bayswater wrote:Shooshie wrote:Is your 2014 Mac Pro the "trashcan" model? If so, that's good news. It means Apple fixed the problem in the hardware itself. (I guess) Mine is a 2012 Mac Pro, and when Mavericks came along, it blew my Magic Trackpad out of the water in several ways. (Erratic scrolling, and some gestures ceased working.) Maybe the reason they didn't fix it in the next OS release was because they fixed it through the new hardware. Not that we'll ever know for sure, but it's the only guess I've got!
Shooshie
I don't see how it could be a hardware problem on the older Mac Pro. It happens on my MBP with its build in trackpad, and my iMac with an external Apple trackpad. It only happens with DP, and no other application, and didn't happen before Mountain Lion.
It's just a guess. The hardware controller that receives the signal from the Trackpad may have a buffer that prevents all the little jagged directions it wants to go in. Here's how I think the problem works:
1) For movement to take place on the trackpad, the interpreter chip has to sense three relative events: starting position, direction, and confirmation.
2) Finger pressure is generating a constant stream of false directions, so it has to average those, and even then that average is constantly making moves.
3) When scrolling, the finger pressure is variable. The first touch is the anchor. The second average is the direction. The third produces movement in that direction. This is happening at probably hundreds of samples per second.
I think that Mavericks changed the way it averages and/or sense direction. This should have been transparent to applications, but for some it was not. Many gestures were killed in some applications, such as the Finder, Safari, and many other apps. The scrolling issue appeared at first in several apps. After an update or two of Mavericks, and after updates of many apps, as well as Adobe Flash, and other plugins, they got most of it ironed out.
Here's what I think they did. (Please understand the operative words here are "I Think." I haven't read about this anywhere, and I'm just trying to reason out what happened.) I think Apple allowed apps to determine their own buffer size for determining direction, thereby offering greater sensitivity. Or it might have been some other tweak, but it had the same effect. In other words, the slightest change of direction now will be picked up by the signal interpreter as a change of direction. It's up to the app developer to provide a level of buffering that cushions those changes and takes the average of more direction changes before making a move. Maybe. Again, these are guesses.
Why did they do this? Maybe it had to do with a graphics card or chip. Maybe the old scheme would not work with higher resolution, such as for the Retina Displays. Maybe the old average that determined direction would be considered very coarse with Retina Displays.
Since developers have to update their apps for Retina Displays and their graphics cards, maybe they also have to set the Trackpad's Scrolling-direction-buffer to be aware of the pixel disparity between the Trackpad and the Retina Display. Maybe the difference isn't the new Mac Pro, but retina displays, themselves.
I feel like I'm circling the problem, but without more technical information, I can't nail it down. I'm sure a programmer would read what I'm saying and either know immediately what it is, or else could dismiss my whole argument and say "that's silly; it's just the blah-blah-blah matrix," and change a couple of numbers, and it would all be set.
But I'm just trying to understand why some people never seemed to have the issue and others did. If those with new Mac Pros don't have it, then there is obviously something different that makes that possible. The interpreter chip, graphics card, retina display, Bluetooth chip... SOMETHING is different. For those of us who have the issue, it's a real problem, and it's unfair that we should have to buy a new computer to get past it.
Those who don't have the problem have been acting since the beginning as if it's something we're doing wrong. Those smug aspersions have not sat well with me, a person who generally is very aware of his digital surroundings, and who can track down almost any problem. No, this has been a problem generated by something that Apple did. Most developers have accommodated the problem with some kind of interface change. Maybe the Cocoa environment fixes it automatically. Maybe MOTU does not fully utilize the Cocoa GUI APIs. We know MOTU has always tried to get more out of the windows and other interface features than most developers. Maybe that's why DP never got "fixed" after Mavericks, at least as regards the Magic Trackpad.
So, I could guess all day, and maybe some of my guesses would be right, but most would probably be wrong. The important thing is that someone who has their hands on the materials to fix it is now taking a look at it. We'll probably see that fix, and it won't require buying a new Mac Pro.
Shooshie
