four finger swipes on magic trackpad, lion, not working

I'm experiencing the same exact problem - 4 finger swipe left and right doesn't work on the magic trackpad. 4 finger swipe up and down works, and 4 finger swipe left and right works on my macbook pro, so it music be a lion bug. Switching to 3 finger swipe for switching between full-screen apps fixes this.

I had the same problem after I played with "gestures settings" in system settings.

I tried, as suggested elsewhere, to switch to three finger, verify that this worked, then switch again to four fingers. It started working again as it should.

Wow, I had the exact same issue as described above: Just unpacked my new magic trackpad and everything worked BUT the 4 finger swipes left and right.

Setting them to 3 fingers, then back, and then of course re-enabling 3 finger drag, did the trick.

Now, finally, the magic trackpad behaves exactly as the built-in trackpad of my MacBook Pro.

@Apple: Please fix this bug? :-)

Hate to sound like "me too" but this also happened to me so apparently this is an issue with either Lion or the trackpad. I was wondering if anyone experienced what I did:

All of a sudden the magic trackpad would not respond to a single one finger tap. Two finger tap configured as secondary click worked fine, so did other gestures. Fortunately I had a wired mighty mouse laying around so I plugged it in and was able to actually do something. I went to the trackpad settings and played around and then noticed that it was working again. I don't know if the act of plugging the mouse in sorted things out but then I decided since it was working to change the settings to match my macbooks as others did, with three finger drag and four finger to switch workspaces. Four fingers did not work for anything so I then rebooted. When it came back up it still did not work so I switched it back and decided to Google it to see if others had experienced the same behavior. I tried the suggestion from Oliver (thanks Oliver) and that appears to have worked, four finger gestures work as expected.

Really odd, this isn't the first bug I've come across since Lion was released. I suspect a Lion issue since if it was hardware related fiddling with the settings shouldn't have an effect, but of course I could be wrong. I'm going to open an issue with Apple support.

My guess is that the problem relates to switching 3-finger-drag-ON which in some cases has "side-effect" in forcing 3-finger to 4-finger-swipe gestures in the "more gestures" section. They are:

- swipe between full-screen apps

- mission control

- app expose

With 3-finger-drag-OFF, then toggling the above gestures to confirm they work with 4-fingers, then switching 3-finger-drag-ON, I find I get all the expected gesture behaviours as I have them set.

The "side-effect" automatically forcing 3-to-4 finger gestures may not be always doing what is intended.

I couldn't recreate the broken behaviour to test & confirm.

See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3199221?answerId=15726579022#15726579022

sgordon46 wrote:

See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3199221?answerId=15726579022#15726579022

It's not possible to *star* Richard's comment in that discussion, as helpful. Gave it a thumb-up.

The marked "correct answer" doesn't adequately detail the steps.^†

† Re: My Magic Trackpad won't do all the Lion gestures.

jemalave wrote:

I went into preferences and unchecked all the gestures boxes then Ichecked them all again and everything worked fine.

Same problem for me.

When I checked 3 fingers it worked then rechecked 4 fingers and it worked again.

It worked for me, thanks for that.

worked for me 🙂

worked for me as well

This also occurred to me after I enabled 3-finger drag. As suggested by ikkyusan, I did the following:

1. In System Preferences, change Mission Control to 3-finger gesture, activate Mission Control with 3 fingers, then change Mission Control to use 4-finger gesture, activate Mission Control again with 4 fingers.
2. Go to the Point & Click tab, enable 3-finger drag again.

Everything works now.

Had the same problem with Mountain Lion and this fixed it. Thanks!

This thread solved my "me too" problem with the four finger swipe side to side. Setting all to off and then back on seemed to work. I did notice that one of my settings for the mission control may have been conflicting, but switching it from 4 to 3 and back again makes it work great!. Now finally the Magic Track Pad matches the built in.

I can confirm that this also works on OS X Mavericks