Mission Control gives users of Mac OS X Lion control over their workspaces, application windows and interface as they work in Apple’s new operating system. It combines the old tools Spaces, Dashboard and Expose into one useful feature.

Launching the Mission

To invoke the feature click the Dock icon or swipe up on a trackpad with three fingers. Get rid of it with the same three finger swipe only in the down direction. You can also set up a hot corner preference which is accessible in System Properties. Click Mission Control and choose the Hot Corners button in the lower left. In the image below we have the upper right hot corner set to invoke Mission Control. When our mouse goes up to the far upper right corner Mission Control appears.

Assign Mission Control to a Hot Corner in the Mission Control Preferences window in System Properties

On your Apple keyboard the F3 button will also bring up Mission Control. This gives a user lots of options for revealing the tool.

Mission Controls Previews

Mission Control in OS X 1o.7 Lion

In Mission Control the Dock stays at the bottom, as usual. The desktop’s wallpaper image hides behind everything. We wish that you could click the desktop to quickly hide all the windows. Maybe in a future release. Clicking on the other thumbnails opens the window each one represents.

At the top of the screen are all of your desktops, full screen apps, workspaces and the Dashboard where you find useful widgets. You can add desktops by mousing to the upper right corner. A box with a plus sign appears. Click it to create a new desktop. You cannot rename desktops, which is a shame. They will be named with ascending numbers – Desktop 1, Desktop 2, etc.

Stacked Window Previews

A group of stacked Chrome windows in Mission Control

Each application preview can be clicked to show its Windows (see above). If you have more than one window of that app open, they will be stacked in a staggered fashion. You can click whichever window of that app you want to see.

Full Screen Apps

As we noted, when in Mission Control, the thumbnails at the top represent your desktops. But also any app that is running in the new Full Screen mode will also be a preview at the top of Mission Control. Put an app in Full Screen Mode by clicking the two arrows in the upper right corner of the app’s window. Not all apps support this yet. Apple updated most of their software in the last week to support this new feature.

Unfortunately Full Screen Mode hides the content of your second monitor in dual monitor setups, making it nearly useless for those who like to use a second monitor. At least you can get out of the Full Screen Mode easily by either invoking Mission Control and choosing another workspace from the top row, or by pressing the ESC key to exit Full Screen Mode. Apple needs to address this problem. Why can’t Full Screen Mode put only one monitor into the mode while the other stays in normal mode? Or why can’t you put two apps into Full Screen Mode at the same time?

Manipulating Spaces and Windows

To switch from one space to another you can use a three-finger swipe to the side. This rotates between your spaces, desktops and full screen apps. As we said above, invoking Mission Control and clicking the space’s preview thumbnail will also switch to another desktop, space or full screen app too.

If you have more than one window of an app open, as we said above, it will show all of them stacked. To reveal them all, just swipe down with two fingers over the stack. Swipe up to return to your previous view.

Notice all the Preview windows shown by swiping up over the Preview Dock icon

If you have a lot of different apps open, you can easily show all of the windows for that app by mousing to the app’s Dock icon and the use the same three finger down swipe action. Up shows the windows and down hides them returning to the previous space. All the windows that are shown can be clicked to go to that window.

Gestures Galore

It will take us some time to get used to all the different gestures needed to quickly manipulate windows and use the various features in Mission Control. Here is a list of the gestures in Mission Control:

• 3 Fingers Up – invokes Mission Control.
• 3 Fingers Down – hides Mission Control.
• 3 Fingers Left/Right – switch between spaces and windows or full screen apps.
• 2 Fingers Up in Mission Control – swipe over a cluster of windows to show them all kind of like a mini Mission Control inside Mission Control.
• 3 Fingers Down over a Dock Icon – shows all of the windows of that app and get out of the view by either clicking a thumbnail or using 3 Fingers Swipe Up.
• 3 Fingers and Thumb Pinch Out – shows your desktop.

Tame OS X Lion Mission Control Workspaces & Windows With Lots of Petting is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

If you have a multi touch mousepad and have already downloaded Firefox 4, you can enable mulitouch gestures by changing a few settings. This will allow you to pinch to zoom in Firefox 4 and enable the use of a twist gesture to switch tabs.

