Multi-touch trackpad gestures
Category: Mac 3 comments
Let’s take a look at the trackpad on MacBook Air. Not only is it larger but Apple has taken some of the multi-touch innovations developed for the iPhone and adapted them for MacBook Air.
You may be familiar with trackpad gestures on MacBook and MacBook Pro such as two finger tapping for a secondary click and two fingers scrolling. MacBook Air now allows you to pinch, swipe and rotate so you can navigate your applications more efficiently.
You can use pinch to zoom in and out. It works right in coverflow in the finder. You simply place two fingers on the trackpad – your thumb and forefinger work best – and drag them outward while keeping contact with the trackpad. With pinch you can easily switch between a larger icon view and a text view.
It works with Safari too. if you get to a page with small text, just pinch to increase the font to a more readable size. To move back and forth through web pages, instead of hitting the forward and back buttons, you can use another gesture called “Swipe”. Just use three fingers together. To page forward, swipe from left to right. To page backwards, swipe from right to left.
These gestures work in iPhoto too. You can pinch to get a closer look at a shot and swipe to move through a photo slideshow. You can also use a gesture to rotate photos. All you do is select the photo, place to fingers on the trackpad and rotate your fingers.
Those are just a few of the things you can do with trackpad gestures. The system preferences on MacBook Air has demos on how to use them.
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3 Comments
1. Sasha | January 16th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I hope the user can modify the “multi-touch” gestures. The “swipe”, for example, is totally counter-intuitive. Why should I “push away” things to the right if I want the next picture on the right to move to the middle. It runs exactly opposite to the logic!
2. itouch porn | January 31st, 2008 at 7:04 pm
This MacBook Air is really hot. I want one!
3. Amizyo | May 10th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Nah its actually logical,the swipe’s just a movement.If you swipe from right to left,its not pushing away,just take for example a photo album.you’re just ’swiping’ the pages which translates into a flip to the next page.The swipe is just a motion : )