'ExtraMagic' for Magic Trackpad: 3/4 Finger Gestures & More - Now in Windows!

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

Hi All,

I've joined the efforts with a few other geeks in order to present what can be considered the world's first 3+ finger input enabler for Magic Trackpad on Windows platform. Please meet the ExtraMagic project.

As of February 2015, the ExtraMagic sofware is capable of handling the following trackpad gestures in Windows 7/8:
- 3 finger drag, 3 finger tap, 3 finger horizontal and vertical swipes.
- 4 finger tap, 4 finger horizontal and vertical swipes.
These ExtraMagic gestures are highly configurable. In fact, now you can get more customizations in Windows than there are in OS X.

Few more important notes: as of end of February (2015), the project is at the BETA testing stage. All of the modern (2009+) Macs running Windows via Boot Camp should be supported, but, as of today, PC support is limited. Basically, your Bluetooth adapter shall be officially Mac-compatible (use one the Broadcom chipsets found in the modern Macs). So far two such USB Bluetooth dongles, Belkin F8T016 and F8T065 have been tested, and found fully compatible. On the other hand, most of the PC motherboards might come with incompatible internal Bluetooth radios.

More features and gestures are coming, but the first goal is to finish the BETA testing. As of around March 2015, there might be some bugs under the hood. But we can tell, all is working for us right now, so for as long as the Bluetooth adapter is compatible, everything should work for you, either. The incompatible Bluetooth radios, such as some Atheros chips (say, in Asus motherboards) might not even allow you to touch the trackpad with 3 fingers. What I mean, even with the pure stock Boot Camp drivers, the Magic Trackpad input will freeze for several seconds after simply touching the trackpad with 3 fingers. That's the obvious incompatibility, and of course the Extramagic would be unable to detect the gestures if such Bluetooth adapter is used.

If you want to help us to test the BETA version (ExtraMagic v0.9b) please visit http://extramagic.forbootcamp.org/download.htm
Known issue in v0.9b: sometimes you'll need to re-run Step 2 of the installer twice to get the gestures working.

Your feedback is much, much appreciated. Including the critics. So please do not hesitate to post

 

[AMeyer8000]

DAS IST FANTASTISCH! You made my day with your Extra magic! Gestures and three finger dragging work great for me even on the Windows 10 technical preview! The only missing gesture is pinch zoom with two fingers? Is it intended to work? But anyway thank you for making this possible!
Your fan already,
Arno

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@AMeyer8000: Thank you very much for providing the feedback. Pinch-to-Zoom has been coded, but so far we have been unable to stabilize this gesture. Only the reliable 3/4 Finger gestures are included in the current version. But I'm glad to announce: this and more of the Extra Magic for your Magic Trackpad (i.e., new gestures and features ) are coming this year.

@ALL: Just in case - a new build is out (Extramagic 1.0b). So far all of the feedback is good, both from the people who use Windows on a Mac (Boot Camp), and from the PC users (but of course, only from the people who have the compatible Bluetooth adapter for their PC - please see my first post).

 

[adune]

Just to clarify, does this only work with the bluetooth trackpads? Would this driver work on my mid-2014 MacBook Pro and it's touchpad? I have heard about Trackpad++ having similar functionality in Boot Camp, but their website seems to have gone and stayed down for a while now.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@adune: Extramagic is a multitouch driver solution available only for Apple wireless Magic Trackpad paired with Mac running Windows (or with PC that got a compatible Bluetooth radio - see my first post). Whereas Trackpad++ alternate drivers are only for Apple Macbook Air/Pro built-in trackpads. This project had migrated to a better hosting, the site should be available now.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@ALL: An initial testing phase is finished. Today the stable version, Extramagic v1.1 has been released.
The only known issue is, in rare cases the installation Step 2 might require to be run again in order to really enable the gestures. Unfortunately so far we have been unable to find the reason why the installation sometimes requires to be run again. On the other hand, such workaround is documented, and is simple, and no other known issues persist in Extramagic software itself, so we decided to finish the testing and concentrate on the development again.

P.S. Special thanks to all of the people who helped to test!
P.P.S. Dear All, could you consider posting some feedback there, not just send via email. Thank You

 

[basvdelsen]

Hello,

It took a while but it finally all works on my Asus G750JX Windows 8.1 with original bluetooth, no dongle. Here's what I had to do.

1. I had to disable Secure Boot Control.

2. Then I had to enter in Admin command prompt:
bcdedit.exe -set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit.exe -set TESTSIGNING ON

3. Restart and installed extramagic twice.

4. After that, it did work but then I had a test watermark which I tried to remove with the suggested app but it didn't seem to work even after restarting.

5. Then I tried to turn Secure Boot Control back on to see if it would still work, but after that I got the same "Can't communicate with driver" error again so had to reinstall twice again after disabling it again.

