This morning, Apple updated their Boot Camp app to version 6.0 bringing support for Windows 10 in an official capacity. Granted, users could already use the previous version to install Windows 10. Is there a way, or an app, to use a Kindle Fire as a drawing pad? Like, you draw with a stylus on the Kindle Fire, and your strokes show up in Illustrator on your PC, for example. Edit: To clarify, something akin to this. Apple iPad Pro (Best Apple Drawing Pad) The iPad Pro has come a long way when it comes to drawing and is without doubt the best Apple drawing tablet for Mac users. Because it’s an Apple product, it’s naturally the most Mac compatible drawing pad although that doesn’t mean that it’s the best.
A mouse or trackpad provides a way to activate interface elements and initiate actions using clicks and fluid, intuitive finger gestures to supplement keyboard input.
Inklet displays a canvas in most popular drawing and image apps, like Photoshop, Brushes, SketchBook Pro, and Illustrator, on which your trackpad movements become pen and brush strokes. To conclude, Inklet offers you the possibility to transform Multitouch and Force Touch trackpads that are embedded in your MacBook, or the Apple Magic Trackpad 2 into a virtual graphic tablet. The app is compatible with numerous drawing apps, and can also work with the Pogo pen for increased accuracy.
macOS supports a wide range of standard mouse and trackpad clicks and gestures that people can customize. Individual clicks and gestures that aren’t primary ways of interacting with content can be enabled and disabled based on their applicability to the current workflow. People can even choose specific regions of a mouse or trackpad for invoking secondary clicks, and select specific finger combinations and movements for certain gestures.
| Click or gesture | Expected behavior | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary click | Select or activate an item, such as a file or button. | ||
| Secondary click | Reveal contextual menus. | ||
| Scrolling | Move content up, down, left, or right within a view. | ||
| Smart zoom | Zoom in or out on content, such as a web page or PDF. | ||
| Swipe between pages | Navigate forward or backward between individually displayed pages. | ||
| Swipe between full-screen apps | Navigate forward or backward between full-screen apps and spaces. | ||
| Mission Control (double-tap the mouse with two fingers or swipe up on the trackpad with three or four fingers) | Activate Mission Control. | ||
| Lookup and data detectors (force click with one finger or tap with three fingers) | Display a lookup window above selected content. | ||
| Tap to click | Perform the primary click action using a tap rather than a click. | ||
| Force click | Click then press firmly to display a Quick Look window or lookup window above selected content. Apply a variable amount of pressure to affect pressure-sensitive controls, such as variable speed media controls. | ||
| Zoom in or out (pinch with two fingers) | Zoom in or out. | ||
| Rotate (move two fingers in a circular motion) | Rotate content, such as an image. | ||
| Notification Center (swipe from the edge of the trackpad) | Display Notification Center. | ||
| App Exposé (swipe down with three or four fingers) | Display the current app’s windows in Exposé. | ||
| Launchpad (pinch with thumb and three fingers) | Display the Launchpad. | ||
| Show Desktop (spread with thumb and three fingers) | Slide all windows out of the way to reveal the desktop. |
Use standard controls and views. The standard controls and views automatically respond to most standard clicks and gestures. For example, a scroll view that implements a semantic layout and enables magnification automatically responds to the smart zoom gesture.
Respond to clicks and gestures based on context and meaning. Based on their configuration, people make various physical movements to perform gestures. As a result, your app should pay attention to meaningful events instead of monitoring specific device interactions. For example, instead of watching for a two-finger swipe, your app might watch for a “Swipe between pages” event.
In general, respond to gestures in a way that’s consistent with other apps. People expect most gestures to work the same throughout the system, regardless of the current app. For example, the “Swipe between pages” gesture should behave the same way regardless of whether people are browsing individual document pages, webpages, or images. On a system with a Force Touch trackpad, people expect apps to behave predictably and consistently when they force click a control to get more information or accelerate an action.
Avoid redefining systemwide, inter-app gestures. Even in a game that uses app-specific gestures in a custom way, people expect systemwide gestures be available for things like revealing Mission Control and switching between full-screen windows. Remember that people can customize the gestures for performing systemwide actions.
Handle gestures as responsively as possible. Gestures should enhance the experience of direct manipulation and provide immediate, live feedback. To achieve this, minimize other operations while gestures are being performed.
Make sure gestures apply to the appropriate content. In general, gestures should apply to the content on which people are currently focused, such as a selected element or active view in a window. Start by identifying the most specific content people are likely to be manipulating and make it the target of the gesture. If the content doesn’t respond to the gesture, then consider targeting higher content levels and containers.
