While looking around for a particular utility, I ended up on Google Code just dredging through all the projects they have online. As I went through, I kept opening tabs to more and more applications that sounded interesting. I found enough applications worth sharing that I decided to post one per day this week and highlight some hidden treasures of Google Code.
Day #1: touchfreeze
As a college student, I used to perform freelance computer support for a wide variety of individuals at their homes and businesses. One problem that I heard frequently came from people with laptops. Their complaint was that with their laptop, they would be happily typing along when all of a sudden the cursor would jump down a few lines, highlight everything, and overwrite the text with what they were typing. After noting that there was nothing wrong with the hardware, I watched a person type and saw that their palm or thumb would touch the laptop’s touchpad with the motion of their typing. This was enough to cause the touchpad to think it was clicking somewhere and move the cursor. The word processor behavior then highlighted all the text in between and overwrote it with the next characters typed.
This is where touchfreeze comes into play. Touchfreeze, as a 251 KB download and a 2.3 MB process once installed, monitors your computer for typing. If you are typing it disables the ability to click with the touchpad and the left or right-click buttons. When you stop typing, after about a second, you’re able to click the mouse/touchpad again. It’s a pretty simple process, but you’d be surprised at how frequently I hear about this problem.
Touchfreeze has a system tray presence to allow you to close it out or specify if it should startup with Windows. Simply download and install.
Check out the Google Code page for touchfreeze: http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/