6. Then everything worked and the watermark was gone as well.

Here's some other things I noticed

1. After installing extramagic the "Always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar" gets turned on, but I can simply turn it off.

2. The 3 finger drag only seems to have a delay when dragging the extramagic settings window. All other things have no delay so far.

3. Scrolling is okay but it's not "smooth scrolling"


BTW what does "Respect Focus when Sending Scroll" do?

Thanks for the great driver!

 

[basvdelsen]

I just found that selecting text with the 3 finger drag has a delay. Is that just me?

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@basvdelsen: Thank you for the feedback. 3-finger drag, as implemented in Extramagic, has a small delay on purpose, to make it technically possible to drag any distance without dropping the object. However, we knew some people might not like this feature, so the delay can be easily removed via Extramagic Settings utility, please check the option accented on a screenshot: http://trackpadextramagic.com/Remove3FDragDelay.png

About the Respect Focus option: it determines whether the scroll will go to a focused window or control (Windows 8.1 default behavior), or to the one under the mouse pointer (regardless of the focus state, i.e. OS X-like behavior).

Note: for Macs in Boot Camp there is 100% NO need to make any of the manual terminal commands you mentioned. But what I can confirm, rerunning the Step 2 of the Extramagic installer might be needed after the first install (as already mentioned in the posts above).

 

[basvdelsen]

@V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r

I did have that option checked but I still got a delay, but today the delay seems to be gone.

Last night I also had a problem with overall responsiveness, after a few hours of use it would respond very badly and only would turn back to normal after restarting. I've had that happen twice so far. Today not yet. If it happens again I'll get a dongle to see if that fixes it.

I have a request for an extra feature that would allow people to use the trackpad upsidedown. Inverted axis and inverted physical clicks.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@basvdelsen: Thank you, it's a very interesting suggestion.

@ALL: Extramagic is made for all modern 'Boot Camped' Macs running Windows 7/8/10. Plus, as indicated in the first post, there is a PC Bluetooth adapters compatibility, but it might be limited to Mac-compatible Bluetooth chips. Would be very cool if the happy Extramagic (PC) users leave some feedback there (or via contact email), specifying the Bluetooth adapter, so that we could add each specific adapter to the list of supported PC Bluetooth solutions. Thank You. And of course, Boot Camp users feedback is also much appreciated

 

[basvdelsen]

I just tried a new belkin F8T065 dongle, one of the recommended ones. I was hoping it would improve performance, but it actually made it way worse. 3 finger dragging stops dragging after half an inch of movement which renders it useless. With my laptops bluetooth (qualcomm atheros ar9485wb-eg wireless network adapter) it's laggy sometimes but at least I can drag with it but it's not good enough for photoshop work or smoothly selecting text. Also having to keep installing the driver over and over is really annoying. I actually bought a logitech T650 yesterday in hope it would be better and yeah, scrolling is way smoother and to be able to use one finger drag without delay is nice but when I put the Logitech on the same pointer speed as the trackpad which is the fastest speed the Magic trackpad is way smoother in pointer movement. So I'm not happy with either. Really hoping this driver is going to get better. For now I might just return both of them and get a mouse until there's significant improvement in this driver or there's a new touchpad for windows that's as smooth as the trackpad.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@basvdelsen: Thank you, this is a valuable information.

On Macs in Boot Camp, Extramagic allows dragging with 3 fingers really smoothly, without any issues.

After your report, we performed new experiments with PC and Belkin Bluetooth. The results: one of our PCs allowed smooth 3 finger drag operation, but with other PC's USB ports the similar behavior has been reproduced! It appears that adaptive power management of the USB port, and the port version may affect ('jitter') the flow of the data streaming via Bluetooth. PC USB Bluetooth behavior can improve if other 2.4 Ghz radio sources around are not active and the USB port has stable power. And, just to restate, Macs internal Bluetooth seem to have no such issues.

 

[basvdelsen]

So you fixed this issue completely with the dongle?

How do I fix it? I can't see those options in the power options.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@basvdelsen: I'm not 100% sure what exactly is the reason. The same USB Bluetooth dongle works much better being plugged into one PC's USB 3.0 port, than into other PC's USB 3.0 port, that's what we observed. Investigation is in progress.

 

[jmeche3]

I am using the IOGear GBU 521 Bluetooth dongle on a Dell machine. I can confirm that all of the two finger functions work, but none of the 3-4 finger functions work at all. the pointer sits still when I perform the gesture but nothing happens.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@jmeche3: Thank you very much for reporting. If running the second step of the Extramagic installer one more time does not help, then this might be some sort of adapter incompatibility. We'll add this one to the list of incompatible USB Bluetooth solutions.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@ALL: A new beta build of the next version of Extramagic (1.2) is ready. In parallel, version 1.1 is still available from the website of the project.

