Surface Pro and Visual Studio Part Two: The Puppies and Unicorns Return!

Turns out there’s a TrackPad Settings application! Huge thanks to Sumit Maitra for mentioning its existence on my last blog post. There was nothing in the documentation or on Microsoft’s web site that this application existed, which is a huge mistake. Instead of spending several frustrating hours and writing a blog post about that frustration, a link on the Type Cover web page saying, “we give you full control over the Type Cover with our application” so we know it exists. Come on Microsoft marketing, help us out here because this application fixes most of the problems I was having. I think I’m more frustrated that I didn’t know about the app that would have fixed my frustrations. <grin>. Why isn’t this application not already on the Surface Pro itself?

Before you ask, yes, I did a Bing search for “Surface Touch Cover settings” (and a million other terms about the Touch Cover) and nothing was returned about the TrackPad Settings application. Here’s an idea for the Bing team: if you’re on a Surface/Windows 8 machine include the Windows App Store on the side of the search results.

Anyway, the important thing is that setting the Tap Gestures off made a world of difference in the Touch Cover. Add in the cool setting of being able to turn off the track pad completely and just use an external mouse if that is your wont. We still don’t have the settings to make the function keys real function keys, but I’m pretty darn happy that the Type Cover works a million times better. I’m looking forward to coding today and using my two pound laptop replacement for development. Hurray for unicorns and puppies!