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Customizing Your Mac’s Trackpad

Tapping the track pad in order to click has become a very popular way for selecting application or texts when using a Macintosh. Its popularity comes from the convinces factor of not having to press down completely on the trackpad every time. However, tap to click tends to be annoying for new users, who may find themselves selecting texts or applications when not desired. Other than tap to click, the trackpad has many other potential capabilities like secondary click, zooming, rotating, and a multitude of gestures. To find these trackpad customizations locate your System Preferences application, then open the Trackpad pane under Hardware. From there you are free to explore. Bellow is a quick overview of my most commonly used trackpad click and hand gestures.

Tap to Click

As described above, tap to click gives the user the connivence of being able to tap their trackpad (instead of pressing down to select) in order to select text or apps.

Secondary Click

This allows the user the ability to secondary click (a.k.a. right click), instead of pressing control + click.

Zoom and Rotate

Found in the Scroll & Zoom section, zoom and rotate is a quick way to zoom into or rotate photos in selected applications like iPhoto.

Swipe Between Apps

In my opinion this is the best gesture ever created. Although it is simple this gesture enables you to four finger swipe between your desktop screens.

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Introduction to Mission Control

Mission control is where the user can see and navigate everything running on your Mac. Mission control explains itself; Apple brought Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and full-screen app to one place. To use Mission control, you swipe with three fingers on your trackpad. You can also click the Mission Control icon in the dock, and your desktop zooms out to Mission Control. You can also use gesture navigation. By using this you, swipe up and your desktop zooms out to Mission Control. Swipe left or right to more to the next or previous Mission Control item.

In Mission Control, at the top of your desktop it shows your Dashboard, desktop spaces, and your full-screen apps. At the bottom or middle of your screen, it shows an Exposé view of the open windows. Exposé groups window not the same application. So if you have tabs from different windows from safari, it will group those items together to make it easier for yourself.

The spaces on your Mission control depend on the user. You can also add and remove desktop spaces from Mission Control itself to add a new space, click the new Spaces control (+) in the upper-right corner of Mission Control. To remove a space, click the delete button (x) on the space’s thumbnail. You can also bind an application to a space to make it ready for spaces right from the Dock. You can do this by pressing and holding the icon in the Dock and make a selection from the contextual menu. Leave a comment below and we will answer it as soon as possible.