Laptops

Multitouch Trackpad Gestures coming to Linux, Chrome, and Other OSes

TouchPad Gesture: Pinch to zoom from Synaptics, Inc. on Vimeo.

Have you wanted multi-touch support on your notebook's touchpad, but were out of luck because you've been running Ubuntu? Synaptics announced today the extension of its Gesture Suite to several Linux operating systems, which means that you can now zoom, flick, rotate, and ChiralScroll to your heart's content on your Linux box.

Gesture Suite supports an array of multitouch gestures, including Three-finger Flick to page rapidly through documents; Two-finger Twist and PivotRotate to rotate images; PinchZoom to shrink and enlarge maps, photos, and browser text; ChiralScrolling to continuously scroll through long documents by moving your finger in a spiral; and of course linear scrolling to move up and down (or right and left) in documents.

The continuous "Chiral" scrolling motion. [Synaptics]
Gesture Suite works with Ubuntu, Chrome, Fedora, SuSE, Xandros, Millos Linpus, and RedFlag, and can be used with a variety of touchpad sizes, ranging from the smallest netbooks to larger notebook PCs. Gesture Suite is free... well, it will be: it'll be bundled for free with notebooks that have a Synaptics TouchPad or ClickPad.

To learn more about Gesture Suite Linux and watch some fun scrolling videos, visit the Synaptics Web site. Do you use Gesture Suite on your PC? What are your favorite gestures? Let us know in the comments!

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