Everytime I Think About You I Multitouch My Cell
After apologizing for the title of this post, I am happy to announce the release of a new app which I am calling MultiClutch. It’s a beta, though it has been in testing privately since the first week I got my Macbook Air and put it together. In honor of the new multitouch-equipped Macbook Pros, I’m going to make it public in hopes that others will find it useful. Basically, MultiClutch allows you to assign custom keyboard shortcuts in a given app to a given gesture. Want swipes to change tabs in Safari? Done. The same in iChat? Done. Want zoom-in to open emails in Mail, zoom-out to close windows in every app, and a swipe down to bring up Quicksilver? Done done done.
MultiClutch works by installing a simple input manager that will catch a gesture events, looks to see what shortcut you’ve defined for it in the frontmost app (if you haven’t defined anything, it behaves in the standard manner), and performs that shortcut. You use a System Preference Pane to customize gestures with an interface similar to the shortcut-customization table in the Keyboard & Mouse pane. You can ‘bind’ gestures in a given Cocoa app (due to the nature of input managers, Carbon apps are not supported) or globally. In addition to zooming in and out, and rotaing in either direction, and the four swipe directions, I’ve been experimenting with ‘combo’ gestures. Right now, I’ve added the ‘zoom in, zoom out’ gesture (i.e., in one fluid motion) and vice-versa, with more perhaps to come if I find them to be intuitive and useful enough.
This app is currently in beta, so it should go without saying that you should use it at your own risk and have a backup before you install it. That being said, I and several other testers have been running the app smoothly on our systems for quite some time, and MultiClutch is very careful to be safe in the way that it supports gestures. Please get back to me with feedback if you have ideas or run into issues.
If you’d like to donate to help support the time I took developing MultiClutch (which was not insignificant), you may do so by following this Paypal link.
Download Multiclutch [255kb]
Dig this!
Use this app on iusethis
Update: There was a rare issue where binding certain key combinations could cause the preference pane to hang. A new beta fixing this issue is up and it is a recommended upgrade. MultiClutch will prompt you to install the new input manager when you install the preference pane.
Update 2: Fixed donation link =).
Note: Multiclutch uses a modified version of a bit code from shortcutrecorder to help display custom shortcuts to the user, and I thank those developers for their hard work in the frustrating area of converting keycodes to characters.
February 29, 2008 at 10:30 am
Can you combine other keys with the gestures to get other results or to maintain your default gestures? (e.g. ctrl + pinch = open a webpage while pinch alone = default zoom out)
February 29, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Hi TJ,
Not in the current version, but I may consider it for future versions. Best,
William Henderson
February 29, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Does this work in Tiger?
February 29, 2008 at 2:10 pm
It for Macbook Airs and new Macbook Pros, which do not run tiger.
February 29, 2008 at 2:12 pm
So these use modifier keys, correct? So will the defaults be left alone? I would like the expanded behavior just not replacement behavior.
Thanks,
Michael
patiently waiting for his new MacBook Pro…
February 29, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Michael,
The defaults are left alone if you don’t redefine them. The way it works is you pick the app you want to customize gesture behavior in, and you pick the gesture you want to customize. Then it redefines the gesture behavior for that gesture in that app (only). Best,
wc
March 1, 2008 at 6:56 am
Been using the beta you put up on MacRumors for a while now and I’m absolutely loving it. I just made a small donation to express my gratitude. This app makes multitouch extremely fun and, better yet, useful.
Only one question though: I want to use Zoom In in Camino, it’s mapped to command+ there, but I can’t get the + in the MultiClutch prefpane, the closest I get is command= (+ and = sharing the same key and all). Any thoughts on that?
Thanks!
March 1, 2008 at 8:04 am
Is this only for leopard? I was really excited when I downloaded it but it didn’t work on 10.4.11
March 3, 2008 at 6:28 am
Well gee Zack… take about one second to think about that question AFTER actually understanding what MultiClutch IS (it’s called “comprehensive reading). You’ve earned yourself a token “well duuuh!!”, since considering that it doesn’t run on anything but Air’s and the NEWEST MBP’s, it quite OBVIOUSLY doesn’t run on Tiger, since THEY don’t run on Tiger! Get it? And since you’re running Tiger you quite obviously don’t have either an Air nor new MBP… so double “duuuh!”
March 3, 2008 at 8:57 am
Sounds great–many thanks! I will try it once I have a compatible laptop.
It sounds like you can assign 3-finger swipes in all 4 directions?
Can you assign 2-finger swipes in 4 directions too? Or will those always be interpreted as scrolling/panning no matter what? Some apps don’t have much use for scrolling, so it would be nice to let 2-finger swipes perform other tasks in those apps.
