Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
2. In each view (Point & Click, More Gestures, and—for trackpads only—Scroll &
Zoom), hover over a gesture to display a video demonstrating how it works.
3. To enable a gesture, select its checkbox.
4. Some gestures have multiple options—use the pop-up menu under the gesture
name to specify your preference. For example, in the More Gestures view of the
Trackpad pane, the Swipe Between Full-Screen Apps gesture can be performed
by swiping left or right with either three fingers or four fingers.
5. Practice the gestures you've just configured! You may find it helpful to create a
little cheat sheet with the gestures and settings you've chosen (e.g., “4 L/R to
switch apps”) until you've memorized them.
As you use gestures, you'll find them increasingly natural—and it will drive you crazy to use
a Mac with different settings!
Unfortunately, Apple offers no way to assign
custom
actions to trackpad and mouse
gestures—you can't, say, swipe three fingers diagonally to run a script. So, the point of
enabling and using these gestures isn't to do new things, but to do existing things more
easily—with practice, you may find that if your fingers are already on the trackpad, it's
quicker to zoom by pinching than by dragging a slider; it's easier to scroll by dragging two
fingers than by clicking arrow buttons; and so on.
Save Clicks with Third-party Input Devices
In Apple's design aesthetic for pointing devices, even a single visible button is considered
excessive. But some people
like
having lots of buttons, and if you find it easier to remember
“click the second button from the left” than “swipe down with three fingers” do perform a
particular action, a third-party device might be just what you need.
During the time I worked at Kensington, we had a trackball model (Turbo Mouse Pro) with
11 buttons and a trackpad (WebRacer) with 22 buttons—all programmable! Those particular
models have been discontinued, but companies like
Kensington
,
Logitech
,
and
Microsoft
still
sell mouse and trackball models with multiple buttons that you can customize to meet your
needs. In some cases you can also customize scroll wheels and other controls.
An obvious use for an extra button is to perform a double-click. (Recall that, all things being
equal, less clicking is preferable.) If you have your hand on your pointing device most of the
timeanyway, perhapsafinger naturally fallsonan“extra” buttonthatcanservethispurpose.
Youmightalsousebuttonsforfrequent operations suchasUndo,Cut,Copy,Paste, switching
apps, and so on.
