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Comment by farisjarrah | Hacker News Reader

They really lost me at the whole 3 finger gesture thing. That's a very unnattural thing to do when you are only ever using 1 finger at a time for 90% of the interactions with the touchpad. Furthermore they have like 2 handed 3 finger gestures to do things like zoom in and out.... I feel like pinch to zoom is a lot more effective and natural.

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I completely disagree. I occasionally use 3-finger swipe to switch between desktops on OS X and the "gentle brushing" motion actually feels more natural than trying to "point and click" with one finger.

Now, to be perfectly fair, I also have CapsLock+Shift+H/L keymapped to do the same thing, as well as two-finger swipe on my mouse. The point is, one doesn't necessarily preclude the other.

Yeah I think this mindset is going to be prevalent with Windows users because these kinds of gestures are not native, while Mac users are comfortable with it since it's integrated in the OS.

It’s also a trackpad vs mouse thing. Three finger gestures work a lot better with the kind of high quality trackpads that the majority of macs come with.

And that is the rub. On my macbook pro, which has what I consider to be a significantly better trackpad, I three-swipe without even thinking about it. but that comes from very tight hardware/software integration.

I have only used Linux for the past decade, but your point still stands as I only get to use crummy windows trackpads. Mac trackpads are indeed much better. I probably would be more amenable to gestures with an actual functional trackpad

Three finger gestures are actually pretty nice when you get used to them. I even use the four finger gestures that Windows has somewhat frequently (to switch between virtual desktops)

One-hand three finger (text select, dictionary lookup, file and window drag and drop) and four finger (expose up and down, virtual desktops left and right) gestures are great on MacBook trackpad. At some point they were default in macOS but now I need to reenable them on every install in both trackpad and accessibility settings. Especially the tree finger one (point + middle + ring fingers) is so much better than click and hold to drag.

I have a FingerWorks iGesturePad on my desk right now, a 17-year-old device which is still to this day the most advanced multi-touch consumer product. My experience with this product teaches me that multi-finger input is not at all unnatural as you call it. You do it all day every day with everything in your life EXCEPT your computer; you would get accustomed to it in minutes or hours.

Didn't Apple buy Fingerworks and used the ideas if not the technology for the mobile devices?

Yes, and the laptop and standalone touchpads as well. Those touchpads are more similar to Fingerworks products than the touchscreen iDevices. I would even argue that Apple's current touchpads with haptic feedback are clearly superior to what Fingerworks offered, if you install third-party software to expand the range of gesture options. I've been using jitouch for close to a decade now, and on a MacBook Pro I use multitouch gestures at least twice as often as I use keyboard shortcuts.

Two finger pinch to zoom is such an awkward gesture for me for some reason, but I recently discovered that some Android apps like Google Maps and Edge have an alternate one finger zoom gesture that I find much more intuitive: double tap and drag up to zoom out, and double tap and drag down to zoom in.

Three finger is the one gesture I actually use on my macbook pro. My thumb sits on the edge of the laptop, my index is on the glass, and my second and third fingers are hovering at the ready. At some point I got into the habit of scrolling with fingers 2 and 3 rather than 1 and 2.

Four finger, or really anything requiring me to lift my palm rather than pivot from the keyboard, is absurd though.

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