March 3, 2008 at 10:19 am
Morgan,
You can assign 3-finger swipes in all four directions. 2-finger scrolling is not currently included but I will consider it for future versions. Thanks!
wc
March 3, 2008 at 11:14 am
Oh my, these “does this work in Tiger”-questions make me wait for the first “I tried it with my regular MacBook, but it doesn’t work” post. Thanks for the great app, although I can’t use it, I think it is awesome for the people who actually can.
March 3, 2008 at 10:52 pm
This is utter crap. It doesn’t even work on my Newton!
March 3, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Timtim:
Is your Newton running Tiger or Leopard?
March 4, 2008 at 7:59 am
I think Timtim was just being funny
.
Can’t wait to try this w my new MBP!
Jeff
March 4, 2008 at 11:35 am
Installed the app, configured Swipe Left and Swipe Right for the commands of page-back and page-forward in Firefox, restarted Firefox, nothing. For some reason the finger-swipes aren’t causing any commands to take place…
March 4, 2008 at 2:57 pm
So I guess it doesn’t work with a Windows Vista UMPC huh??
Cool app- looking forward to trying it on my Air.
March 4, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Huh. I just installed this on my new MBP, it’s working great, except now when I try to go to Multiclutch in the Sys Prefs, it hangs on “Loading Multiclutch”, and I have to quit Sys Prefs to unfreeze it. Note that the Multiclutch gestures still work, I just can’t edit them now. Any ideas? I installed for the user.
March 4, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Elliot,
Please contact me at william (dot) c (dot) henderson (at the server) gmail so that we can figure out what is going on and fix it. Thanks!
wc
March 4, 2008 at 5:44 pm
This sounds awesome! I can’t wait to try this out on my new MBP when it comes in! Thanks for sharing such a useful app! It’s people like you that make the Mac so great! Keep up the good work and I’ll be donating as soon as I get to try it! Thanks again! One last thing, it is kind of a bummer that people who don’t have multitouch computers or ANY need for this software can’t get it to run!
(I’m confused why people are asking if this runs on Tiger, just as well ask if it runs on DOS!)
March 4, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Anyway to successfully get Multiclutch to switch between spaces using left and right swipe? I can get it to work when there is at least one open app in each space but if the space does not contain an open app you cannot swipe out of that space. I have a global setting for Left and Right Swipe with ^right arrow or ^left arrow.
March 4, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Disregard my last comment, I’m not that smart.
Figured it out, awesome! Turned off Control Arrows in Spaces first, assigned Control+Right Arrow and Control+Left Arrow globally then turned on Control Arrows again in Spaces. Thank you this is what i wanted to do since the first day I heard about multitouch pads.
March 4, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Hello,
i am currently desperately waiting for my new Macbook Pro (should have been shipped yesterday)!
What i would be interested in is the source - do you plan to open it or give it to other developers?
Because i’m a developer myself and i would be very interested!
Can’t wait to try your little program!
Regards
March 4, 2008 at 11:46 pm
The issue described by Elliot has been discovered and fixed. Please download the new beta if you are having issues.
March 5, 2008 at 2:57 am
Is it possible to add multitouch feature to other apple notebooks?
March 5, 2008 at 3:32 am
Hi there…
I just want to say this is a brilliant app! I have installed this on my new MBP and MBA and I’m so thrilled with all the new possibilities. These new combos save me a bunch of time when browsing!
I wish apple included these from the start…but thanks again for the brilliant app/sys pref!
Chris
March 5, 2008 at 3:34 am
Will…
BTW, tried to make a paypal donation, but it said there is something wrong with the merchant’s email address.
Thanks again for this great addition to multi-touch!
March 5, 2008 at 7:19 am
Chris: thanks for the heads up. The link on the site was bad (the one in MultiClutch seemed OK) and has been fixed.
March 5, 2008 at 11:45 am
Wow…this is amazing…two questions…
1.) how are you mapping quicksilver to a gesture?
2.) is there any way to manually input commands in the pref pane? I’d like to do things like command+tab (switch applications)…but when I put in the key combination, the system responds to the command, changing the application (and not filling in the box in the control panel).
Awesome utility!
-Zach
March 5, 2008 at 11:55 am
Zach (and others wondering similar things),
To map to quicksilver, I’m simply mapping MultiClutch to the command-space keystroke I usually invoke QS with. As for the second question - this is a two part problem:
* The first is that if you press the keys for expose/spaces/application-switching/etc, that function activates before MultiClutch has a chance to grab it. This will be fixed in future versions but can be worked arround by disabling or changing their keys temporarily.