To enable pinch to zoom, you need to head over to the configuration for Firefox 4 which isn’t under the menu, but rather typed into your address bar. The functionality is already in there, we just need to turn it on.

About:Config Settings in Firefox 4

Type about:config in your address bar.

Warning that you should only change what you know.

Click I’ll be careful, I proimise!

Enabling multitouch gestures in Firefox 4

In the filter box type “browser.gesture” without the quotes and you will see the list of options.

Turning Pinch to Zoom in Firefox 4

For the Pinch to Zoom double click on each of the following entries and past in the cmd portion.

  browser.gesture.pinch.in         cmd_fullZoomReduce

  browser.gesture.pinch.in.shift   cmd_fullZoomReset

  browser.gesture.pinch.out        cmd_fullZoomEnlarge

  browser.gesture.pinch.out.shift  cmd_fullZoomReset

To enable twist gestures, change these entries

  browser.gesture.twist.left       Browser:PrevTab

  browser.gesture.twist.right      Browser:NextTab

If you end up messing something up, you can go back in and change the entries back to the original blank to disable them.

Firefox 4 offers a new interface, speed improvements and features. To find out more, check out our Firefox 4 overview.

How to Enable Pinch to Zoom and Twist Gestures in Firefox 4 is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Apple may be bringing a new unlock screen that uses gestures, similar to the 9-dot pattern available for Android users to unlock their devices rather than using a short 4-digit PIN or a longer alphanumeric passcode. The gesture-based system allows users to ‘connect’ the dots in a pattern to unlock their devices based on the saved pattern stored on the phone.

While Android’s functionality for unlocking is novel and adds some wow factor when it was released, more recently the gesture-based mechanism has been called into question by industry insiders and analysts. As smartphones with touchscreens–which would be required for gestures to work on–attract fingerprints, swipes on the phone may be picked up by others and provide clues to what the gesture is for unlocking the device. If the phone is found by an unauthorized user, that user can glance the screen from the fingerprints and oils left on the screen from when the original owner had swiped in their unlock gestures last. According to Adam J. Aviv, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pensylvannia who is researching the unlock gesture as a security mechanism, “The more I used the [Android] phone, the more I noticed you could see my pattern. I’d go to bed in the evening, wake up, and you could see my smudge.” Aviv adds, “The practice of entering sensitive information via touch screens needs careful analysis in light of our results. The Android password pattern, in particular, should be strengthened.” Report on Aviv’s study on security were reported by the Christian Science Monitor.

It’s unclear if Apple intends on commercializing its gesture-based lock screen, though 9to5 Mac reported that Apple has already deployed the lock screen for internal use. The lock screen could potentially be expanded to other internal use, including on apps for retail stores when employees use iPod Touch devices as a point-of-sale payment device to process credit cards for purchases.

While iOS has historically been seen as a consumer-grade operating system, Apple has also been making inroads with the enterprise market due in part to the ease of deploying apps as well as Apple’s support for Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync environment inside the iPhone. It’s unclear how IT managers may respond if Apple commercializes the gesture-based lock screen, especially in light of Aviv’s findings on the potential security risks left by smudges when gestures are used.

Apple Brings Android’s Gesture Unlock to iPhone, Will Consumers Get the Feature? is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

We already know what’s officially new in OS X 10.7 Lion, but now that the masses have had a weekend to dig into OS X Lion we know more about what’s coming to Macs this summer, and what’s missing from OS X Lion.

The new features listed below are in addition to the announced changes listed on the OS X 10.7 Lion feature page, or give us new details about an announced feature.

Multi-User Remote Computing – Instead of simply connecting to the account in use on another mac, you can connect to a virtual display and see your files, instead of a family member’s. This is a nice feature that is not possible in OS X Snow Leopard.

SSD Trim Support – TRIM Support is a means of coordinating disk use that hasn’t been present in past versions of OS X, but with Lion it looks like OS X will now Support SSD TRIM, but possibly only on Apple SSDs. In short this is a good thing. The video above shows why you want TRIM support.

View in Spotlight - When you search for an item in Spotlight you can put your mouse on top for a quick Preview of the item or, if the file isn’t supported in Preview, you can see a popup with more information.

Migration assistant - The new version of migration assistant, which connects to your old computer to bring your files to your new Mac, can now connect to a Windows PC over the network to migrate your old files to your new Mac.

