Wed 25 Jun 2008
MultiClutch Your MultiTouch
Posted by Dan under Apple, MacBook Pro
2 Comments
The Need to Know:
Title: MultiClutch
Author: Will Henderson
Version: 1.0
Price: Donation
Website: http://wcrawford.org/2008/02/28/everytime-i-think-about-you-i-touch-my-cell/
MultiClutch is a fairly simple App that installs as a preference pane in your System Preferences. After the install, you will see the logo above in the “Other” area of your System Preferences. The layout of the preference pane is very minimalistic and very simple. On the left side you have a list of programs that you have MultiClutch enabled on including a “General” category which will translate across all Cocoa applications. To add an application, all that you need to do is click the + icon as you do in many MacOS programs and select the application you desire. On the right side is a list of multitouch commands and what key press each command will perform.
Now, with the amazing-ness of adding MultiTouch commands to any application, there are a few things left to be desired. One huge functionality that I would love to see added to the program is the ability to add single letter commands without the need for the Command, Option, or Control keys. For example, in Aperture, I cannot add the ‘f’ key press by itself for going to full screen. I also cannot add ‘Option+F’ to filter the images. This may not be a big deal to those people who don’t use Aperture, but this is across the board including the likes of Photoshop and Gimp. It would also be nice to see some Carbon functionality added (You can’t use MultiClutch in Finder), even though this is not the fault of the Author, the addition of this can’t be done until Apple adds this. Luckily you can combine QuickSilver and MultiClutch and make a script to do whatever you want, then add what key presses you want to MultiClutch then to QuickSilver as a trigger (In that order, trust me).
With all of that, I still couldn’t live without the likes of MultiClutch in Firefox to browse back or in any program be able to zoom out then back in to lock my computer (Thanks to QuickSilver and a script I wrote, which I then tied to ‘Command+Option+Control+L’). Even with all of the missing functionality, MultiClutch is still an Application that any MultiTouch enabled notebook should not be without. Unfortunately for us, Will has accepted a job with Apple which means he can’t really work on MultiClutch any longer without it belonging to Apple (Thanks to the agreement ALL Apple employees sign when they start working there, I even had to sign one while working as a Mac Specialist in an Apple Store which pretty much stated *All Your Ideas Are Belong to Apple*). Luckily for us, Will has made the source code publically available (which I have and am working on editing) so the Open Source community can start working on it, and the fact that he is working at Apple now also means that it is possible that many people at Apple are working on integrating this into Mac OS as you are reading this.
If you love this program enough to use it everyday, please don’t forget to donate to Will. I am sure he will appreciate it greatly (I know he sent me a nice thank you email). Have fun with what should have came from Apple!
Update: I recently found a way to ‘trick’ MultiClutch into accepting single keypresses (even though they are not really single keypresses at all)! If you are like me and want to use things like ‘F’ for fullscreen in Aperture or option + [another key] in any other program, you can simply press ‘fn + F’ for ‘F’ or ‘fn + option + F’ for ‘option + F’ ect. Leave a comment if this helps anyone!