* The other issue is more fundamental. MultiClutch only works in Cocoa apps (whether for a Global binding or an application-specific one). So while the above will work to get expose/spaces working with gestures, the gestures will not work in Carbon apps. I’m sort of split on the issue of whether or not to even allow such functionality, since it will always be of limited use if it doesn’t work in every app, and has already been the source of much confusion. The issue is that there is no way to actually detect when gestures are performed in Carbon apps because they do not have the hitch-in mechanisms that Cocoa provides. I have been looking for alternatives, but thus far I’ve had no luck in the matter.
Hope that helps! Best,
wc
March 5, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Hey Will,
Fantastic app that I’ve been long waiting for (well at least for the week I’ve had my MBP)!
I’m unclear how to add gestures to the Finder, I choose ‘/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app’ and ‘Relaunched’ the Finder but the gestures I assigned don’t work (Swipe Up & Swipe Down = move up or down in directory, ie, cmd-up arrow & cmd-down arrow; Swipe Left & Right = rotate windows, ie, cmd-` & cmd-shift-`). Is there a way to make this work I’m missing?
Thanks for wonderful piece of work.
March 5, 2008 at 5:50 pm
This is a great app, thanks for the hard work!
I was wondering if you could list some of the more useful command changes (swiping in firefox and such) as examples! I thought this would be good so you wouldn’t have to explain some of the more popular ones to everyone who asked.
speaking of, how do you change it so that you can use swipes to switch between tabs in firefox? Thanks!
March 5, 2008 at 5:59 pm
OH! and one last question for now. Is it possible (or would it be possible to implement in a later version) the ability to set double clicks (as in a two fingered double click) to implement certain commands? Thanks!
March 5, 2008 at 9:06 pm
I figured out the flipping through tabs by poking around a bit! The application is really fun! sorry to fill your comments area but now you don’t need to tell me that one!
new question: will this work with MS office for mac? I am assuming not… but… just thought I’d check
March 6, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Thanks for the great util! for Firefox for some reason the short cut cmd + the square brackets don’t work though the cmd + arrows works perfectly!
March 6, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Will-
This app fills a real need and I thank you for it. I’d like to report similar problem that Nick had w/ Firefox and MultiClutch.
I have mapped 4 shortcuts to gestures for Firefox: swipe left (command+[ ), swipe right ( command+] ), zoom in ( command+= ), and zoom out ( command+- ).
Right off the bat it worked great. Then after rebooting my laptop I fired up Firefox and, nothing. I can’t get it to work again and the entries in the pref pane are still there. I even deleted them and recreated them and its like Firefox does not register them.
March 6, 2008 at 8:50 pm
This is a great app, but it is easy to see why it is still in beta. Half the time it doesn’t work, especially in Firefox and Finder. I don’t seem to be the only one experiencing this, either.
I’m running OS X 10.5.2 on a new MBP with multitouch, and Firefox 2.0.0.12.
I promise I will make a donation as soon as it works consistently, all the time. Keep up the good work!
March 6, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Guys, neither firefox nor the finder are cocoa apps…
March 6, 2008 at 11:57 pm
to get it to work in firefox you need to download the beta of the new Firefox 3
March 7, 2008 at 2:13 am
hi
would this work with Touchpad pro (iphone app) - http://touchpadpro.com/
it uses vnc to connect to the computer
March 7, 2008 at 10:45 pm
This is a great tool and works well, but the fact that it only works for Cocoa apps is a dealbreaker for me.
Besides, it will be obsolete when Apple releases the real thing:
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/19/apple-depicts-advanced-multitouch-gesturing-control-panel-in-mac-os-x/
Just being able to switch between open windows (Cmd + ` and Cmd + Shift + `) or using Expose (F9 and F10) with swipe gestures was thrilling, though, so I commend you. I can’t wait to be able to map those four commands to the 4 directions of the swipe gesture and have it work everywhere.
March 9, 2008 at 3:34 am
Hi
What’s the best way to uninstall this? Are there any special things that need to be done, or can I just remove the prefpane the usual way?
It’s cool software, but I always like the possibility for uninstalling easily, as the app fiddles a bit with input managers.
March 9, 2008 at 10:33 am
Hi Felix,
Currently the only way to uninstall completely is to remove the input manager, located at /Library/InputManagers. Having an automated uninstaller is plan for the next release. Note that if you are only trying to upgrade, MultiClutch WILL uninstall the old version and put in the new one. Best,
William Henderson
March 10, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Thanks for an outstanding tool. I have one problem. For a while, I had it working great in Firefox. Swipe left / right would do page back and forward and swipe up / down would do shift tabs. I got addicted to this new ability. Then, after a restart, Firefox no longer works. Other apps I have configured in MultiClutch still works, just not Firefox. I tried deleting the Firefox entry and recreating it, but that didn’t help. I also tried disabling all my add-ons to see if one of them was the culprit.
