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Baffling inconsistencies in OS X Lion Multi-Touch

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Baffling inconsistencies in OS X Lion Multi-Touch

gesture-two-cjr.jpg
OS X Lion's new Multi-Touch gestures have switched things up more than any previous version of OS X, and they're brought a lot of confusion with them. While "natural" scrolling is the most obvious change and the one that takes the most getting used to (unless you disable it), other inconsistencies in the way Lion handles Multi-Touch gestures are both more subtle and potentially more baffling. The one that's been tripping me up even after almost two weeks of using Lion is the gestures for going forward and back in Safari and other applications.

In Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, a three-finger swipe would take you backward and forward in any app that supported that gesture, like Apple's Safari, Finder, Preview, iPhoto, Aperture, and even the iTunes Store. Eventually, third-party browsers like Firefox baked in support for these three-finger gestures, and the whole system worked pretty well.

OS X Lion introduced a new gesture for forward/back navigation: a two-finger swipe. I actually like this gesture better, because when you're using Safari you get a preview of the next/previous page as you swipe, something that three-finger swiping doesn't provide. It's a very neat trick, but there's a problem: the gesture only works in Safari. No other programs react to this gesture at all. So if you have "Swipe between pages" set to "Scroll left or right with two fingers" in System Preferences, you lose the ability to use gestures to go back and forward in Finder, iPhoto, Aperture, and other apps.

Things get even more confusing if you enable "Swipe with two or three fingers" and have natural scrolling enabled. I'll try to explain why with the outline below:

Two-finger swipe: natural scrolling disabled

  • Swipe from left to right: Go forward
  • Swipe from right to left: Go back
Two-finger swipe: natural scrolling enabled

  • Swipe from left to right: Go back
  • Swipe from right to left: Go forward
Three-finger swipe: natural scrolling enabled/disabled makes no difference

  • Swipe from left to right: Go forward
  • Swipe from right to left: Go back
You might have already caught on to the inconsistency, but I'll spell it out anyway: If you have natural scrolling enabled and have also enabled swiping with either two or three fingers, the gesture direction is completely reversed depending on the number of fingers you use. The result: brain meltdown.

Right now, the only ways around this inconsistency are:

  1. Disable natural scrolling
  2. Leave three-finger gestures disabled and lose the ability to swipe forward/back in any app other than Safari
  3. Set swiping to three fingers only and lose Safari's ability to preview pages as you swipe
  4. Reverse the three-finger swipe gesture directions with a third-party app like BetterTouchTool (my personal choice)
  5. Live with it, while your muscle memory quietly rebels and plots to overthrow you
I'd like to think this inconsistency is something that Apple will address in a future update to Lion, but as it's likely Apple considers three-finger swiping a "legacy" gesture from earlier versions of OS X and only kept it around to placate users who upgraded from Snow Leopard, the company may not bother. A better solution might be to expand the new two-finger gestures to apps other than Safari. In the meantime, using BetterTouchTool to work around the problem has at least stopped my muscle memory from cursing Apple's UI design team fifty times a day.

Baffling inconsistencies in OS X Lion Multi-Touch originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.




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IMHO, the "natural scrolling" feature is far more trouble on a desktop machine than it is worth. Granted that you can disable it, but the fact that certain gestures were changed with it in mind, makes me a bit nervous about where OS X and iOS are going to meet down the road.

Doug
 

dtravis7


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IMHO, the "natural scrolling" feature is far more trouble on a desktop machine than it is worth. Granted that you can disable it, but the fact that certain gestures were changed with it in mind, makes me a bit nervous about where OS X and iOS are going to meet down the road.

Doug

Some users like it. I am not one of them. Seems backwards to me! I turned it off after an hour to keep my sanity!!! :D
 
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I actually like it.
 
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I got used to the natural scrolling pretty quickly, maybe because I use an iPad alot as well as a touch screen phone. As far as moving forward and backward in Firefox or other Apps, a four finger swipe works fine for me, and I did not have to change any thing to set it up.
 
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There are some redundancies in the gestures when used in conjunction with certain keyboard bindings. For instance, you can set 4 fingers to swipe spaces left and right, but if you hold down the Option key, it will reverse. This may be true of many other gestures, but I have yet to try all combinations.

So yeah.. I obviously disabled the natural scrolling feature, but I also disabled the three finger drag and re-enable the single tap drag with drag lock. This leaves the three finger gesture free for swiping back and forth in Finder/Preferences and other applications. I don't think I've ever gotten two finger swiping to work for some reason, but would like to try it again. Grr... I want to be in Lion so I can experiment, but it just annoys me so! What a conundrum.

Doug
 
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Getting used to the natural scrolling isn't a problem for me at all, it's...natural! It's when I have to go back to a windows machine where I get mad!

As it goes right now, I'm either going to try a new installation of Lion, or actually go back to SL. My trackpad is inconsistent(which I thought was why it was mentioned in the thread, but wasn't), and sleeping/waking just isn't right. I'm probably going to go back to SL, and upgrade it back when there are a few more Lion updates.
 
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I disconnected the mouse on my iBook for a few days and played with Multi-Touch just to get a feel for it. I noticed something interesting. While learning the gestures isn't that hard it reminded me of learning how to use the stylus to write on my old Palm Pilot from 10 years ago. Apple revolutionized the industry with the iPhone and the touch screen but these same gestures on a laptop (and presumably desktop) seem a bit silly, much as the special gestures to form letters on the Palm Pilot did years ago.

-
 
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Not confusing for me at all. When you are reading a book or magazine, to read further, you flip the page to the left. To go back towards the front of the magazine, you flip the page to right. Very natural.

Unless you are Chinese, then everything is opposite. :p
 
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Not confusing for me at all. When you are reading a book or magazine, to read further, you flip the page to the left. To go back towards the front of the magazine, you flip the page to right. Very natural.

Unless you are Chinese, then everything is opposite. :p

I won't dispute flipping back and forth in the case of an e-book, but swiping up to go down and visa-versa on a web page on a desktop or notebook does NOT feel natural at ALL.


While we're at it, I can't stand the fact that swipe to the top and bottom of a web page is gone in FF. This was done with three fingers, and should still work since those gestures do absolutely nothing now. I could care less about inertial scrolling since it's just a fancier version of smooth scrolling.
Doug
 
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I won't dispute flipping back and forth in the case of an e-book, but swiping up to go down and visa-versa on a web page on a desktop or notebook does NOT feel natural at ALL.


While we're at it, I can't stand the fact that swipe to the top and bottom of a web page is gone in FF. This was done with three fingers, and should still work since those gestures do absolutely nothing now. I could care less about inertial scrolling since it's just a fancier version of smooth scrolling.
Doug

Three fingers up is supposed to be Mission Control, and three fingers down is supposed to be Exposé for all the windows in the foreground application.
 
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Three fingers up is supposed to be Mission Control, and three fingers down is supposed to be Exposé for all the windows in the foreground application.

Well, I've got both of those gestures relegated to 4 fingers, so 3 finger gestures for the same does absolutely nothing. They might as well at least add the option for those whom are using 4 fingers for MC and Expose. It would be only fair, considering that they've done this in other instances.

Doug
 

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