Lion has only been out for a short while now, but as you’ve probably discovered, the new operating system has more gestures than a taxi driver in a hurry. We’ve swiped, swerved, and tapped our way through the new OS X's gestures, and here are the six that we just love.
Dictionary lookup has historically been available in previous versions of Mac OS X, but required you to press Command + Control + D while hovering your cursor over a word. Lion has simplified things by allowing you to simply double-tap on any word using three fingers.
Gesture navigation in Safari has been around for a while, but with Safari 5.1 for Lion, you are presented with a slick new page animation whenever you slide two fingers from the right to the left in order to go back in your browsing history. Similarly, you can slide two fingers from left to right to go forward in your browsing history. When you do this, the new pages will slide over top of the older pages in a nice, 1-to-1 animation.
Quick Look now has a new swipe gesture just like Safari that lets you swipe with two fingers from the left or to the right to navigate through the pages in a PDF, iWork or Office document, or navigate through a group of images. You can get to Quick Look by pressing the spacebar after selecting a file in Finder.
In addition, in any Quick Look dialog, you can pinch apart (using two fingers) on the trackpad to have the Quick Look file go full screen. When in full screen mode, simply use two fingers and pinch together.
Finder in Lion includes a new icon view that allows you to easily navigate through all of the files on your Mac with two different gestures. We’ll try this out in the “All My Files” section of Finder. Once there, press Command + 1 to go to the new icon view. You’ll see your icons are organized by groups into small Cover Flow-like sections.
To navigate through these items with a gesture, simply scroll up and down with two fingers to see the different groups, and then position your pointer in a group and slide two fingers left or right on the trackpad to see the different files in the sections. When you see a file you want to work with, just double tap on it.
Mission Control has taken the place of both Exposé and Spaces in Mac OS X Lion, but in the process, has gained many new gestures. To activate Mission Control, simply swipe up with four fingers on your trackpad.
Once you’re in Mission Control, you can swipe left or right with three fingers to move between the different Desktops, Spaces, or full screen applications that are currently opened. 
Hover your cursor over a group of application windows (in Mission Control, windows are grouped based on the parent application). With your cursor hovering over the windows, push up on the trackpad with two fingers. The windows for that application will enlarge and fly apart so you can see them better.
Photo Booth now allows you to slide two fingers left or right on the trackpad to navigate through the different effects panes. This especially works great in full screen, where you’re least likely to want to click around.
Mac OS X Lion comes with plenty of gestures, and these 6 are just a few that can greatly improve your daily computing tasks. Do you have another gesture that you use in Lion on a daily basis, and you couldn't live without it? Let us and other readers know in the comments below.
Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.
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July 25, 2011 at 10:46pm
Um...the dictionary look-up gesture doesn't work for me. That doesn't seem to be a default gesture.
EDIT: Oops. Apparently the gesture is not supported in Rockmelt.
