Random Realization: I use Figma best on a (Mac) trackpad.

This was a weird realization to come to terms with as I was prepping a FigJam board earlier for my FoFPH volunteers to work on. I initially was trying to do all the work for my non-work related tasks—meaning, FoFPH, Tambayan 404¹, or any personal stuff I’m working on in Figma—but I found myself feeling a bit bogged down using my split keyboard and trackball mouse.

Whereas if I do the same things on my work Macbook… I do wonders. I’m super fast with editing things, I know which keyboard shortcuts to interact with, and the trackpad makes it significantly easier to interact with the canvas, be it zooming in and out or panning around the area.

It feels a bit weird because I wanted to have a clear separation of work and my personal + extracurricular stuff with my devices. But then again, even I don’t follow that same rule, considering I’m logged in to our work Slack on my personal phone…

I guess this is now just a testament to how certain ways of interacting with devices work better on some programs than others. I guess the same can be said for coding and writing (or typing), where it’s better to do it with a keyboard that’s better set up for long periods of typing, and the keys are in a relaxed state, with an ergonomic setup and such.

Design does need me to use the mouse more often than I normally do when I’m just browsing the web or I’m coding something on my website. There are things only trackpads can help me do, and there are things that having a nice keyboard and ergonomic mouse help me do well, too!

For now, I’m resigned to the idea that I’ll just have to sometimes mix my device usage like this, and be thankful that my access to a Macbook isn’t as restricting as it could be in other work setup situations. And I still do take note on separating time for work tasks and time for extracurriculars.

That’s all! That was a random thought bubble that I just wanted to lay out somewhere. My blog or my personal website² is the best place for this 😁

Footnotes

1. Maybe I should make a page dedicated to everything about Tambayan 404 in my website. Someday. ↩

2. I still flip flop between these two words but I am not yet decided on what best to call this… space I have in the internet :)) Website seems best, but… I guess that just means I need more pages 😆 ↩