After apologizing for the title of this post, I am happy to announce the release of a new app which I am callingMultiClutch. It’s a beta, though it has been in testing privately since the first week I got my Macbook Air and put it together. In honor of the new multitouch-equipped Macbook Pros, I’m going to make it public in hopes that others will find it useful. Basically, MultiClutch allows you to assign custom keyboard shortcuts in a given app to a given gesture. Want swipes to change tabs in Safari? Done. The same in iChat? Done. Want zoom-in to open emails in Mail, zoom-out to close windows in every app, and a swipe down to bring up Quicksilver? Done done done.

MultiClutch works by installing a simple input manager that will catch a gesture events, looks to see what shortcut you’ve defined for it in the frontmost app (if you haven’t defined anything, it behaves in the standard manner), and performs that shortcut. You use a System Preference Pane to customize gestures with an interface similar to the shortcut-customization table in the Keyboard & Mouse pane. You can ‘bind’ gestures in a given Cocoa app (due to the nature of input managers, Carbon apps are not supported) or globally. In addition to zooming in and out, and rotaing in either direction, and the four swipe directions, I’ve been experimenting with ‘combo’ gestures. Right now, I’ve added the ‘zoom in, zoom out’ gesture (i.e., in one fluid motion) and vice-versa, with more perhaps to come if I find them to be intuitive and useful enough.

This app is currently in beta, so it should go without saying that you should use it at your own risk and have a backup before you install it. That being said, I and several other testers have been running the app smoothly on our systems for quite some time, and MultiClutch is very careful to be safe in the way that it supports gestures. Please get back to me with feedback if you have ideas or run into issues.

If you’d like to donate to help support the time I took developing MultiClutch (which was not insignificant), you may do so by following this Paypal link.

Download Multiclutch [255kb]
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Update: There was a rare issue where binding certain key combinations could cause the preference pane to hang. A new beta fixing this issue is up and it is a recommended upgrade. MultiClutch will prompt you to install the new input manager when you install the preference pane.

Update 2: Fixed donation link =).

Note: Multiclutch uses a modified version of a bit code fromshortcutrecorder to help display custom shortcuts to the user, and I thank those developers for their hard work in the frustrating area of converting keycodes to characters.