Define custom gestures cautiously. A custom gesture can be difficult to discover and remember. If a custom gesture seems gratuitous or awkward to perform, people are unlikely to use it. If you must define a custom gesture, make sure it’s easy to perform and not too similar to the gestures people already know.
Don’t rely on the availability of specific devices and gestures. You can’t be sure that everyone has a mouse or trackpad, or that they want to use it. In addition, people can disable and redefine gestures without your knowledge. For these reasons, it’s best to offer multiple ways to initiate actions.
For developer guidance, see NSResponder.
The system offers a variety of standard pointer styles, which your app can use to communicate the interactive state of an interface element or the result of a drag operation.
| Pointer | Name | Meaning | AppKit API |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arrow | Standard pointer for selecting and interacting with content and interface elements. | arrow() | |
| Closed hand | Dragging to reposition the display of content within a view—for example, dragging a map around in Maps. | closedHand() | |
| Contextual menu | A contextual menu is available for the content below the pointer. This pointer is generally shown only when the Control key is pressed. | contextualMenu() | |
| Crosshair | Precise rectangular selection is possible, such as when viewing an image in Preview. | crosshair() | |
| Disappearing item | A dragged item will disappear when dropped. If the item references an original item, the original is unaffected. For example, when dragging a mailbox out of the favorites bar in Mail, the original mailbox isn’t removed. | disappearingItem() | |
| Drag copy | Duplicates a dragged—not moved—item when dropped into the destination. Appears when pressing the Option key during a drag operation. | dragCopy() | |
| Drag link | During a drag and drop operation, creates an alias of the selected file when dropped. The alias points to the original file, which remains unmoved. Appears when pressing the Option and Command keys during a drag operation. | dragLink() | |
| Horizontal I beam | Selection and insertion of text is possible in a horizontal layout, such as a TextEdit or Pages document. | I beam() | |
| Open hand | Dragging to reposition content within a view is possible. | openHand() | |
| Operation not allowed | A dragged item can’t be dropped in the current location. | operationNotAllowed() | |
| Pointing hand | The content beneath the pointer is a URL link to a webpage, document, or other item. | pointingHand() | |
| Resize down | Resize or move a window, view, or element downward. | resizeDown() | |
| Resize left | Resize or move a window, view, or element to the left. | resizeLeft() | |
| Resize left/right | Resize or move a window, view, or element to the left or right. | resizeLeftRight() | |
| Resize right | Resize or move a window, view, or element to the right. | resizeRight() | |
| Resize up | Resize or move a window, view, or element upward. | resizeUp() | |
| Resize up/down | Resize or move a window, view, or element upward or downward. | resizeUpDown() | |
| Vertical I beam | Selection and insertion of text is possible in a vertical layout. | iBeamCursorForVerticalLayout() |
Use system-provided pointers as intended. People are accustomed to the meaning of the standard pointer styles. If you change the meaning of one, people can’t predict the results of their actions.
Prefer system-provided pointers because they're familiar. If you must design a custom pointer, make sure it improves the usability of your app and isn’t confusing. For example, your custom pointer should make it easy for people to know which part of the pointer to position over an element. If you customize the arrow pointer, create custom versions of the related arrow pointers too, such as copy and disappearing item.
For related guidance, see Drag and Drop. For developer guidance, see NSCursor.
When running on a device that’s equipped with a Force Touch trackpad, your app can provide haptic feedback in response to a drag operation or force click in certain situations. There are three specific haptic feedback patterns your app can adopt.
| Haptic feedback pattern | Description |
|---|---|
| Alignment | Indicates the alignment of a dragged item. For example, this pattern could be used in a drawing app when the people drag a shape into alignment with another shape. Other scenarios where this type of feedback could be used might include scaling an object to fit within specific dimensions, positioning an object at a preferred location, or reaching the beginning/minimum or end/maximum of something, such as a track view in an audio/video app. |
| Level change | Indicates movement between discrete levels of pressure. For example, as people press a fast-forward button on a video player, playback could increase or decrease and haptic feedback could be provided as different levels of pressure are reached. |
| Generic | Intended for providing general feedback when the other patterns don’t apply. |
Use haptics judiciously. Overuse diminishes the feedback's significance and can cause confusion.