Any ideas?
March 10, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Im utterly confused as to how to ue this. I have it running. How to I set up actions in the pref pane? It currently has just GLOBAL in the left hand column. If I wanted to be able to swipe to change tabs in Safari for example, how would I set this up? There should be a small “How To” with this, while aI certainly appreciate the builder’s time and efforts so far.
March 12, 2008 at 10:49 am
Love the idea of the app, but it doesn’t work for me in Firefox, either. Unlike David, though, it never worked for me. Is there something new with this update of Firefox? Also, I have a brand new MacBook Pro, so maybe there’s something new in the OS or the touchpad that’s keeping it from working?
Thanks!
March 12, 2008 at 2:49 pm
I have a new Macbook Pro. I have not yet gotten MultiClutch to work, but I REALLY want it to. I am using Firefox, but I really like the “swipe left” and “swipe right” navigation in Safari. Is there any chance you would make this open source and let us play with it? I need a new project.
March 13, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Too bad it’s not working on a normal macbook, cuz it sounds awesome! You lucky basterds with enough money for a pro
March 14, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Thanks for the great tools.
Will it be feasible to have more complicated gesture?
For example, Swipe Down-Right (use three finger to draw a L), or Up-Down.
It will be great if we can have such gesture as it mimics quite some major mouse gestures in browsers (Firefox/Opera etc)
March 14, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Somehow i’s working now… Very weird. I’ll keep you updated if anything changes. I’m running firefox on a brand new macbook pro.
March 16, 2008 at 12:07 am
I realise multiclutch gestures stop working after I restart firefox or restart my MBA. But everytime, after surfing for about 10 minutes, I try the gestures again, and they will start working.
I think its a matter of when the OS will load those multiclutch gestures to the running instance of firefox.
I wonder if we can force firefox to load those multiclutch gestures everytime it starts up.
March 16, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Will, this is an excellent application. Thanks for coding it! I look forward to modifier key / gesture combinations in future releases - once I started swiping, proper keyboard shortcuts are just -so- passe.
March 16, 2008 at 5:20 pm
Nevermind. Not working, again.
I think Casper might be on to something.
March 17, 2008 at 3:50 am
Will, this is splendid work. However, I’m experiencing this problem where the preference pane refuse to record any shortcut keys that I’ve entered every now and then. To fix that, I need to install the preference pane again (without uninstalling/removing anything).
Also, the configuration is not allowing commands such as Cmd+W to be registered as a valid shortcut. I’m not sure if all these problems are a result of a limitation of shortcutrecorder or not though.
I’m on the multitouch MBP, if that helps. E-mail me if you need anything from me to debug.
Thanks again!
March 17, 2008 at 8:35 am
This is a wonderful app.. It’s a bit glitchy, but for those who have issues getting firefox working, try adding “.app” to the end of the application name.. This seemed to work for me for a bit, but then at some point it stops as well. Now I go into the pref pane to reconfigure and upon close the app closes.
Will, let me know if there’s a place you’d like me to submit bug reports to.. I’d be happy to help you troubleshoot this. Definitely filling a need, and when it was working, my browsing / code editing was an incredible experience.
Thanks much!
March 17, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I set it up and it worked great, it then stopped working, Is there a way to reinstall this?
March 19, 2008 at 3:49 am
I think Casper was on to something regarding getting the OS to load the multiclutch gestures. I have the same issue where firefox gestures don’t seem to work at first and then they suddenly start working. Based on Casper’s hypothesis, I tried to force the gestures to load by opening up an app that supports gestures directly (e.g. open a PDF in Preview). Then when I go back to Firefox, my gestures assigned to Firefox work.
I’m not sure if this always works, but it seemed to work the few times I’ve tried it so far. This should hold me over until the issue is addressed.
Will, thanks for the very cool app. You are very talented.
March 19, 2008 at 10:08 am
I’m looking into why you guys are having the intermittent successes with Firefox, but just to reiterate, Multicluth only works with Cocoa apps. Thus, unless you instal the new beta 3, you should not expect Firefox to work. That being said, I’ll do all I can to see if we can get it to work consistently somehow.
March 19, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Thanks for all the work. Firefox is, perhaps, the best application to use multicluch with. I dread having to leave the track pad to navigate between tabs and pages. A version of multiclutch that works with firefox consistently would be amazing. Being without multitouch functionality after experiencing it is like going back to a tabless browser.
