Rhino and Apple Magic Trackpad Opinions?

Rhino Mac Hardware
1

are there any Magic Trackpad Gurus out there using it for Rhino/CAD 3d and swearing by it? does working in Rhino feel good, anything you would like to have changed improved? in case of completely replacing the mouse, is there anything you miss or feel is now better?
do gestures work, can you set up shortcuts with/for it?

just to be clear and i am talking about the external Trackpad that you place next to your keyboard, not the one built in obviously, i am not sure what the mechanical technical difference are, but i heard that the external one is not as good as the built in from the laptops.

i am considering buying one to replace or even to amend the mouse and would love some opinions.

2

TrackPad works better with Rhino Mac than any other 3D software. It is incredible.
Perfect solution when on the go.

External MagicTrackpad works exactly the same as the built in one.

The only issue I have is this old one:

That being said I am still faster with the mouse.

My current workflow is (I think barely anyone would do it): MX3 Mouse on the right, external Magic trackpad on the left (prefer the scrolling on the trackpad and also like the thought of training my left hand)

Hope this helps, let me know if you have any specific questions

1 Like
3

If you use other 3D software, beware.

The trackpad is awesome in Rhino for navigation (two-finger orbit, pinch zooms to cursor)

in other software (at least Fusion), pinch just zooms to center and you have to use a modifier key to orbit.

I have to use a mouse because I use Fusion for CAM. If the other softwares would copy Rhino in this regard, I’d have no problems at all with using a Trackpad instead of a mouse.

there’s a person in my shop who uses both a mouse and a trackpad.. I’ve almost gone that route on a few occasions but I keep holding off. I don’t really want both of those things on my desk

1 Like
4

thank you both for the quick response here. i now have experimented with 4 Rhino Versions and 3 built in trackpads of 3 different Macbooks.

in Mac Rhino V5, rotating the viewport using two fingers feels direct and fast i would say its really usable there but v5 came from an entire different stable.

in V7 the trackpad is simply unusably slow for rotating the viewport, everythng else works pretty ok. for some reason rotating is so slow that i have to make a marathon to get to swivel around an object with no options to change the settings afaict and all the settings are at its highest in the system settings already.

in V8 and v9 it feels even worse, due to the added acceleration but also the annoying inertia setting which one can at least turn off, still in total it is just not controllable enough. or am i doing something wrong?

one more tiny but very important thing. the gestures dont work properly when in conjunction with _MaxViewport for instance. here i use the middle mouse button usually, and there it works so that once you have the pointer on a chosen viewport you can middle mouse click to activate it, no prior clicking needed, the same should work for gestures, once the pointer hovers over a viewport the gesture to actiave MaxViewport should already work, having to click additionally when that is what you do a lot is very bothersome.

Also what would be needed of course are configuration options like 2,3 and 4 finger tap for instance, right now there are only swipe options in the Rhino settings.

i saw @dan replying to some of the requests that came in the past several years, unfortunately the counterparts were not very eager to follow up so this “project” is rather very stagnant. I really would like to give it another try at some point, maybe theses issues could be fixed?

but for now i must conclude that i will not even buy an external Magic Trackpad though i had all the wills to do so for other apps, its basically not a good tool to work fast at all, even as an amendment to the mouse on the left side of the keyboard as a kind of space mouse alternative it does not work well in its current implementation.