Trackpad++: Alternate Trackpad Driver for BootCamp

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

THX for the tip Vlad. I've got a Q: do you plan to implement another zoom gesture? Seems like it's been removed from v24a. THX A 1000KG

I am happy to announce that the Pinch-to-Zoom operation will become available in the future. The only issue is, at this moment of time I am not sure would this feature come to all MBA/MBP trackpads or just to selected models. As you know, all the rest of the gestures work fine with both trackpad generations, but only the new trackpad of the Haswell MBA seems to be capable of handling this specific gesture properly in Boot Camp. I am working on this now, so wish me good luck

 

[goobot]

I don't understand the lack of support for the late 08 unibody MacBook, it is literally the same thing as the mid 09 MacBook pro, the same line they just chose to update the naming to keeping everything more organized. It would make no sense to not support it just cause it doesn't have the word "pro" written on it yet it is still part of the same family and is still the same computer....

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@goobot: I apologize for sounding like that, but: this machine is a bit outdated, so it isn't too critical (sorry again) that there is no official support.
But, as I stated somewhere above, Trackpad++ will work with any device that has the compatible physical trackpad device; however, I cannot say or write "something is supported" unless I test it. "Tested and verified = supported" is valid for the Mid-2009 MBP and later models (i.e., as of today, every model including the Mid-2013 Haswell MBA).

 

[bkribbs]

Do I still have to reinstall this every week?

 

[CocaCoca]

I am happy to announce that the Pinch-to-Zoom operation will become available in the future. The only issue is, at this moment of time I am not sure would this feature come to all MBA/MBP trackpads or just to selected models. As you know, all the rest of the gestures work fine with both trackpad generations, but only the new trackpad of the Haswell MBA seems to be capable of handling this specific gesture properly in Boot Camp. I am working on this now, so wish me good luck

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH U MASTER VLADIMIR! With Trackpad++ we already got the amazing powers of three finger drag and four finger swipe, but pinch to zoom would explode our BootCamp universe

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@CocaCoca: Thank you very much

@bkribbs: Yes. And, this way, use it infinitely, with all of the features enabled, and without any charge. Or, if you are really impressed by this driver software, please support my efforts by donating. To restate, for donators the weekly update becomes optional. (Although I would anyways recommend to update at least once in ~2 months). 'Pros and cons' have been discussed somewhere above in this topic, so nothing new, actually.

 

[pickaxe]

Hey Vladimir, I'm having a problem. I am virtualizing my boot camp partition with VMWare/Parallels. It seems the new Haswell Air Trackpad++ updates are making virtual machines hang as soon as Trackpad++ Control Module is launched.

This of course makes VMs freeze soon after boot (because T++ is launched on startup) but If I disable T++ from launching on boot, the system doesn't hang. Doesn't hang with just Power Plan Assistant running, either.

Using 2013 MacBook Air. Tested on:
- both ML and Mavericks as hosts
- both Parallels 8 and VMWare Fusion 5
- both Windows 8 and 7 (clean install of both). (8 install is EFI, 7 is BIOS emulation)

ALSO a request - maybe an option on 2.4b on Windows 7, to re-enable four finger down for Ctrl+Alt+Tab instead of Flip3D? So I don't have to mess around with AutoHotKey.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@pickaxe: Please use Trackpad++ only with real Boot Camp partition, and not with VMware or Parallels. Anyways, Trackpad++ cannot work in virtual environment. It (driver) should be simply disabled by VM, like it was happening before. So, all of the issues (if any) are on the VM side. From my side nothing changed in this area since the version 2.3

 

[rpinky]

Powerplan7.com doesn't load

@CocaCoca: Thank you very much

@bkribbs: Yes. And, this way, use it infinitely, with all of the features enabled, and without any charge. Or, if you are really impressed by this driver software, please support my efforts by donating. To restate, for donators the weekly update becomes optional. (Although I would anyways recommend to update at least once in ~2 months). 'Pros and cons' have been discussed somewhere above in this topic, so nothing new, actually.

I would like to donate to not have to update Powerplan and Trackpad every week, but I can't get the page to load. Have used IE10, Firefox and Safari with no success. I keep going to Filecluster to download the updates.

Love the software!

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@rpinky: Thank you very much for willing to donate and support my efforts.

