Baffling inconsistencies in OS X Lion Multi-Touch

In Universal Access Zoom mode the up side of the zoom box won't go up when you drag up. You must go all the way to the left corner to get it to go up.

With all this 'finger talk', I haven't seen a single That's What She Said joke.
Bravo, America.

After poking around, I found a solution and a rather nifty trick to use three-finger swiping to move back and forth in apps other than Safari, a wonderfully useful feature I used in Snow Leopard and was not willing to give up AND two-finger scrolling in Safari for preview of previous page, in addition to the effective three-finger swipe to move between Spaces.

To use the three-finger swipe back and forth WITHOUT losing the two finger scroll functionality in Safari, just hold the Option key while performing the gesture in Finder, iPhoto, and iTunes! This allows you to use three-finger swipe to go back and forth in both Spaces and Finder windows.

While it is still inconsistent with natural scrolling (three-finger swipe left using natural scrolling would go back while a two finger swipe to the left would go forward), it is a great way to be able to use them all together. Apple should probably implement a persistent setting in the future to not confuse users between Safari and Finder, but they did allow both to work at the same time.

These are my settings: http://cl.ly/3k0m1M2S40163g0w3x45

I wonder if this is a bug, because the actual behavior doesn't seem to match the little settings video. If you have it set to:
- natural movement
- swipe with two or three fingers
the video shows both 2 and 3 fingers doing the same direction (right to left= forward; left to right=backward). What actually happens is opposite with 2 or 3 fingers. Definitely confusing and inconsistent.

It took a little tweaking, but it's working great for me now.

As nifty as the two finger swipe was in Safari, it was worthless since it doesn't work in any other app. So I just turned it off.

Now I use:

- Two finger "Natural" scrolling (it's fine, deal with it)
- Three Fingers, Right to Left: Back
- Three Fingers, Left to Right: Forward
- Four Fingers, side to side: Switch Desktops/Full Screen Apps

Easy.

Next person who thinks "upgraded to snow leopard" is funny and original thing to say gets a poke in the eye.

OSX Lion feels like a downgrade from SnowLeopard, I've been using Mac for almost 10 years now and have never been so disappointed.

Better Touch Tool lets you make completely customized gestures for almost anything. I highly recommend it. If you tried it when Lion first came out, the bugs are all gone now.

Actually the latest Chrome Dev channel releases have the three-finger gesture properly reversed. They also support the two-finger gesture although it doesn't swipe the page (yet) so you end up going back and forth accidentally on wide pages.
I really like the natural scrolling, there was always a brain jarring moment when switching between iPad and trackpad, and now that's gone. Now I need to convince everyone else to switch too when I need to use their systems ;-)

Apple is migrating features from iOS to OS X, and multi-touch gestures are part of that migration. Yes, you can cling to the old and familiar. Or you can just get over it and learn the new gestures. Once you learn them, you'll never go back. Trust me.

It's not just Safari. Say you have "swipe with two or three fingers" enabled. Spaces will now be set to four-finger swipe horizontal. The four-finger gesture obeys the "natural scrolling" setting. However, if you're in Mission Control, if you swipe left to right with four fingers, you move back a space, but if you swipe the same direction with three fingers, you move forward a space.

It's really unfortunate that three-finger swiping is a "legacy" gesture that doesn't obey the natural scrolling settings that Apple is pushing as the default. For the sake of consistency, I went back to the default gestures just so three-finger swiping between spaces works properly, but now if I want to move back and forth in "legacy" applications, I have to hold down the alt key while swiping three fingers to move back, rather than move Spaces. It's exceptionally inelegant, and at that point I might as well hit the command+[ shortcut.

Hey Apple! Fix it.