Changes and improvements in the test version 1.2:

- Should be no occasional delay when dragging with 3 fingers, even if third-party PC USB Bluetooth dongle is used (we optimized buffering of the realtime data flow as much as possible, but again, some PC Bluetooth solutions might be incompatible - see my first post).

- When installed on the Windows 10 Technical Preview, the new Windows 10 gestures are available! They are named 'Task View' and 'Previous Desktop' / 'Next Desktop' in the list of Extramagic gestures. I recommend choosing 3 or 4 fingers up gesture to toggle the Task View, and 4 finger horizontal swipe for desktops switching.

- High DPI optimizations for Boot Camp and other minor fixes

You can get this build at http://www.trackpadextramagic.com/Extramagic_Setup_v12_BETA_Apr_21_2015.exe

As always, the feedback is much appreciated.

UPDATE (04/21): beta build has been updated today. The download link right above now points to this latest beta build of Extramagic. In this version Windows 10 Notifications Center toggle gesture has become available. So in total, with Magic Trackpad and Extramagic you should now be able to toggle Task View, switch desktops, and toggle the Notifications Center with the gesture of your choice. Tested with Windows 10 Technical Preview build 10049.

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@ALL: Version 1.2 has been released. All of the features and improvements of the beta version are incorporated in this new stable version of Extramagic.

 

[gt9430a]

Wow glad to find this thread. I've recently been looking into trackpads (for Windows) and got the Logitech T650, which mostly works, but has a serious lack of customization, like most Logitech products I've had in the past. I'm going to buy an Apple trackpad to test if this works with a cheap Panda BT 4 Nano adapter I got off Amazon (http://smile.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00BCU4TZE), but will let you know. Keep up the great work Vladimir!

 

[V-l-a-d-i-m-i-r]

@gt9430a: Thank you. About adapter you mentioned - now it appears not all Bluetooth 4.0 solutions work properly with Magic Trackpad (no matter with or without Extramagic software). For example, Grand-X Bluetooth 4.0 adapter is listed as OS X compatible, but I was unable to get it to work in Windows with Magic Trackpad. At least if it's very cheap, the risk is minimal

 

[gt9430a]

Thanks Vladimir - i got the trackpad and just tested it out - the Panda BT connector works great! I like how you can assign the pre-defined actions to different gestures, and the 3-finger drag is awesome, since the difficulty of text highlighting (for copy/paste) is a major issue for me with the T650. The only things that I can think of as far as wishlist would be:

1) smoother scrolling in browsers (tested in IE 11 and Chrome). Logitech achieved this through extensions - Logitech Smooth Scrolling in Chrome and Logitech Setpoint in IE. I have no idea how these extensions work, but they must be necessary
2) the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to different gestures (i.e. either increase dropdowns to include things like maximize/snap app to left or switch to the next Chrome tab, or better yet to allow for the equivalent user-input shortcuts like Win-Left, or Ctrl-PgDown, etc.)
3) five-finger support? I'm assuming that this isn't possible, but it would be incredible to add given the 3-finger drag compromise of losing swipes and taps. If you were able to add this, then adding more shortcuts, or the user-defined shortcuts would be even more useful

I think that if you're able to add any of these wishlist items (especially #1), you'll have an even more awesome product and far and away the best trackpad solution available on Windows. Fantastic job man, rock on!

 

[danzelnz]

I'm trying to get this going with a Azio BTD-V401 Bluetooth adapter, but I'm not having any luck.

http://www.aziocorp.com/en/products/30-usb-micro-bluetooth-adapter-v40-edr-aptx-btd-v401.html

On every reboot I get "Cannot communicate with Extramagic driver!".
I've redone step 2 a few times.
"Test Mode" appears at the bottom right of my screen.
Windows 8.1 64bit.

The Bluetooth dongle has apt-x support, which you need to install the CSR bluetooth stack to get working. Could this be interfering?

Any troubleshooting tips? Or should I look for another bluetooth adapter?
Will try remove the CSR bluetooth stack now.
Thanks!

 

[danzelnz]

In answer to myself, removing the CSR bluetooth stack got this working, awesome

Feature request:
I would like to use this to switch desktops (I use dexpot to get multiple desktops).
Dexpot allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to switch them, so custom keyboard shortcuts in response to a gesture would work.

I've made it run AutoHotKey scripts which send the keys for now

 

[gt9430a]

@danzelnz: Are you saying that AutoHotKey can tie a keyboard shortcut to a mouse gesture (recognized in AutoHotKey)? Do you have an example? Just curious how it is on performance, since this sounds like a good solution.

Thanks