It's so abnormally strange the page is not available for some people. Are you on the AT&T network? I think all of the few unavail. reports I got so far are from there. Maybe you could call your provider and ask why.

 

[arneevertsson]

Fast swipes => Slow scrolling

I've tried now with and without accelerated scrolling, and the behaviour is the same: quick swipes that work brilliantly in OSX mode (or on an iPhone) gives a super slow scrolling speed.

About accelerated scolling: The scrolling speed is actually to fast, jumping 2-4 pages at a time in Chrome and Firefox (didn't try IE since the scrolling is hopeless anyway). That's why I shut it off.

Maybe I'll take a little time to record a video of how it works, if that could be of any help to the development.

@arneevertsson: I do not have the video, but according to what you wrote, the scroll behavior is wrong in your system, not the way it's designed to work with Trackpad++. (For me at least) it naturally follows the finger speed and, 100%, handles any finger speed. Just imagine how many people would complain having the same behavior. This topic would contain mostly the scroll discussion in such case. OK, but what happens if you enable accelerated scrolling? Also, please make sure you do not have any scrolling enhancement software installed, especially WizMouse or its siblings, or different smooth scrolling plugins for browsers. For instance, when using Logitech mouse, smooth scrolling addon is installed in IE ==> wrong behavior could appear.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@arneevertsson: Thank you for feedback. Just a note: to actually scroll with maximum speed please make sure the fingers start at the bottom/top of trackpad, then move them quickly until they almost reach the top/bottom, only then lift them. This way, especially with accelerated scrolling, I am getting super-speed.

 

[prodigee]

Hey Vlad, thanks for the reply! Unfortunately, still no luck. I changed both region settings (Format and System Locale) to English (United States), ran the fix as administrator and restarted many times and it's still stuck there. I've got the Windows 8 fix. The exe opens and closes very quickly. By spamming it open I think it says "could not detect locale for removing watermark. Tried en-US and en-US". I've definitely got both region settings as English (United States) and did restart after changing the System Locale. Not sure why it doesn't want to work :S

Another slight hitch I ran into was I initially couldn't chose v2.3d when installing TP++. An error message saying
"Trackpad++ Control Module Initializer has stopped working"
showed and it would close. It worked when I chose 2.4b. After running the installer again, 2.3d worked. Probably not related but I thought I should mention it.

Appreciate all your help with this. It'd be great to figure this watermark bug out!

I too am having this same issue, however, it doesn't boot into test mode each time, only after restart after installing the drivers does it do this. Otherwise it says that it cannot communicate with the control module and I have to install again. I have tried installing with both versions 2.3 and 2.4 and I am still experiencing this problem, which as you could imagine, isn't a really huge deal, but it is somewhat annoying that I have to keep repeating it.

Is there a fix out there for this? I saw that you said that there was a fix or patch of some sort, but I can't seem to find it? Is there something else I can be doing or I have been doing wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated. When it works as it should trackpad++ is truly incredible. I'd love to see this get resolved so I can continue to use the trackpad as it is meant to be experienced.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

When it works as it should trackpad++ is truly incredible. I'd love to see this get resolved so I can continue to use the trackpad as it is meant to be experienced.

Thank you, appreciate your feedback!

Now regarding the 'Test Mode' issue. Let me write a more technical explanation. FYI: with the latest versions of Windows, Microsoft has introduced the crazy digital signature enforcement policy, which is specific to 64-bit OS only. Yes, the 32-bit version of Windows 7 / 8 has "normal" rules, while (only the) 64-bit version requires that every driver module which communicates with hardware shall be signed by an authority cross-signed (approved) by Microsoft, and, by the way, the developers must pay big money on a yearly basis to achieve this. Fortunately, the policy still can be changed to match the policy of the 32-bit version of Windows® 7 / 8. Nothing more, nothing less. This does NOT affect system security, because you will still be getting a big fat warning window with the red header everytime you try to install the driver. So, the Trackpad++ prerequisite Power Plan Assistant is designed to successfully handle this thing if the 64-bit OS is detected. Successfully in 99.9% of installations, according to amounts of feedback on this issue. If you see the 'Test Mode' and/or Windows version info in the corner of desktop, then something went wrong. Below is a link to (my) Windows 8 fix:

http://powerplan7.com/Windows_8_x64_Test_Mode_Remover.zip

USAGE: unzip, run *as administrator*, wait until says done, reboot. By the way it's safe to apply the fix multiple times. For example, if the message persists after reboot, apply the fix again. The only thing which could affect the success of the fix is your locale settings, the fix is 100% verified to work for English Windows 8, so, if no success, please try to temporary change both the region and display language to English.