Provide haptic feedback in response to user-initiated actions. People easily correlate haptics with actions they initiate. Haptics that occur at other times can seem arbitrary, which can lead to confusion and a disconnected user experience.
Don’t redefine feedback types.Readcube app for mac. To ensure a consistent experience, use feedback types as intended. Alignment and level Change feedback patterns are for very specific use cases and should be used consistently throughout the system. If the use cases for these patterns don’t apply to your app, use the generic pattern.
Fine-tune your visual experience for haptics. Provide visual and haptic feedback together to create a deeper connection between actions and results. Make sure animations are sharp and precise, to visually match what people feel through the Force Touch trackpad.
Don’t rely on a single mode of communication. Not all devices support the full range of haptic feedback, and people can disable the feature entirely in Settings if they choose. In addition, haptic feedback occurs only when the device is active and your app is frontmost. Supplement haptics with visual and audible cues to ensure that important information isn’t missed.
Synchronize haptics with accompanying sound. Haptics don’t automatically synchronize with sounds. If you want an audible cue, you synchronize the sound with the haptic.
For developer guidance, see NSHapticFeedbackPerformer.
By now, most Mac die-hards are used to getting such questions from their PC-using friends as “How can you use a mouse with just one button?” All that even though Apple makes the best trackpads in the business and you can use any mouse you want with a Mac anyway.
No matter what you think of the keyboards on Apple's laptops, their huge, luxurious, Multi-Touch, Force Touch trackpads can't be beat. And macOS includes tons of handy trackpad gestures that you might not have even tried yet: left-click, tap to click, select text, sweep every window out of the way to reveal your Desktop files, and so much more. If the native options are not enough, you can expand your toolkit with Swish, an app that has 28 intuitive gestures you can adapt to streamline the everyday workflow.
Create your own trackpad gestures
Control your Mac with a wave of your hand. In addition to keyboard shortcuts, you can also create gesture shortcuts for your trackpad and magic mouse. Try the best software right now!
Even better, with a utility like BetterTouchTool you can customize gestures on your trackpad further, as well as set up a mouse or any other input device you can connect to your Mac. If a mouse or trackpad action is taking too long, or somehow hurts your hand — for example, selecting text with a trackpad — there's probably a better, faster, easier way to do it. Here's how.
/best-gtd-app-mac.html. If I have an idea or errand or other todo item, I’ll quickly add it to the appropriate list. If I need to write a post, I’ll check my @ideas list. I’ll take my errand or shopping list with me if I go out.
If you've got a Mac laptop, you should go to System Preferences and open the Trackpad pane. It's already packed with gestures you might not be using that can really speed up some tasks on your Mac.
There's no mystery to these options, either. As you mouse over or select each gesture, a video preview on the right will show exactly what will happen. It's definitely worth a few minutes to watch all the previews and decide which gestures could work for you.
Some gestures even have options you can select from a dropdown menu. For example, in the Point & Click section, you can enable the Secondary Click gesture by checking its box, and then the dropdown lets you choose if that secondary click will be a two-finger tap or click in a specific corner of the trackpad.
Here are some useful built-in gestures you might not have known about. You can enable and customize them in System Preferences ➙ Trackpad:
Look up & data detectors. Select a word and then Force-click (or click with three fingers) to look it up in your Mac's dictionary and thesaurus. Find it in the Point & Click tab.
Tap to click. Check this box to click with just a tap of your finger, instead of needing to press down hard enough to hear the sound and feel the haptic feedback.
Scroll direction: Natural. Uncheck this box in the Scroll & Zoom tab if you want scrolling on your trackpad to work the same as it does with a mouse: swipe up to scroll up, swipe down to scroll down. If this box is checked (and it is by default), scrolling works like it does on your iPhone and iPad: swipe up to scroll down, and swipe down to scroll up. Some people are really particular about this, and you could be one of them.
Rotate. When you're editing a photo that needs to be rotated, this gesture in the Scroll & Zoom tab lets you just turn the photo by rotating two fingers on the trackpad. It snaps into alignment at 90, 180, and 270 degrees, but you can stop anywhere you like.
Notification Center. In More Gestures, you can enable opening the Notification Center with a quick swipe of two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad, like you're pulling the Notification Center in from the side of the screen.
Mission Control and App Exposé. If you tend to keep too many apps or too many windows open, you need these options turned on in More Gestures. Mission Control lets you swipe up with four fingers to see every window you have open, across all apps. Swipe down with four fingers and App Exposé displays the windows you have open in the current app.
