Magic Trackpad

How to disable natural scrolling on your Mac’s multitouch trackpad

All of Apple’s MacBooks come equipped with a multitouch trackpad that recognizes a two-finger scroll up/down gesture. Apple’s iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini can also be paired with any generation of Apple’s Bluetooth Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse to provide a similar multi-touch experience.

You probably use this gesture a lot throughout macOS while you’re browsing websites or writing up long documents since clicking and dragging is so 1990’s and tap/multi-touch gestures are more commonly used on modern multitouch trackpads.

If you’re an ex-Windows user, or still use Windows, then you’re probably used to the content on the page scrolling in the same direction as your fingers move on the trackpad, but on the Mac it’s quite the opposite by default. Fortunately, it’s easy to change the scroll direction of your trackpad, and in this tutorial, we’re going to show you how it’s done.

MacID’s ‘Tap to Unlock’ makes logging into your Mac even faster

Probably one of my most-used applications on my Mac is MacID, which I use on a daily basis to unlock my Mac without ever using the keyboard to enter a password. The application works in two ways – these include allowing you to use your iPhone or iPad’s Touch ID sensor to log into your Mac, or using a secret ‘Tap to Unlock’ gesture on the multi-touch trackpad (or Magic Trackpad/Magic Trackpad 2) to log into your Mac.

Both ways can save a ton of time, and reduce wear and tear on your keyboard, but in this tutorial, we’ll focus on how you can set up ‘Tap to Unlock’ in MacID on your Mac.

References to Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad 2 discovered in OS X code

References to unreleased Apple-branded mouse, keyboard and trackpad accessories have been discovered in OS X code by French blog Consomac. Code strings discovered in the latest OS X 10.11.1 beta 3 point to the Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad 2, which are likely next-generation versions of Apple-branded mouse and trackpad. In addition, the strings hint at a brand new keyboard, dubbed the Magic Keyboard.

Using BetterTouchTool to cycle through Safari tabs

BetterTouchTool is a free Mac utility that allows you to supercharge your Mac’s trackpad gestures. There are literally hundreds of uses for an app like this, but I’d like to share with you one particular use case scenario that I find extremely useful.

I’ve set up BetterTouchTool to allow my MacBook’s trackpad to quickly cycle through all of my open tabs in Safari using a simple two-finger gesture. Have a look at our full demonstration video and tutorial for all of the details.

How to enable the three finger drag gesture on Mac

One of the first things that I do on a new macOS install is adjust the trackpad and mouse settings to my liking. I absolutely love using things like tap to click and the three finger drag gesture.

Imagine my horror when I could no longer find the three finger drag gesture as an option in System Preferences. It’s simply no longer in the place where it usually is: System Preferences > Trackpad. Well, as it turns out, things aren’t so grim as they at first seemed.

Apple moved the three finger drag gesture option to another location, although the move doesn’t make a lot of sense if you ask me. In this post, I’ll show you how to enable the three finger drag gesture on macOS.