Further to our recent article about scrolling tips you might not have known, the Apple Knowledgebase yielded up an article for those who have the new touchpads found on the 2008 MacBook Pro and on the MacBook Air.
These new touchpads are based on the same technology that’s in the iPhone and iPod Touch and they can do far more than just move your mouse pointer and scroll. They can scroll horizontally, use a pinching movement for zooming in or out, use two finger rotating for rotating pictures or preview pages, and a three finger “swipe” movement for moving forwards and backwards in places like Safari!
Does anybody know if these gestures can be configured to do different things in different applications? I very very much wish they’d release a peripheral trackpad so I could use one without paying for an iPod Touch which I can’t afford!
- Ricky Buchanan
All these tips are great, but I have use of only one finger on each hand and overall fairly limited movement with my hands. I am using a old powerbook G4 with an old style tracker pad, but want to upgrade to a new MacBook. My concern is that I won’t be able to use the multitouch pad. Does anyone know if it is possible to configure the pad so you don’t need two or three or four fingers to use it?
@Bill: I’m fairly sure the multitouch pads can be configured to only need one finger, although you’ll not get the fancy functionality of course. But I don’t have a laptap which has it – I’ll try to find somebody with a laptop to answer this too.
Hi there, and thanks for providing this resource! Unfortunately I have no insights on the new MacBooks, but if it’s of interest to anyone, many older touchpads can support two-fingered scrolling; in fact, a Google search for “two-fingered scrolling” turns up many Mac-specific items. I believe this is usually a matter of the hardware being able to interpret size, area, intensity, or number of contacts rather than fully independent multi-touch (so there is probably a limit to the complexity of gestures that can be squeezed out of older hardware).
It’s also common to find use of the edges of the touchpad as reserved areas for scrolling (in fact, more common on generic “Wintel” hardware than the two-fingered gesture); depending on make, model, and particular device, sometimes this is pre-configured in the hardware firmware (the “Ergonomic Touchpad” folks — who are basically selling a bare pad as would normally be embedded in a laptop or other device — seem to supply theirs this way); other times it must be configured or supplied by a driver. [Note that I have no direct experience with the 'Ergonomic Touchpad', I'm basing my understanding on their claims of how it should work out of the box. It's possible they're relying on default driver configurations in certain OSes, so YMMV.]
If you have a touchpad and wonder what it should be capable of — and particularly if you know who made the actual mechanism (Synaptics, Alps, …?) and it is exposed to software as such — the documentation for the X.org drivers (for UNIX/Linux X11 users) should tell you what your hardware is capable of. Finding that “common knowledge” worked into a Mac driver will be another matter, but you could at least point your favorite developer to it.
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Meanwhile, I have a related, “should be simple” issue that I haven’t been able to find the answer for, so hopefully it’s not far from the topic to ask here: Surely there is some way to adjust OS X’s “drag sensitivity?” A relative is just learning to mouse at 80, and when a relatively slow click speed is combined with slight hand movements, a lot of accidental dragging occurs. All I need is a way to adjust the tolerance to motion during a click (so the pointer has to move a longer distance for it to become a drag), but I can’t seem to find this documented anywhere!
@Joe: Unfortunately I don’t know of any way to do the adjustment you’re looking for – it’s certainly a reasonable assistive technology need! The only thing I can think of which may help your relative to use a trackball or another type of pointer where they can remove their hand from the part which controls movement while pressing the button to click. It’s worth a try, especially if you can get a trial unit to play with – there are some trackballs with quite large ball sections (usually designed for kids, alas) which would be easier for stiffer fingers to use.
HI, i have a macbook pro (snow lepard) and I need to know how to change the two finger touchpad shortcut menu? Please advise