Trackpad

This panel controls the response to trackpad gestures. Note that your computer needs to have; a) a trackpad and b) that trackpad has gestures capability; for these settings to apply. If your system has a mouse input, this capability does not apply. At the time of this writing these trackpads are only available on a few notebook models that have the glass trackpad technology.

These controls are provided in addition to the primary settings provided by your operating system. The primary settings are found on the System Preferences panel accessed from your Apple menu.

There is additional help information found on the System Preferences Trackpad panel. Review this information for a basic understanding of how trackpad gestures are used. The documentation on this page assumes you are familiar with the core documentation and the terms (including the meaning of "Gesture" ) defined by Apple for advanced trackpad interaction.

Access the EazyDraw Trackpad Gestures settings (shown below) from the Preferences help window which is accessed from the EazyDraw main menu, at the top.

You may disable gestures for EazyDraw with the top Accept Gestures checkbox. For many users this may be the preferable setting. During normal clicking and tapping the trackpad will enter the gestures mode, this can be annoying can cause inadvertent changes to a graphics size and orientation. When unchecked EazyDraw will ignore all gestures on the trackpad, they will still operate as defined by Apple for all other applications.

The Rotate checkbox controls EazyDraw’s acceptance of the two finger-pivot-sweep gesture. If enabled EazyDraw will rotate graphics with this gesture motion. One or more graphics must be selected for any rotation gesture to apply. Hold down the shift key while making the rotation gesture to snap the rotation angles to 15 degree increments.

There are two Magnify gestures with preference settings. Magnify is the gesture performed with the "pinch" gesture. It works with both the pinch inward motion and the inverse gesture where two fingers pulled apart -- with no spinning actiion.

Zoom is defined as a magnify gesture performed when no graphic(s) is selected (or if Exapnd is disabled). The gesture will zoom the view of the drawing. Zooming in and out on a drawing is covered in detail on the Zoom Tool Palette help page. This gesture is just another shortcut method to zoom the drawing. The position of the cursor is relevent for the Zoom gesture; the cursor must be over the drawing and the location of the cursor is used as the focal point (or center) of the zoom. This means the drawing content exactly under the cursor remains stationary as the rest of the drawing is zoome out or in from the focal point.

The Expand checkbox controls the application of magnify gestures to individual graphics. When checked a (de)magnify gesture will uniformly scale selected graphics. The action is a shortcut for a locked morph scaling or a resize of a graphic with uniform interaction level setting.

Both Magnify and Rotate gestures have a Threshold setting. This is a integer number between 2 and 10. It sets a "trigger" level for entering the associated gesture mode. A small value indicates a "hair trigger" response that will quickly enter the gesture mode. Larger vaues will require a more pronounced gesture to enter the associated action. The relative levels of the two settings can be used to favor one gesture action over the other. If you find you are inadvertently jumping into a gesture mode, increase the threshold. Conversely, if you find in difficult to initiate a particular gesture decrease the threshold.

Each gesture has a Speed value with numeric entry and a slider for interactve adjustment. The speed is a similiar to a gain (or volume) control for the associated gesture. Larger values will produce larger changes for a given gesture motion. Increase the speed control if you find that you find the need to make large pronounced gestures or decrease the value if the resultant changes are too fast and hard to control.

Cancel and Apply are used to close the panel. Cancel will close the panel without making changes to the settings. Apply changes settings to reflect the entered values.

Theme settings aplly to all drawings. They are persisent and will be present when quitting and re-starting EazyDraw.

The Swipe Gesture is a two finger vertical or horizontal motion. This gesture will scroll a drawing. The swipe gesture is more globally defined in that it applies in the same manner to all of your windows including those of other applications. So this gesture is managed by your system settings. EazyDraw does not provide any special prefrences settings for thsi gesture.

The cursor needs to be positioned over the drawing for any of these gestures to initiate. This is somewhat different than other actions such as keyboard input which usually appllies simply the front-most window. But gestures require the target window to be front-most and the cursor to be positioned over the active drawing area on the window.