 

[CocaCoca]

Vlad, any chance to support the Magic Trackpad soon? In Windows 8 it's so useless, it almost lets me cry Why Apple made no normal Windows drivers???

 

[prodigee]

Thank you, appreciate your feedback!

Now regarding the 'Test Mode' issue. Let me write a more technical explanation. FYI: with the latest versions of Windows, Microsoft has introduced the crazy digital signature enforcement policy, which is specific to 64-bit OS only. Yes, the 32-bit version of Windows 7 / 8 has "normal" rules, while (only the) 64-bit version requires that every driver module which communicates with hardware shall be signed by an authority cross-signed (approved) by Microsoft, and, by the way, the developers must pay big money on a yearly basis to achieve this. Fortunately, the policy still can be changed to match the policy of the 32-bit version of Windows® 7 / 8. Nothing more, nothing less. This does NOT affect system security, because you will still be getting a big fat warning window with the red header everytime you try to install the driver. So, the Trackpad++ prerequisite Power Plan Assistant is designed to successfully handle this thing if the 64-bit OS is detected. Successfully in 99.9% of installations, according to amounts of feedback on this issue. If you see the 'Test Mode' and/or Windows version info in the corner of desktop, then something went wrong. Below is a link to (my) Windows 8 fix:

http://powerplan7.com/Windows_8_x64_Test_Mode_Remover.zip

USAGE: unzip, run *as administrator*, wait until says done, reboot. By the way it's safe to apply the fix multiple times. For example, if the message persists after reboot, apply the fix again. The only thing which could affect the success of the fix is your locale settings, the fix is 100% verified to work for English Windows 8, so, if no success, please try to temporary change both the region and display language to English.

I tried that solution to no avail. Oh well, I'll live it really is just a minor annoyance.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@CocaCoca: The development for Magic Trackpad takes place, but it's in an extremely early stage. To address your question: IMHO Apple will never make the great Boot Camp driver, neither for internal trackpad, nor for the wireless one. Because by letting people use Windows OS without issues, they could experience the drop of sales in the App Store. And I have heard that App Store generates ~20% of their yearly revenue... So, this is it.

 

[CocaCoca]

Thanks, Vladimir! Now I understand.

 

[Flavour]

I managed to get the Test Mode thing sorted out. It was a while ago though, so I can't quite remember how or what the problem was. All good now though

I do have a question relating to Power Plan Assistant though, and there doesn't seem to be a separate thread for it. Is there a way to change the System Tray icon? PPA is great and I use it a lot, but I think I'd prefer it to have the Windows default power icons.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@Flavour: A little of off-topic is no problem. You can use both icons, system and PPA, e.g. like this:

Just to explain, when creating the PPA power icon my goal was to utilize the 16x16 tray icon size as efficiently as possible. As the result: you can always observe exact percentage, power plan (by color) and power source (by battery cap). Very informative (right?), but the problem is, no space is left for fancy design. Every pixel is utilized

 

[Solenz]

Reverting the Signing Policy Change

I know that when installing the power plan assistant changes the signing policy on 64 bit installations on Windows. If we want to remove power plan assistant with the trackpad++ driver how do we revert the signing policy change. The policy changes from 64 to 32. How do I revert it back to 64. I know that it does not affect the security off the computer but I prefer the signing policy to be 64 bit.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@Solenz: Well, the reverse action is quite simple. Open command prompt (cmd.exe) as administrator, type
Bcdedit.exe -set TESTSIGNING OFF
and hit 'Enter'. Then reboot.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

By the way I will soon have some final news regarding the anticipated new zoom gesture. Will post here soon. Treat this as an announce

 

[CocaCoca]

By the way I will soon have some final news regarding the anticipated new zoom gesture. Will post here soon. Treat this as an announce

Then the news are good? Amazing! I'm very eager for the beta version! Can't wait, wanna test!

 

[Daniel Shin]

couldn't find file to download

I couldn't find the file to download at your homepage. The linked website doesn't have a new one. When I downloaded and set it up, it said "This is an outdated version~"
How can I download the updated version of trackpad++ ?