Thanks again Will, this is the best application I’ve come across.
March 20, 2008 at 7:35 am
I assigned gestures to Flock (carbon Firefox based), and it didn’t work with multiclutch. I installed Flock 1.1, and hey presto, it worked! I shut down, next day, it didn’t work again until I started Safari. Thereafter, no more success….
March 21, 2008 at 11:19 am
I have a little bit of feedback to add to the pile as well.
As far as getting the gestures to take effect, I usually find that adding them while the app is closed or closing and re-opening the app after assigning gestures usually gets them working.
One bug that I’ve noticed (but I haven’t been able to consistently reproduce) is that sometimes my gestures will all just spontaneously disappear and I’ll have to go back and re-assign them. I’m not sure about the cause of this–it’s happened about twice so far–but if there’s anything I could do to debug this I’d be glad to try and help.
Finally, I have a comment about the interface. I understand that you have the add and remove buttons for the gesture assignments because you don’t want to take over all the assignments for an application, but I think it would be much faster to set up the gestures and easier to configure them if the panel just listed all of the gestures (I mean, there’s only 10 of them–they could all easily fit on one screen) and then you would just add keyboard shortcuts to the gestures which you wanted to use, and leave the fields blank (or use a “Remove shortcut” button) on gestures for which you don’t wish to assign a shortcut. Obviously this would take a little more logic for the program to make sure that it’s only using the assigned gestures (a task which the current interface delegates to the user), but I think it would improve the experience of setting up and modifying gestures very much.
March 22, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Try Firefox Beta 4 with multiclutch, it works ….my dream comes true…
March 24, 2008 at 11:58 am
Hi,
Firstly great app really nice to get things working in Firefox 3.0. However, the shortcut to switch tabs in firefox is control+tab-key, but when the tab key is hit the component registering the event changes focus. This is probably quiet hard to get around without being hacky, perhaps you should map and obsure combination say a+s+d held together as the tab key (that stinks of hack huh?), as realistically who wants a shortcut that is this keyboard combo?
I have seen other people had diffs with this. For the interest of those trying to findout how to switch tabs in firefox 3.0 the other shortcut that switches tabs is control+pageup and control+pagedown (or on a macbook keyboard control+fn+up-arrow and control+fn+down-arrow)
Anyhows once again great app, Mac should have this option pane as standard.
All the Best,
Brew
March 24, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Could you have a test or indication if it’s supported on the current installed hardware?
I have a recent MBP, but it doesn’t seem to be working… need either a test or just a red/green light for current status…
Ta,
-Adam
March 26, 2008 at 4:50 am
Hi,
Maybe I am asking something some one else already asked before, but i’l asked it anyway…
Can this app be using on a mb pro without the multi-touchpad?
I have the mbp pro with the touchpad where you can scroll with two fingers (2.2Ghz, previous modell)…
Greetings,
Henk
March 26, 2008 at 9:16 am
how do you add a gesture for finder only?
I can’t see finder in the list of apps.
March 27, 2008 at 2:37 pm
How do I know if an app is done in Cocoa or not? I have a new penryn MBP. Ordinarily, I use Opera on all my computers, whether they be Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows… but that swipe left/right has me using Safari 3 much more than I use anything else.
Oh and iTunes needs this stat!
March 27, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Henk and Adam, this will only work on the latest MBP (penryns) that were released 2/26 (2.4, 2.5, 2.6) with 10.5.2 (build 9C70101)
March 27, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Well works good with Opera. Only done some swipes, but I’ll no doubt add some others soon. Great App!
March 28, 2008 at 11:47 am
Any chance of getting this to work with spaces? I’d love to be able to ctrl-swipe to get to the next desktop…
Just a feature request
March 28, 2008 at 5:49 pm
This is working brilliantly in Firefox 3, thank you so much. One question: I’d like to assign “rotate right” to do a command click (open link in new tab). MultiClutch doesn’t recognize the click, is there any workaround I could use?
March 30, 2008 at 8:29 am
Been using it now for a while, and still love it. However, here are some ideas I’ve had:
Zooming should be convertable to Modifier+Scrool wheel. That way a more continuous zooming would be possible in Firefox (Ctrl+Scroll).
Secondary click should be reassignable as well. It could be assigned to cmd-click in Firefox for opening new tabs.
More combined gestures! I love zoom-in, zoom-out, but an L-formed swipe would feel more comfortable.
And I second the global shortcuts. Swiping for Spaces or iTunes from anywhere would be awesome. Maybe even allow binding to Applescripts.
