just a little update: I have finally finished my master’s thesis  and will soon continue to work on BetterTouchTool, BTT Remote, BetterSnapTool, and maybe even Secondbar

Cheers,

Andreas

• The first version of BTT Remote for iOS (iPhone , iPad, iPod Touch) is now available in the App Store! It requires Mac OS X Lion (10.7) or greater
  
  More information on http://bttremote.comPlease report anything you dislike about BTT Remote or features you want to see implemented. I want to make it the best Mac remote-control out there In order to use BTT Remote you’ll need BTT 0.9, which also includes some other new features:
• Added four finger doubletap gesture for the trackpad
• Added a cool new predefined action to trigger arbitrary menubar menu-items(Trigger menubar menu-item). You can e.g. use this to start / stop dictation, switch tabs etc..
• Added a predefined action to show the current menubar in a context menu at the current mouse position (Show menubar in contex-menu)
• Added an option to reduce the mouse cursor speed while holding specific modifier keys. (it’s in the advanced trackpad and magic mouse preferences and can also be triggered with the predefined action “Toggle mouse speed”). I’m using this to slow down my cursor while using e.g. Photoshop.
• Added an option to ignore gestures while typing on the keyboard, this can be activated in the general BTT trackpad preferences.
• Some bugfixes

I had to drop support for 32Bit Macs with the latest BetterTouchTool update (because Apple seems to have decided that it’s time to move on, and many of those cool new & shiny features are only available on 64bit). As far as I know the last Macs without 64bit support where sold until 2006 or 2007. Everything  that has a Core 2 Duo or newer does support 64bit.

Unfortunately the autoupdater I’m using doesn’t seem to be able to block 64bit updates on 32bit systems. So if you updated and now get an error when launching BTT,  you’ll have to download an older version of BTT.

 The last version that supports 32Bit can be downloaded here

The app can always be controlled with one hand, all actions etc. can be triggered with your thumb.  It’s not a trackpad / mouse replacement but rather a nice remote control for your Mac. I’m already using it a lot to e.g. open movies while lying in bed but it would also be suited for e.g. presentations or to browse the internet while your Mac is connected to a TV.

Also I’m currently adding some special features for some apps

This is the main view, here you can see all apps for which you have configured Remote Actions in BetterTouchTool. Also there are buttons on the bottom to open various views.

Tapping on a configured app brings you to the configured actions for this app. Below the app specific actions the global actions are shown.

Swiping to the right (from anywhere in the app) opens a view with some common keyboard actions (brightness is there twice for people with external monitors, so you can change the brightness of both display independently). Tapping on “Tap to use keyboard” opens the standard iPhone keyboard, which allows you to type anything you want. Also the empty bottom area of this view can be used as trackpad to move your mouse cursor and click/scroll.

Swiping to the left  (from anywhere in the app)  opens the trackpad view, it’s only purpose is to allow you to move your mouse, scroll and click.

This view opens after tapping the “Running Apps” button in the first view shown above. It shows you all GUI applications that are currently running on your Mac.

Each of those apps offers those actions:

This view opens after tapping the “Menubar” button in the first view shown above. It allows you to access the current menubar from your Mac, you can trigger all menu items even if you don’t have any explicit actions configured for an app.

This is the file browser, which allows you to open any file or app on your mac. So e.g. while lying on the couch you can open a movie (or anything else) on your iMac. The first folders it shows are your Finder favorites.

in my spare time I developed a little BTT iPhone remote. It’s not yet finished, but I think I’ll be able to release a beta in about 2 weeks. For the most part I programmed this, because I haven’t made iPhone apps for a while and I wanted to learn some of the new techniques Also my new Macbook doesn’t have an infrared receiver and I wanted to control VLC while lying in bed.

If you want to help beta-test this thing, please comment on this post, and enter your e-mail (won’t be visible to other users). I’ll invite the first 30 people to  download the iPhone app (in about 2 weeks). You’ll need iOS 5.1 or later to participate in the test.

The features of the iPhone remote are pretty basic:

• integrated trackpad, to move your mouse, scroll and click (but without multitouch gesture support for now)
• you can configure arbitrary application specific actions in BTT which will then show up in the BTT iPhone remote (all the actions and shortcuts you can use in gestures will be available for the iphone remote)
• you can launch files on your mac via the iphone (e.g. a movie)
• you can send keyboard commands from the iphone to the mac
• I think the design is nice

I know there are already many tools like this, but maybe you like the idea of having only BTT running and no extra server tools.

//Edit: so already more than 50 people want to help beta test this thing  I’m not sure if I can send the beta to all of you, but I’ll see. Due to other work I had to finish, the beta will not start until in about two weeks from now ( 08/22/2012). Comments are closed now!

in this post I’ll collect questions / bugs / etc. concerning my tools and Mountain Lion. If you have more questions please use the built in feedback reporter in BTT or comment here.

1. Why isn’t my three finger tap working properly?
   • Do you have Three Finger Dragging enabled in System Preferences => Trackpad? If so, that’s currently not very compatible with BTT In Mountain Lion the behavior of the Three Finger Drag has changed and now it produces a leftclick if you do a three finger tap. So if you want to use a custom three finger tap in BTT, you’ll have to disable three finger dragging for now. (You can use single finger double tap dragging though… Apple has hidden that feature in System Preferences => Accessibility => Mouse & Trackpad => Trackpad Options => “Enable dragging”
     For some actions it may be enough to enable “Lookup” with Three Finger Taps in your System Preferences => Trackpad.
2.  How can I map Notification Center to a BTT Gesture?
   • To map the new Notification Center to a BTT Gesture go to System Preferences => Keyboard => Keyboard Shortcuts => Mission Control (see http://d.pr/i/Hjms/5JURbpbS) . Enable the shortcut for Notification Center and assign a keyboard shortcut. You can then use this shortcut and assign it to a gesture in BTT.

I recently got some reports that BTT wasn’t working on Snow Leopard anymore. So it turns out that a very strange bug caused this on 32Bit machines. If you are running 32bit and BTT isn’t performing any gestures anymore, please try this version: http://bettertouchtool.net/btt0.784.zip

if you downloaded BTT during the last ~24 hours via http://bettertouchtool.net/BetterTouchTool.zip (not via autoupdate) then you may be asked everytime you start it, if you want to check for crashreports everytime your computer starts up. Also it may show you the preferences window everytime it restarts.
Because only ~500 people should be affected by this I won’t release an other autoupdate to fix this for now. So please redownload it from http://bettertouchtool.net/BetterTouchTool.zip , should be fixed now.

I got a few e-mails since the release of 0.78 about the window moving shortcuts not working like they did before.
In case you’ve got the same problem (the shortcuts move the window under the cursor instead the focused window) you can easily fix this yourself: go to Action Settings => Window Moving & Resizing, and check “Focused Window” there.