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List of Magic Trackpad gestures?

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by daniel, Nov 2, 2010.

  1. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    So, I just bought a Magic Trackpad. I have some arthritis in my thumb, which makes using a mouse or trackball painful when it's acting up. So far (half hour into it) I like it. But the documentation is sketchy:

    One finger to move the cursor or tap to click;
    Two fingers to scroll or tap to right-click, as well as pinch or rotate.
    Three fingers to swipe pages.
    Four fingers for expose.

    Does anyone have a complete list?

    For drag and drop the only thing I've found so far is to hold down the lower left corner (physical left click) while dragging. Is there a keystroke that substitutes for holding down the corner, or a gesture?

    Thanks.
     
    #1 daniel, Nov 2, 2010
  2. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    Okay. I figured out dragging. (Tap twice then drag, lift to release.) I'd still like a complete list of gestures.
     
    #2 daniel, Nov 2, 2010
  3. Paradox

    Paradox Prius Enthusiast / Moderator
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    Found this:

    [​IMG]




    And this as well:


    • Scrolling. There’s no longer a need to precisely place the pointer in that narrow gutter where the window slider is. Just position the cursor over the scrollable area and do a two finger slide up or down. You can do that with “inertia†turned on or off. One has to be careful here with finger movements. One has to have a clean single finger touch for the pointing (without allowing another poised finger to accidentally touch), then consciously bring the other finger down for two finger scrolling. One can’t be ambivalent or careless.
    • Rotation. Just like the iPad, one can rotate image in Preview or other eligible apps. For example, Image Well from XtraLean Corp won’t allow it.
    • Pinch/Zoom. If you want to get a better look at something, say, in Safari just do a two finger spread movement to zoom in. That’s a lot easier than mousing up to the zoom icons at the top. Again, it doesn’t work with every app. One also has to be careful here as well. If the cursor is over the desktop, a careless movement with two fingers will zoom the size of the desktop icons. That could be handy, especially if you have “icon preview†turned on (CMD-J), but for the first time user, it can be mildly alarming. To zoom the entire screen, hold sown the CTRL key and do a two-finger slide. Users with slight vision problems users will love that.
    • Four Finger Swipe. There are two gestures here that I love. A four finger swipe horizontally brings up the Application Switcher, normally accessed with CMD + TAB. Then you can quickly switch from app to app as the foreground app. I use that on conjunction with HyperSpaces to invoke four virtual desktops and keep my apps better organized. A four finger vertical swipe triggers Expose.




    I couldn't find any more than the ones listed above which you probably know about already though... Sorry.
     
    #3 Paradox, Nov 2, 2010
  4. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    Thanks Paradox. Yes, I know those, and the image is the back of the box the trackpad came in.

    Tap-and-drag turns out to be unreliable. Sometimes it doesn't register. And worse, in a card game where clicking on a card causes it to jump to an eligible move, it jumps before the drag engages.

    Now, with the mouse, in Firefox, in some but not all web pages, holding Control while left clicking, caused it to open the link in a new tab. Installing the trackpad killed that even for the mouse. I have to do a two-finger tap to open a context menu and select Open in New Tab.

    However, all in all I still like it since the trackball was hurting my arthritic thumb so much.
     
    #4 daniel, Nov 2, 2010
  5. eagle33199

    eagle33199 Platinum Member

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    Check this support site out daniel: Apple Portables: Using the Multi-Touch glass trackpad

    Yeah, it's for their laptops... but the laptops use the same gestures as the magic trackpad! In fact, the laptop gestures came first :p

    From their trackpad page (Apple - Magic Trackpad - The Multi-Touch trackpad for your desktop.), it looks like there's a specific trackpad configuration screen... playing with some of those settings may let you get dragging to work easier.

    Something i discovered this morning with my laptop that hasn't been clearly mentioned on any of these pages... I was looking at a webpage and accidentally swiped down with 3 fingers, taking me instantly to the bottom of the page. May be useful for getting to those most recent posts in some of these long threads!

    I'll take a look at the firefox issue when I get home... sadly I've always right-clicked and selected "open Link in new tab", never taken the shortcut you mentioned
     
    #5 eagle33199, Nov 3, 2010
  6. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    Yes, there's a configuration screen, but it seems to leave a lot to be desired, though it does have a continuously-running tutorial embedded in the config screen.

    There are three-finger gestures, and even 4-finger gestures.

    And I didn't lose the "open in new tab" after all. It just migrated from the Control key to the Apple key. Weird. It's much easier than opening the context menu, especially if you browse the way I do: I open multiple tabs from the links on a page that interest me (e.g. threads within a forum) ad then browse through the tabs. -- But it does not work on all web sites. Apparently there's something in the coding of the page or the link that governs it.
     
    #6 daniel, Nov 3, 2010
  7. eagle33199

    eagle33199 Platinum Member

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    Yeah, it depends on how the site is set up. If a site uses plain static HTML links, it'll work great. However if they try to get fancy with frames and/or javascript, suddenly it's not a link your clicking, but an instruction to change something on the current page, so you can't open it in a new browser.

    There's a web app we use at work for all of our requirements tracking that works like that... I can't open anything in a new page, and even worse it does some sort of window identification thing so I can't even open it twice in two different windows!
     
    #7 eagle33199, Nov 4, 2010
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