I have to say that the new MacBook’s are really great workhorses and I like it a lot (well, have to be honest I switched from a new MacBook to a MacBook Pro for the greater screen estate).
For some, like myself, I can not really “dig” the new Trackpad. It is ok to work with, but I liked the “old” Trackpad much better. Maybe future revisions will work better and Apple might make the Trackpad “less glassy”. So for home usage, or if you have space around you, I definitely suggest to get a external mouse.
That’s exactly, how I work most of the time from home and today when my 3 1/2 year old decided he wanted to play with “daddy’s trackpad” while I had my Bluetooth mouse connected I thought “no go Junior”. To my surprise the Trackpad worked, event thought I had an external mouse connected.
No sweat. A quick trip to the System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Trackpad settings and enable that “Disable trackpad when external mouse is connected”, right? Well, I was quite surprised to not be able to find the setting in ANY of the settings, neither in the “old” place under Keyboard & Mouse…
nor in the new Trackpad one.
To my surprise I did not find any relevant information about this on the net. Looking over at the Apple Discussion Board did not bring anything up either. Thus, either Apple is unaware of this issue (which I doubt) or no one cares (which I doubt as well). Luckely, I have another “old” MacBook Pro around and thus looked up the settings in the “.GlobalPreferences.plist” (located at UserDir/Library/Preferences).
Just as I thought the GlobalPreferences on the new MacBook Pro is missing the setting for “com.apple.mouse.ignoreTrackpadIfMousePresent” which was present in my old MacBook Pro. So, the obvious thing to do was to edit the file “.GlobalPreferences.plist” and add that setting.
Editing this file should only be done if you know what you are doing! In my case I have had no success in modifying the file with “vi”, “emacs” or “pico” as they don’t read the XML format file nicely. Thus my old and in my opinion best text editor BBEdit came to help. The great thing about it that it comes with a shell extension. Thus opening the file is a simple: “bbedit .GlobalPreferences.plist” (BBedit will give you a error message if you try to open the file otherwise!).
Once the file is open insert the lines:
<key>com.apple.mouse.ignoreTrackpadIfMousePresent</key>
<integer>1</integer>
These line should go right above the line “<key>com.apple.mouse.tapBehavior</key>”!
Now save the file and log out and you should not be able to use the Trackpad anymore when your external mouse is connected.