Is there a way to differentiate between gesture sizes? A small swipe could do something else than a big swipe. Or the swipes could fire continuous events. That way you could go back several pages in Firefox with one long swipe, or swipe to continuously fast forward.
I know that not all of these will be technically feasible, but nothing wrong with brainstorming, eh?
March 30, 2008 at 3:22 pm
This is what multi-touch should be! when do you think we can expect the next version?
March 30, 2008 at 9:36 pm
This is strange: I have swipe right set to option+arrow (change spaces)…when iTunes is the active program, it doesn’t work, but when i type option+arrow, it does work.
Also, finder seems to be off and on with all gestures.
March 30, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Actually, iTunes seems to be compeletey unresponsive. While it’s the active app, global gestures don’t work.
March 31, 2008 at 2:18 am
@charly: sorry to say this, but there are at least 3 answers on your second question… carbon apps aren’t supported for now, so all apps that use the carbon (and not the cocoa) framework cant recognice the gestures with this extention… although it strangely worked one time with the firefox 2.0.0.13 or .12
if you wnat to find out if an app uses carbon: open the Activity Monitor, select the application and click the information option if you find “/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/…” in the opened files ‘n ports tab then it’s carbon..
greetings
April 1, 2008 at 12:12 am
Dang.
April 1, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Zooming: open syspref, accessibility, zoom options. You can set default zoom levels, then use the alt-splat-= key combo to zoom in directly. works great with the zoom-in gesture.
I’m having trouble entering key combos that are already bound to some function, like splat-tab. Perhaps the user should just enter the keys they want to bind one at a time? GamePadCompanion does this, and it works well.
in fact, i’ll donate $50 if this makes it into a future version.
Thanks for the great utility!
April 2, 2008 at 3:15 am
unfortunately it wont work at all on my mbp (15″, penryn) - maybe the german version of osx is the problem? and how can i uninstall it?
April 2, 2008 at 4:07 am
i git the german version and penryn as well, and it works… probably you only tried carbon apps
April 3, 2008 at 12:55 am
Brilliant piece of software, great work. Hope you are hard at work doing the next upgrade
Would love to be able to switch applications (command - tab) using a gesture, haven’t found a way to do this. A function for sharing sets of gestures for popular applications would be fantastic.
April 4, 2008 at 11:08 am
Heya,
Just an idea, Dont know if this is possible, but if a repeat rate could be spcified that would be awsome. I have mapped rotate right and rotate left for volume control in itunes, but las each twist is only a small increment and it doesnt measure how much I have rotated. Similar usage on the pinch for zoom would be good for when mapping to zoom on firefox.
Is the source open, I wouldnt mind having a peak.
All the Best,
Antony
April 5, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Hi,
This is an awesome app. I had the same problems with it only working intermittently with firefox v2. I’ve found a way to consistently get multiclutch to work with this version of firefox. Open firefox and then click on the help menu - don’t do anything else, just click out of the menu to close it. The gestures should then work.
This trick doesn’t seem to work with Photoshop though (another carbon app).
Thanks to will for developing this.
Mike
April 5, 2008 at 2:57 pm
MikeTheGoat - Great find. Clicking the Help menu works great!! Weird.
April 6, 2008 at 9:55 am
MikeTheGoat - You legend!
It worked for me in all Adobe cs3 apps. Wish i could buy you a beer
Oh and great work Mr Crawford
April 6, 2008 at 10:02 am
Glad to be of service. I’ll have another play with the CS3 apps that i’m running and see if I can get it working too. I have *no* idea why it works though.
April 6, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Hi,
I’m trying to use this very nice app with a danish keyboard and firefox 3 beta. that means that, when trying to map to cmd+[, I fail miserably, since on a danish keyboard that means pressing alt+cmd+8, which isn’t recognized by the shortcut catcher.
Is there any way to set the keyboard manually to cmd+[, or possibly just to the backspace key?
thanks in advance
/Jonas
April 6, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Hi Jonas, future version of MultiClutch will address this issue. In the meantime, you can edit the plist preference file if you are feeling adventurous - it’s called
com.wonderboots.MultiClutchBindings.plist
It stores the bindings as keycodes. So you could, for example, set a binding to apple-backspace and go in and remove the keycode for the apple key).
Here’s the list of keycodes for modifiers to help you:
control: 59
option: 58
shift: 56
apple: 55
Hope that helps!
April 8, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Well, i got to say that i had some hopes to see it working in my iBook G4. I mean, i can do two-finger scroll in it so what the heck, right? Sadly, Multiclutch installs but does not work at all (10.5.2). Oh, well… time to save some money for a new macbook.
