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Original MacBook Air Hacked to Use Four Finger Gestures 17 November 2008 at 5:35 am by admin

four-fingers.jpg

The new four-finger trackpad gestures found on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro could be coming to older Mac notebooks, too. A curious (and jealous) member of Mac Rumors – michaelb – was so envious of the four-finger gestures his girlfriend was enjoying on her new MacBook that he stole the installation disk and popped it into his first-gen MacBook Air.

Because the installer discs that Apple ships with its computers are ror restoration purposes only, you can’t use it for a fresh install on other machines. However, there are ways and means, and michealb ended up with the new system on his old machine.

But it didn’t work. Michael had to do some rummaging deep in the system to make it recognise his trackpad, and then up popped the new options right there in the System Preferences. Michael now enjoys the same four-fingered fun as his girlfriend.

Now, reinstalling the entire system to grab a new feature is a little extreme, but this proves that the older trackpads are capable of the new multi touch goodness — this should also work for MacBook Pros. We have our hopes that Apple will bake this into the next OS X software update (10.5.6). I took a new unibody MacBook for a test run in the store last wek and the four finger gestures, which invoke Show Desktop and Exposé behaviour, are great.

Old MBP. Do we get the 4 finger swipe as well??? [MacRumors Forum]

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+ iTuny Adds iTunes Controls to Launchy [Featured Windows Download] By admin 30 September 2008 at 2:00 pm and have No Comments

Windows only: iTuny is a free plug-in for popular application launcher Launchy that controls music playback and so much more. Once installed, iTuny adds several actions to Launchy that allow you to play, pause, stop, or advance playback, which alone is a nice start. iTuny doesn’t stop there, though; you can also rate songs, show track info, set the volume, search your library, create new playlists, display album art, post to Twitter, and more. iTuny also integrates with previously mentioned Snarl to display notifications when you invoke iTuny commands via Launchy. The installation and setup are a little confusing, so keep reading for a closer look at how it works.

First, to install iTuny, run iTunes Control.exe from the unzipped download (I grabbed the latest version from this post). You’re given the option to choose where iTuny installs (though the installer doesn’t exactly explained that to you); I chose Launchy Utilities for both location options.

Once you’ve done that, iTuny is officially installed and ready to go. However, if you want to use some of the advanced features—like Snarl or Twitter support—you need to run the iTuny config. To do so, just invoke the iTunes Config command in Launchy.

To enable Snarl support, just tick the Snarl checkbox. If you want to post to Twitter or Pownce—which updates with a “Listening: Song - Artist (Album)” message—just enter your username and password for the service of your choice.

iTuny may be a touch confusing to get up and running (be sure to take a look at the README that comes with the download to get a better understanding of what commands are at your disposal), but if you’re a Launchy lover and iTunes is your default music player, the iTuny plug-in is a must have.