the onda

I am skeptical of people who claim to want touchscreen laptops for the simple reason that I detest smudgy screens and thus can't see myself ever wanting to dirty up my laptop.

That said, I find the new extra large trackpads on the aluminum Macbook Pros to be the single most upgrade worthy feature in the laptops. Along with Apple's new Magic Mouse, they really do represent a new kind of human interface peripheral.

Except that for the last few months, my three and four finger gestures have completely stopped working. I know it may sound like overkill to anyone from the Wintel side of the house, who is used to at most the two finger trackpad scroll, but 3 fingers to navigate forwards/backwards (this is mapped to 2 fingers on the magic mouse) and 4 fingers to toggle Exposé (a desktop-clearing UI thing) become incredibly useful to anyone who has bothered to train themselves to use them. Trust me.

In case you are among those Mac users afflicted by the trackpad gimping software upgrade that took away my 3/4 finger gestures, here is the solution:

1. Run Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) and click the "Repair permissions" button.
2. Reboot your Mac. Before it starts its reboot sequence hold down command-S (also known as Apple-S) to boot into single user mode. When you get a prompt, type in:

fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk0s2s 

I have no idea how disk permissions can affect the trackpad/mouse driver, but after some Googling and experimentation, I discovered that this fix did the trick for me.