PDF Signing in Preview - Signature Capture allows you to sign a small piece of paper, take a picture of it with your built in camera and then insert it into a PDF using Preview. This simplifies signing digital documents and is a welcome addition to OS X — and a feature missing from Windows, even on tablets.

Podcast Publisher – Apple is making it easier to start sharing with the world in OS X Lion with the inclusion of Podcast Publisher. This new app is a simple to use tool for recording, editing and then sharing your podcasts with the world.

Windows Controls and Gestures - Apple has changed how scrolling works in Lion, essentially inverting the scrolling experience to mirror how you scroll on the iPad or iPhone. Additionally OS X 10.7 Lion adds more control for resizing Windows like holding Shift to keep aspect ratio while resizing and more.

Time Machine Without External Hard Drive - Another new feature in OS X Lion is Local Snapshots which essentially allows you to use Time Machine Backup on your Mac without an external hard drive. This won’t help you with a hardware failure, but it is nice for users who need to get to an older version of a file.

iTunes Artwork Screensaver -The popular iTunes Artwork screensaver gets a refresh in OS X Lion. Now you are able to hover over a picture to play the song.

iChat gains Yahoo support and Live Preview - iChat now supports Yahoo IM right out of the box for video and audio chat. Additionally, if you hover your mouse over a link you’ll see a live preview of the webpage without opening Safari.

Super High Resolution Monitor Support – OS X Lion will reportedly support HiDPI monitors with incredibly high resolutions. For now this means really high res external monitors, but MacRumors imagines a MacBook Pro with a 2880×1800 resolution in the future.

Find My Mac – Another new feature that could be coming in OS X Lion is Find My Mac, a service similar to the free Find my iPhone tool. 9to5Mac has found evidence of this feature in the OS X 10.7 developer build. There’s no functional feature yet, but with the anticipated changes to MobileMe, this could be a big part.

Unfortunately, advancements come at a price. Apple has left a few features off of the OS X Lion developer build which may be missed by a number of users. AppleInsider reports that Front Row, Java Runtime and Rosetta support are all missing from the OS X 10.7 developer build.

• Front Row delivers an Apple TV like interface to your media and is likely to be the most missed feature.
• Java Runtime allows the Mac to run 100% java applications and will reportedly offer better security when it is not installed by default.
• Rosetta allows Intel macs to run older PowerPC applications, and is not included in OS X Lion.

Have you found anything else in OS X 10.7 Lion that we’ve missed? What are you looking forward to the most? Let us know in the comments.

Images Via 9to5Mac and AppleInsider

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: New Hidden Feature Roundup (And What’s Missing) is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Apple has long implemented multi-touch scrolling on its notebooks via a two-finger scrolling gesture, however the new version of OS X 10.7 shows the direction that Apple may be headed in merging its full OS X operating system, found on notebooks and desktops, with the mobile iOS operating system, found on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads. With OS X 10.7, codenamed Lion, Apple will be inverting its scrolling movement to more closely resemble the scrolling gestures on the tablet and phone.

With Lion, the default scrolling motion to scroll down a long page, like a Web page, is to use two fingers on the multi-touch trackpad and flick up. This gesture is akin to users actually pushing the page up to view the hidden contents below. The older scrolling gesture to scroll down a long page is to use two fingers and swipe downwards, a movement that aligns with the direction of scrolling.

If users prefer the older system, they can definitely revert back to the older gestures, but developers who got an early preview of OS X 10.7 Lion noticed the change in scrolling behavior.

While a tablet running the full Mac OS X operating system has been a dream to many who would prefer the desktop operating system’s power to produce content, recent changes in Lion may indicate that Apple may be moving the mobile and desktop OSes closer together.

Via: 9to5 Mac

OS X 10.7 Lion Brings Tablet Scrolling Gestures to Notebooks, Desktops is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

Canonical, makers of the user-friendly Linux operating system Ubuntu, announced today that Ubuntu 10.10 would support multitouch gestures by default.

This is good news for fans of the Linux operating system who have had to work on their own solutions or third-party tools to bring the same multitouch mouse support that OSX and Windows users have enjoyed.

