Customizable 4-finger gestures expected for Snow Leopard

MyAppleGuide reports that Apple might have customizable 4-finger gestures planned for the upcoming Snow Leopard release. The interface discovered by MyAppleGuide would allow users of multi-touch capable Macs to define their own gestures.

The unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros had 2, 4-finger gestures for the new trackpads of OS X Leopard at the time of its release. Chris at MyAppleGuide has accidentally come across a hidden preference pane, an unused .nib file that allows the customization of 4-finger gestures on the new glass trackpads included with Apple"s latest notebooks while trying to reverse the 2 currently available gestures.


Image Courtesy: MyAppleGuide

Currently, the preferences pane has drop down menus for each direction of swipe

  • Swipe up - Shows the Desktop
  • Swipe down - Triggers Expose
  • Swipe horizontal - Brings up the Application Switcher

The above preferences cannot be customized. However, the unused interface would allow functions like switching between Spaces and opening Dashboard


Image Courtesy: Macworld

The hidden .nib file can be found at /System/Library/PreferencePanes/Trackpad.prefPane/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/FourFingerSwipeGesture.nib on Mac OS X Leopard versions of multi-touch capable Macs.

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