April 9, 2008 at 7:23 am
Would be nice if this app could work with Adobe Lightroom
April 13, 2008 at 11:42 pm
I have been trying to get this to work with world of warcraft. What I wanted to do was add most of the character controls to the track pad but the problem i have is that the short cut is sent at the end of a gesture. This means that their is not a long enough key press to do any controls (usually to turn left you push and hold the ‘D’ key).
April 14, 2008 at 3:36 am
Hey Will,
Since I installed MC I have the trouble that when I use three finger swipe left this hides my window instead of going one step back… Swipe right still works… I unistalled Multiclutch but the problem stays… Any suggestions? Greets!
April 14, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Great job! I just with that carbon apps worked. It’s annoying when i go into a app and all of a sudden my shortcuts stop working.
April 14, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Ok the I saw this post in another website regarding three finger swiping for other pruposes. I downloaded the multiclutch works beautifully for safari in terms of swiping to switch tabs (took me a while to figure out what to do).
Now the real challenge using the swipe feature to switch spaces. IT must be achievable because it works for one swipe and then stops. but only works again after the systems preference is present in the window. I’m not sure if it needs to be refreshed or what.
Setup:
1. In multiclutch, setup the global setting for left and right swipe to map to keys command left and right.
2. Enable spaces
3. Set switching between spaces to command arrow keys
This should then enable you to just switch between spaces with the swipe of 3 fingers.
If it could work continuously it would be a GREAT feature for spaces. I can’t believe apple themselves didn’t make this a feature.
April 14, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Will, if you get that to work I will gladly donate US$50.
April 15, 2008 at 11:29 pm
holy crap, has anyone else noticed al the sudden itunes 7.6.2 works with MC?? it didn’t used to! WHAT DOES IT MEAN.
April 17, 2008 at 8:22 am
Noticed lots of these errors in Console.app:
Can’t open input server /Library/InputManagers/MultiClutchInputManager.bundle
For just about every application. (iCal, Mail.app, Safari, etc)… the apps with default Multi-touch already?
April 20, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Multiclutch is awesome, absolutely the missing link for multitouch on OS X.
Couple of suggestions- as mentioned before, an L-shaped gesture would be really useful. Also, a 3-finger click would be great for middle click, to say open webpages in a new tab as one would use with a typical wheel mouse
April 21, 2008 at 1:08 am
How can i remove it???
THX
April 22, 2008 at 2:38 am
Ray, have you experimented with other gestures? I have just two workspaces, and so can swap between them by binding a single action - zoom-in-zoom-out. I have, however, found that this does not always work when the application I have in focus ‘captures’ the zoom-in or zoom-out input, such as a blank desktop (which changes the size of the icons), or iPhoto (which zooms in on a photo).
April 22, 2008 at 8:09 am
thanks a lot for this very useful tool
the “help menu” trick works well with *ANY* app on my mbpro. Together with spaces it saved my life working with Final Cut Pro.
I’d like to see more assignable gestures in future releases and I’d definitely buy this sofware once it becomes stable and more feature-rich. A suggestion: it would be nice if application specific gestures would ovverride the global ones, so if I have mapped a zoom in action in the global tab it performs a particular action for every application UNLESS the application I am using has a specific shortcut mapped for the zoom in action.
Again, thank you.
R.
April 23, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Thanks for this wonderful tool. I just installed it and it works great. However, I’d really love to see support for custom settings in the Finder (as an exception to Cocoa-only). In the “Global” settings I assigned the rotate gestures as well as swipe up/down to show the dashboard/desktop/… which I find pretty useful. It’d be great to have this functionality as well whilst having the Finder active.
April 26, 2008 at 1:21 am
I second Jason : three finger clicking woud be great. And also, 4 finger swipes.
Apart from that, this tool is just awesome, thanks a lot !
April 26, 2008 at 2:28 am
for the 4-finger swipe you would have to invent a new MBP
but nice idea
April 26, 2008 at 2:37 pm
what are the limitations of multitouch? there were patent applications that involve three finger zoom-in and zoom-out…can that be implemented?
April 26, 2008 at 9:18 pm
about how long do you think until the next version?
April 29, 2008 at 5:38 am
Hi, apparently regular macbooks don’t have the fancy gestures. I can’t install your program because under libary there isn’t input manager.
Help?
April 30, 2008 at 1:04 pm
It seems like the “help menu” trick works, along with any other opening. In firefox if I click to open a file, or several other actions, it works. The same is true in iTunes. It seems as if an action must be initiated in the app for MC to begin working. Once that action has occurred, MC works perfectly. Still an awesome app. It only can get better from here.
