Using Apple’s Trackpad
Since September 14th, 2011 we’ve been using Apple’s Trackpads at the office. When Apple first released the Trackpad we were slightly sceptic but with the launch of Lion a lot of situations emerged in which the Trackpad would come in handy. As you probably know, in OSX Lion a lot of things are inspired by iOS. This shows in the ‘new’ inverted scrolling, Launchpad and the auto-hiding scrollbars. All of these new features just have Trackpad written all over ‘em.
Another advantage is having to learn just one set of gestures when you use multiple Macs and at least one is a laptop. At Yummygum we’re now using the same Trackpad gestures as we do on our MacBook Air’s trackpads which makes us more productive.
We’ve been using the Trackpads for quite some time now and it’s save to say that the Trackpads are indeed a great addition to our wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse. Every now and then we still reach for our trusty Magic Mouse. The most important action that’s still kind of lacking is the combination of clicking and dragging (like when you’re selecting text or when we’re working with vector shapes’ anchor points in Photoshop).
Our good friend Patrick van Marsbergen pointed us to a nifty app called Better Touch Tool. It’s free and what it does is let you set all kinds of gestured to trigger actions. E.g. we’ve used it to set a four finger (left and right) swipe to play a (previous and next) track in iTunes, waawaaweewoww! Another cool feature of Better Touch Tool is that it let’s you drag a window to the OSX menu bar which then makes that dragged window full screen.
