or not, for both mice and trackpads. There probably isn’t a single answer that suits everybody, either.
Acceleration works much better on trackpads though.
1:1 is all I ever wanted.