May 1, 2008 at 6:35 am
Lovely app!
Finally life approaches to be as it was when I had my fingerworks multitouch running under linux, swiping desktops around. (Sadly I have a sensor prob w/ my multitouch).
I want to report/ask 3 things:
1. As the writer “Ke” reported above, I have the situation, that I can swap spaces only from non-empty spaces (having 4). Is Spaces.app actually a Carbon app (can’t find it in activity monitor, not even with “All processes” setting), that would explain some hickups.
2. for Safari, zoom-in/zoom-out: I understand to make it work, you have to block the original zoom-in function. (And it does, have tried it, after removing the zoom-in/zoom-out MC binding, zooming worked again). Could you not “return” the hot-key to the standard-binding of zooming, after a delay time, where you had to check if there’s still a zoom-out coming? That way, one could have both, the original zoom-in AND a mapping of zoom-in/zoom-out?
3. After removing the zoom-in/zoom-out and some more playing with the Spaces bindings on global I also lost suddenly (while prefs.pane was closed) all MC bindings.
Great app, but I’m kind of afraid, that Mr. Jobs will not let you do this forever. :S Let’s see how it will go on.
Greetings from Bern in Switzerland,
Michael
PS.: System is new MBP
May 1, 2008 at 6:56 am
That’s funny!
I tried the “Help-MENU” trick for my Spaces issue. It works!
I usually have Mail in Space 1 and Safari on Space 2. As I said, swiping between 1 and 2 worked fine, but after swiping to Space 3 I wouldn’t get back. So what’s the default application in an empty Space? Finder! As people have reported probs with Finder before, not being Cocoa, I guess it makes utterly sense to have the same issue. So after I clicked on Help, i got back by swiping.
I guess it’s the same “load-the-bindings” issue of the other apps.
Greetings,
Michael
May 3, 2008 at 11:25 am
I seem to be getting some strange crashes lately.. not blaming this software.. But that last thing I’m getting in the console is the same “Console[384] Can’t open input server /Library/InputManagers/MultiClutchInputManager.bundle ” error as previously mentioned above.
May 5, 2008 at 7:20 am
Seriously now.. This input manager is great, but its throwing up far to many errors in my logs.
I’d be cautious of this if I were you, until this is resolved.
May 7, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Jim you are right, this is really filling up the logs. It works brilliantly and I love it but I am a little concerned that I have had it under 20 mins and already have 30 lines of logs! Brilliant little app though and I will keep it until I can prove it is harming the system
(damn I sound like my users do now, nooooo)
May 8, 2008 at 12:22 am
Hi…I love the idea of this app as the multitouch gestures is such a innovative concept. However all the settings I setup only work for the “system preferences” pane, but no-where else.
e.g. I set up a global swipe down to command-h. Initially I thought it worked as I successfully hid the preference pane, but it didn’t work anywhere else. The same goes for any other combination I configured.
Is this a known behaviour for anyone else? ow can I fix this?
Marius
May 9, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Multitouch is terrific. I have grown to love my MBA gestures, and now I can add and customize many more.
I set swipe up to minimize and swipe down to close any application globally. Very intuitive and saves a lot of mouse/trackpad miles movements. Thanks for the great work!
May 10, 2008 at 11:54 am
Wow, this looks great!
However, I must be crazy, but I can’t get it to work. I have an MB Air.
For instance, I want a three finger swipe down to minimize a window to the dock. When I choose the “plus” on the right bottom side and choose “swipe down” in the pulldown menu, the default combination is command-H. But I can’t change this… the MB Air just gifs a bumplike sound..
What am I doing wrong?
May 10, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I’m having the same problem.
I can’t get this to work. I’m the new mac book pro and I have tried to get the 2 finger swipe left/right to change the taps and nothing happens. I tried other things but still nothing.
It would be great to figure this out to make it work.
Thanks.
May 11, 2008 at 9:22 am
Wow, this is such a great application that I almost can’t live without it on my MBA. However, I would suggest some more combo gestures which otherwise add the functionality of the multitouch and perfectize the app. The combo gestures that I would appreciate are as follows.
Swipe Up, Swipe Down
Swipe Down, Swipe Up
Swipe Left, Swipe Right
Swipe Right, Swipe Left
Moreover, some keystrokes like Command + Space are not valid on my MBA for unknown reason. Anyway, I highly recommand this application to everyone using multitouch and I am looking forward to seeing any further versions coming …….
May 11, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Nice work! You’ve really gotten a lot of recognition for this. Keep it up.
Thanks,
Mason