Look up & data detectors. This lets you select a word and then Force-click (or click with three fingers) to look it up in your Mac's dictionary and thesaurus. Find it in the Point & Click tab.
Tap to click. Check this box and you can click with just a tap of your finger, instead of needing to press down hard enough to hear the sound and feel the haptic feedback.
Scroll direction: Natural. Uncheck this box in the Scroll & Zoom tab if you want scrolling on your trackpad to work the same as it does with a mouse: Swipe up to scroll up, swipe down to scroll down. If this box is checked (and it is by default), scrolling works like it does on your iPhone and iPad: Swipe up to scroll down, and swipe down to scroll up. I uncheck this box within about 2 seconds of getting a new Mac, but it's really a personal preference.
Rotate: When you're editing a photo that needs to be rotated, this gesture in the Scroll & Zoom tab lets you just turn the photo by rotating two fingers on the trackpad. It snaps into alignment at 90, 180, and 270 degrees, but you can stop anywhere you like.
Notification Center. In More Gestures, this gesture lets you open the Notification Center with a quick swipe of two fingers from the right edge of your trackpad, like you're pulling in Notification Center from off the side of the screen.
Mission Control and App Exposé. If you tend to keep too many apps or just too many windows open, you need these two options in More Gestures. Mission Control lets you swipe up with four fingers to see every window you have open, across all apps. Swipe down with four fingers, and App Exposé displays the windows you have open in the current app.
Some of the best trackpad gestures are surprisingly not included in System Preferences ➙ Trackpad at all. For example, the ability to select text by dragging three fingers over it, instead of trying to hold down the trackpad with a thumb while dragging an index finger across the text, which could cause hand cramps after a while.
This particular feature can be found in System Preferences ➙ Accessibility ➙ Mouse and Trackpad. First, you can adjust the double-click speed and specify a delay before folders spring-load when you hold a file over them. But then switch to the Trackpad Options to find the magic trick. Inside that menu is a checkbox to “Enable dragging” and a dropdown that lets you select “three-finger drag.”
It might take some practice before it's second nature. Besides selecting text by dragging with three fingers, you can also move the selected text around and even app windows the same way.
While System Preferences controls trackpad gestures that work across macOS, you can also create custom trackpad gestures to control features in the apps you use the most. All you need is BetterTouchTool.
If you have a MacBook Pro with the new Touch Bar, BetterTouchTool lets you add app-specific features as Touch Bar buttons, so they are always right at your fingertips. The Touch Bar is contextual, so once you get it set up for each app you use, the buttons will change as you move from app to app.
The BetterTouchTool utility lives in your Mac's menu bar, where it can let you customize gestures for trackpad or other input devices, and even have your windows snap to specific areas of the screen too.
To start with BetterTouchTool, click its icon in the menu bar and then go to Configuration. You’ll see all the possible input devices you can customize in a black toolbar along the top, including your trackpad, keyboard, Magic Mouse, a graphics tablet, regular mice, BTT Remote (which is a companion app for iPhones and iPads), Touch Bar, and Siri Remote. For this example, pick Trackpad.
In the pane on the left, you can choose which apps will support the new gestures. They can be Global, work just in the Finder or other specific apps (just click the plus icon to add them).
Once you've chosen all apps, click the Add New Gesture button at the bottom of the main pane. You can pick from a huge number of one, two, three, four, and even five-finger gestures, or your gesture can be a custom tapping pattern or even use some Force Touch functionality. Here, you can specify a modifier key that needs to be pressed at the same time as well, but it’s a good practice to avoid using the keyboard when setting up trackpad gestures.
When you’re done with the gesture, you should tell BetterTouchTool what this gesture should actually do. If the action has a keyboard shortcut, for example, you can enter that in the Custom Keyboard Shortcut field.
If the action doesn't have a keyboard shortcut yet, you can always create a new keyboard shortcut for it in System Preferences ➙ Keyboard ➙ Shortcuts. Go there first to set up a keyboard shortcut for any menu item in any given application and then head back to BetterTouchTool to set up a gesture that can stand in for that keyboard shortcut.
BetterTouchTool's Predefined Action menu also includes actions that you might not find in standard menus for other apps, such as closing or resizing windows, starting the screen saver, or summoning Siri.
If you’re wondering how far trackpad gestures can go, just imagine that you can draw anything and turn it into an action. Let’s see how.
In the Drawings tab of BetterTouchTool Preferences, you can use your trackpad to draw a line that you can then assign to an action, which will make the drawing into a trackpad gesture.
