Trackpad and Magic Mouse Discussion

The Magic Trackpad and Magic Mouse on Macs and regular Trackpads need some love.

Most importantly, zooming. Zooming in and out with a trackpad is very... exaggerated, to the point of almost unusable. I'm sure with some fine tuning in the code that is above my head, it could be tweaked to be acceptable.

However, there's all kinds of additional potential for these devices as well.

They're pretty unique devices that can support all kinds of inputs. For example, with my magic mouse I can refresh my browser by swiping up with two fingers, or close a window by swiping down with two fingers, or change tabs by swiping left or right with one finger, etc. There's all sorts of great integration to be done with that.

Not sure what would be the best off the top of my head... but there's great potential for some great shortcuts, but they're through swiping on a trackpad or magic mouse. Like, switching from one planet to the next by swiping left or right with two fingers.

I have an app called Better Touch Tools for Mac that allows me to execute keyboard shortcuts by swiping.

When the scrolling is useable with a trackpad, I plan on giving the Magic Mouse a try and creating some shortcuts with the mouse.

Anyone else have some ideas for trackpad and magic mouse integration? There's a lot of potential here for Mac users and laptop users.

I bumped in the beta issues forum a topic mentioning it needs some love.

I support Mac in general using a bit of touching up on it's controls. It seems the least up-to-par for this game as far as OS usability.

I am not sure about the hotkeys, but if the app supports them being keypresses then couldn't it already be used without additional support from Uber? At least to the degree where they open key-assign. Everyone needs that, not just Mac.

Hope it comes soon.

PS: Does a program that rebinds keys on a keyboard, work in conjunction with the Apple App that you mentioned? Couldn't you rebind keyboard keys, then bind those keys to magic mouse?

I can do custom keybinds with Better Touch Tools. Heck, I could have that stuff working right now with the current build. It's the scroll wheel that's the main issue preventing me from using the Magic Mouse.

Using Magic Mouse "Keybinds" simply requires a third party app – which isn't ideal. Doable, but not ideal. Kinda like Twitch.tv integration is doable with a third party app, but not ideal.

Such integration would be pretty low priority though.

I saw that app while looking for a solution to bind 'shift' to mouse4 on the Mac. I ended up installing and using USB Overdrive instead, which has seemed to work so far, though the 'shift' modifier on mouse4 is oddly not quite as sticky/powerful as using keyboard 'shift', when using the current hotbuild2 mod. I'll plan to take a second look at BTT, now that I know you're using it; thanks for mentioning.

My main interest in this thread will be in the Magic Trackpad (and by extension, the built-in Macbook trackpads).

I spent some time just now using apple's Maps application on 10.9 mavericks as well as Maps.ipa on iOS with a retina iPad. There are some slight differences in the multi-touch gesture handling in each, which is not all that unexpected really. [Note that my excessive option selection of system-wide gestures on both platforms may be masking or modifying some default behaviors.]

My suggestion so far for PA would be to start off by mirroring the gesture support in the 10.9 Maps. The only major change being that a single click-and-hold should be a 'selection' action, as it is in PA now (Maps overloads single click-and-hold to also perform the two-finger drag 'rotate' action, which isn't helpful to double-up on for PA). All other gestures in Maps seem basically perfectly suited for PA. I recommend that folks who can, spend a minute or two with Maps on 10.9 Mavericks. Zoom way out and play around with it as though it were a PA planet or moon, instead of Earth.

That would really be enough, but I'll add more cuz we're shooting for awesome, right? On iOS for iPad (but apparently not in the Mac app), Maps has modified the two finger drag gesture slightly. If you begin by dragging vertically straight up or down with two fingers, you change the map viewing angle rather than move the map position. Simply drag initially in any motion other than straight up or down, and you are free to then drag up or down as normal to move the map. The effect works well for that app, but is unfortunately probably not well suited for the hectic pace of PA. Similar, modified situationally-dependent gestures like this could enhance a game like PA well though. One that I'd consider highly is the two-finger side drag Notification Center gesture on the Mac. I use this constantly throughout the day; it's so handy. I can imagine PA notification history list filling up a similar quick-reveal-under list on the right, and quick-reveal-under chat history on the left.

That's it for now, I think.

Finally found some time to play a little using the Mac's trackpad... and I don't find it too usable. The worst is that two finger scrolling kicks in the zoom instead of the panning you'd expect. In the heat of a skirmish I keep forgetting to use the arrow keys and zoom out of the solar system.