Finger-painting frolics

Since its development during the later Renaissance, oil painting has been the de facto standard for ‘serious’ works of art. Notwithstanding the brilliance of JMW Turner’s watercolours, he knew the importance of producing his most significant works in oils, and even the Impressionists remained generally conservative in their choice of medium. Oils are conventionally applied with brushes or palette knives, but many have done battle with their bare hands, including Turner who kept a fingernail uncropped for the purpose.

Few, though, have discarded the brush altogether to work their paint solely with fingers. These days, finger-painting would probably attract a scurry of safety inspectors and endless risk assessments, although there remains something profoundly compelling about such direct manipulation.

For someone like me, who has been driving Macs and other computers for more than 20 years using a mouse, Apple’s Magic Trackpad seemed as compelling and daunting as painting with my fingers. Armed with a corded Mighty Mouse, its scroll ball and configurable buttons, I could challenge allcomers at moving the pointer around with speed and precision.

Over those years, I’ve also used a succession of laptops, alternative input devices, including A4 tablets, an HP/Windows tablet laptop, trackballs, and most latterly, of course, my iPad’s touchscreen.

While pressure-sensitive tablets are wonderful for painting, and I would still be delighted to see a Wacom Cintiq under the Christmas tree, it’s only the iPad that has proved enduringly endearing. Despite the broad points of contact provided by my stumpy digits, its rich range of taps, swipes and sundry digital gestures are fairly quickly learned and joyously direct. They play a major role in making the iPad personal, informal, even intimate.

Relative to my years spent spinning mice around my desk, I’ve hardly used my Magic Trackpad for a few moments, but the experience is growing on me. As I’ve come to expect, Apple has got a lot right, allowing me to tweak its controls and gestures with the most instructionally exuberant pane yet in System Preferences. One shortcoming keeps catching me out, though: there’s no means of controlling its sensitivity to touch.

The problem manifests itself most commonly with items in Safari’s Bookmarks bar, or sometimes the Dock. A careless finger stutter and I’ve removed the bookmark I was trying to select. When I first started using the Trackpad, this problem of finger stuttering was so frequent that I nearly gave the Trackpad away to my son in disgust, but now it is less frequent. However, when I can customise almost every other aspect of the tablet, it’s frustrating that I remain unable to alter its most fundamental operating parameter.

I’m also wary about the Magic Trackpad’s longevity. Initially favourable impressions of the Mighty Mouse were soon soured by problems with its scroll ball, landing me with a stack of four of the beasts that I can rotate through as that ball becomes soiled, despite frequent attempts to clean them. The only action in the Magic Trackpad that should be subject to mechanical wear is its press-click, something that I use infrequently. If that becomes unreliable with repeated use, I could find myself forced back to a mouse.

So I press on with the increasingly rewarding task of learning new hand-eye motor co-ordination, stroking and tapping my way back to efficiency and accuracy. Unlike in painting with my fingers, I don’t have to wear gloves, although sometimes I seem as clumsy as if I were.

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