When creating a drawing, BetterTouchTool will ask you to repeat it several times, so the software can recognize its variations too. Then just click Finish and Save before assigning that drawing to a keyboard shortcut or action. Drawings, in general, open tons of possibilities for custom gestures beyond taps and swipes.
Once you've gotten the hang of setting up gestures to perform one action, it's time to level up! BetterTouchTool can let you assign multiple actions to one gesture, which lets you shorten multi-step workflows you repeat every day.
For example, if you want a gesture to open your web mail client in Safari from anywhere on your Mac, here's what you'd do:
In the sidebar on the left, select Global
At the bottom of the main pane, click Add New Gesture
Select a gesture. In this example, it’s Tip Tap Left. A little animation of it appears next to the Add New Gesture button, so you can see how it works. This gesture consists of putting one finger down and tapping with the second.
In the Predefined Action dropdown, select Launch Application, which asks you to specify which application to launch. Choose Safari.
Now click the Attach Additional Action button. This lets you put in another action (predefined or a keyboard shortcut) that will run sequentially after the first one. Enter ⌘ + T in the Custom Keyboard Shortcut field to have Safari launch a new tab.
Include as many more actions as you need. For this one, that's just a Predefined Action called Open URL, which asks for the URL to open the first time you set it up.
If you get the companion BetterTouchTool (BTT) Remote app for your iPhone or iPad, you can simply use your mobile device to execute BetterTouchTool gestures on your Mac, as long as they are both on the same WiFi network. These gestures should be set up in BetterTouchTool Preferences under the BTT Remote tab.
BTT Remote also lets you access your Mac's file browser and menu bar from your iPhone or iPad — plus, it can turn your device's screen into a trackpad. This effectively lets you control your Mac from across the room, which can come in extremely handy.
Remote-controlling with your smartphone is especially great if you use your Mac as a substitute for TV. For example, you could set up a BetterTouchTool gesture for BTT Remote to launch Safari and open Netflix in a new tab. Then just switch to the trackpad and pick a movie.
Another gesture could open your favorite locally stored video file in Elmedia Player, take the app fullscreen, and turn up the volume. Now your favorite movie is only one tap away. Any other adjustments with media keys can also be easily done with BTT Remote.
Another useful feature in BetterTouchTool is how it can snap your app windows into their preferred spots on the screen.
In the BetterTouchTool Preferences, click the Settings gear to enter the Basic Settings and check the box to Enable Window Snapping. Now when you drag a window's title bar to a corner of your screen, a window outline will appear showing which corner or side of the screen the window will snap into. To maximize a window, drag it to the top edge of the screen.
If you find these controls pretty basic, you can go into Advanced Settings ➙ Window Snapping to tweak more granular controls that will make the feature work exactly the way you want. Say, if you only want half and fullscreen apps, no quarter-screen apps, you can set that up. If you want the half-screen apps to take up 70% and 30% of the screen respectively, rather than 50–50%, that's doable too. You can even leave a little empty space between windows as padding.
In fact, if you click the BetterTouchTool menu bar icon, you'll find an option called Snap Areas (Advanced Feature) that lets you create new snap areas using the current window as a template. This should help tremendously in keeping your Mac’s desktop organized so you don’t have to take the time to manually arrange your windows every single day.
If customizing every gesture feels like too much work, you can get a tool that does it all for you. Swish is a newbie-friendly alternative to BetterTouchTool. It comes with 28 intuitive gestures that will speed up your workflow, organized by the type of task. No custom actions here, you can quickly adapt available gestures and start using them.
It’s super easy to get going with Swish since you don’t really have to adjust any settings. Simply open the app, check available gestures in Preferences — you’ll find instructions on how to control apps, windows, manage snapping, etc. — and get back to work.
Another huge perk of Swish is that it’s built natively for macOS and therefore feels like its integral part — at the first touch. The app works with the Magic Mouse and uses the macOS internal logic, which makes things smooth and easy.
Once you get going with BetterTouchTool and Swish, you'll wonder how you ever lived without gesture control before — the trackpad is so incredibly powerful with the right tools at your fingertips. And when you get BTT Remote involved to fully control your Mac from your iPhone or iPad, the sky's the limit.
Best of all, you can try both BetterTouchTool and Swish for free during a 7-day trial with Setapp, a subscription platform with more than 190 best-in-class Mac apps to supercharge your productivity. Time to challenge yourself to come up with a few time-saving shortcuts today!
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
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