To pull this off Canonical is introducing uTouch, a framework for supporting multitouch mousepads. The framework will work best with mousepads that support 4 finger touch and rather than using one gesture at a time; the development team wants to enable users to string together gestures to tackle more sophisticated tasks.

Ubuntu 10.10 is set for release on October 10, 2010 or 10.10.10 as it is affectionately noted on the gestures announcement page. Ubuntu is a free operating system that will run on most notebooks and netbooks; often times alongside Windows. When released you can try out Ubuntu without installing it by downloading a Live CD image or booting from a USB drive.

Via Netbooknews

Multitouch gestures coming in Ubuntu 10.10 is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Today we had the chance to open up the new TouchMouse from Eclipse that includes gestures for websurfing as well as a scroll pad built into the middle mouse button.

First off, this mouse looks sleek, and if you’ll allow me even sexy. The brushed aluminum top and the shiny caps on the battery portion give it a really nice look and keeps what little weight there is to the back end of the mouse.

The biggest change in mousing that the Eclipse TouchMouse brings to your desk is the removal of the scrollwheel! Instead of the scrollwheel, the TouchMouse is equipped with a small trackpad that lets you scroll left-right and up-down just like you would on a laptop trackpad. When you click the trackpad you can activate a gesture.

The Eclipse TouchMouse lets you do the following gestures:

• Mouse Forward – Home Page
• Mouse Left – Previous Page
• Mouse Right – Next Page
• Mouse Backward – Internet Refresh

There doesn’t appear to be a way to reprogram the gestures at this time.

I’ve had a chance to use the mouse for about a half hour now and I’m sure I’ll have more to say in a full review or an early hands on but I am really impressed by the accuracy of the mouse and the ease of using gestures. I have been working through the gestures in Chrome and they work out great. Really handy for popping open a new home tab and clicking on one of my commonly visited sites.

Let me know if you have any questions on the TouchMouse from Eclipse and look out for a full review soon.

First Look at the Eclipse TouchMouse with Gestures is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Acer just announced the Aspire AS5738PG, their first multi-touch notebook, that will ship with Windows 7 on October 22nd. Unlike many mobile PCs that sport a touchscreen the Aspire AS5738PG doesn’t fold flat like a tablet, opting for a conventional laptop configuration. This doesn’t take away from the ability to use the touchscreen; it just changes the focus of touch technology from that of a tablet.

According to Acer, the multi-touch experience on the Aspire AS5738PGwill focus on making, “entertainment and multimedia experiences more intuitive and interactive.”

With this focus on entertainment, the new Aspire will let users;

• touch anywhere on the screen using one or two fingertips to play movies
• Zoom in and out on websites
• Edit photos and video
• Handwrite notes
• Resize windows
• Launch entertainment applications
• Use gestures like pinch, flip and swirl to zoom, navigate and browse.

For more details on what you can do with touch in Windows 7 on the Aspire AS5738PG check out this collection of touch apps.

Laptop Magazine had early access to this notebook and posted their full review of the Aspire AS5738PG including impressions of the touchscreen and the Acer Touch Portal.

While reading new messages posted to Twitter, we very much liked how we could zoom in on text to make it bigger by spreading two fingers apart, zoom out by bringing two fingers together in a pinching gesture, or scroll up/down by flicking in those directions with our index finger. When viewing images in the Photos folder, we could page through all of the pictures in the folder by swiping left or right with a single finger, which felt completely natural. In fact, after a few minutes of interacting with the 5738PG in this fashion (and after some initial trepidation), we found it superior to the mouse for navigating photos.

….

Overall, touch worked like a charm, but with our fingers constantly pressing the screen, it reclined from a 90-degree angle to approximately 45 degrees over the course of a few minutes. You’ll clearly need to keep one hand behind the screen during longer touch computing sessions to keep the LCD front and center. We also found that the display picked up fingerprints quickly.

Overall the laptop earns good marks from Laptop Magazine for including touch at an affordable price but they wish the touch experience was a little bit more “robust”.

Another interesting part of the Aspire AS5738PG, that number crunchers are sure to love, is the dedicated numeric keypad for easy number entry.

The Aspire AS5738PG will be sold at select retailers later this month and according to the press release will be available at and MSRP of $799.

Acer Aspire AS5738PG Specifications

Acer Aspire AS5738PG is Acer’s Multitouch Notebook is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.