Snow leopard-multi touch gestures

Does this include the white macbook?

Possibly. However nobody here would know for sure. you'll have to wait and see.

That appears to be the case from here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/enhancements-refinements.html

That would mean that you'll have the same 3 and 4 finger swipes as newer macs.

It's the friday 28th here in Japan, and its been confirmed by Japanese site, Gizmodo( http://www.gizmodo.jp/ ) that multi touch is NOT SUPPORTED
in black/white macbooks (and any mac that doesn't sport a multi touch trackpad introduced in 08 models).

Sorry to be the bearer of dissappointing news..I have a
black macbook and was really hoping the gestures would be
supported;(

Unfortunately, that's a physical limitation with the hardware. Those trackpads can "detect" two points of contact, but not their relative positions to each other. As such, you can get the two finger scroll, but they can't add the newer gestures to those machines. Only machines with multi-touch trackpads can use them.

Quite simply, I was mislead online and mislead in the store about the kanji input for my black MacBook.

I'll play around with it for a few days, but I'm returning Snow Leopard due to this disappointment.

That was your only reason for buying the new OS? There are many more reasons to upgrade. A big one for me is the additional HD space that I will recover using it.

JoeyR wrote:
Unfortunately, that's a physical limitation with the hardware. Those trackpads can "detect" two points of contact, but not their relative positions to each other. As such, you can get the two finger scroll, but they can't add the newer gestures to those machines. Only machines with multi-touch trackpads can use them.

I think those were a series of multi-touch trackpads where Leopard wasn't enabling them for the gestures.

I have a black Macbook bought in August 2008 and just installed Snow Leopard. I've looked through system preferences (trackpad) and nothing is mentioned about three or four finger gestures. I also thought this would be supported in older macs but it looks like that is not the case. That being said, so far it seems to be a bit speedier and it freed up 16GB of hard disk space on my machine.

I live in Japan, and electronic dictionaries are 200 bucks or more. Paying 30 bucks for this feature alone is a no-brainer, but alas, no go. For students of Japanese, yes, this feature alone at this price is reason enough. If a third-party vendor sold this, it would sell like hot-cakes.

I also thought this would be supported in older macs but it looks like that is not the case.

The older macs must be those with multi-touch, for example those announced here:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/02/26mbp.html

DaFlake wrote:
That was your only reason for buying the new OS? There are many more reasons to upgrade. A big one for me is the additional HD space that I will recover using it.

On that note, I have found that I save 5GB of space with 10.6 over 10.5.8 and that includes the fact that I installed the Rosetta option in 10.6.

Well that's pointless, I just discovered this with my MBP 2.4 bought in June 2007. The marketing for Snow Leopard was misleading in saying "older macbooks" will get multi-touch features but then only now it is clarified in this forum that they're ONLY adding four finger/three finger support in the computers that ALREADY have multi touch technology introduced in 2008. I guess Apple wants to force its customers to buy a new computer every two years.

The marketing for Snow Leopard was misleading in saying "older macbooks" will get multi-touch features

What it actually says on the web page is this: "Multi-Touch gestures in
older Mac models: All Mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads now support three- and four-finger gestures."

Personally I had no problem using Google to quickly find out what notebooks were being referred to.

In any case, you can give Apple your opinion via the feedback channels:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

I can confirm that there is no multi-touch gesture support on the trackpad of my Intel Core Duo MacBookPro1,1, which is much newer (only 3.5 years) than the original white MacBook, so East Asian language handwriting is also not possible. Fortunately for me, typing and conversion of Chinese and especially Japanese is very quick, so I don't really need the latter.

I'm not sure which version of the white MacBook you have (you'd have to check the Hardware Overview pane on your Get Info panel displayed by the System Profiler. If there was no multi-touch gesture support at all on your MacBook, there will definitely be no enablement by Snow Leopard. Apparently, people who had only 3-finger gestures on older model portables now have 4-fingure gestures made available by Snow Leopard.