Annoying "bug", am I the only one to have noticed? it?

[blow45]

...cause I can't find it elsewhere on the web.

In the login page in lion, you can't tap to click and enter your password. I noticed this because my air trackpad (fiddly rubbish things that seem to always go bad on me) doesn't click anymore, so I just tap, cause I 've not gotten around to taking advantage of my applecare. So I remained stuck in the login page until I connected the mighty mouse and then presto. (as an aside for some bs reason apple's trackpad - the external one - does not connect on the login screen to the air... as far as I can tell, since this is not verified that well).

Same on my imac and apple's external trackpad, tap ad infinitum and nothing happens, click and there you go.

So for anyone who has the same issue, it's a bug, or a "bug", depending on your definition.

 

[ergdegdeg]

I don't think it's a bug. "Tap to click" is an option, that has to be enabled for each user individually. Until you're logged in, that option is not enabled, because it's activated at a user level and not for the whole computer at a time.

 

[blow45]

I don't think it's a bug. "Tap to click" is an option, that has to be enabled for each user individually. Until you're logged in, that option is not enabled, because it's activated at a user level and not for the whole computer at a time.

that's why I put bug in quotes. It makes sense what you are saying, but still snow leopard displayed another behaviour, and allowed tap to click at log in, I am 90% sure of this but I could be wrong.

Someone must have been anal retentive enough in apple's programming team to go, ok, since this is on a user level let's disable it in the login screen, cause in principle it shouldn't be there. Sadly in computers as in life, few realize that principles are there to be broken if there's a higher, more important purpose to be followed. And surely, here too, it's better to enable it anyway in the log in screen, despite it being a user level feature, because this way if the mechanical function of the trackpad goes awry (and they so often do) you will still be able to log in. Apple, and everyone in the tech world are trying to rely less and less on mechanical features that easily break. Since you can do it with tap to click, why do you need to again rely on a mechanical feature that breaks frequently?

Maybe also a lot of people without applecare won't have the time or money to fix the trackpad, why keep them logged out or have them use an external mouse to log in? Solution is simple: enable it by default and disable it upon log in if the user has chosen to. Because to complicate things further, even upon keeping cmd r and entering reinstall/disk util/ etc. mode tap to click is still not enabled.

But anyway we are playing with semantics here, I just posted this just in case anyone with a stuck trackpad would tap away to no avail and think the os had frozen or something.