Zooming in and out on Mac

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Kevin Antcliff

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Jan 25, 2012, 2:32:38 PM1/25/12
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I have not been able to figure out how to zoom in and out on a Mac.

Rob McDonald

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Jan 25, 2012, 3:20:06 PM1/25/12
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If you have a two-button mouse, you can press both buttons at the same
time to emulate the middle button.

I do not have a way to do it yet with a single-button mouse or just a trackpad.

We should be able to modify VSP to accept a key-click combination.
For example, perhaps control-left click will do zoom. I have not
looked into doing this yet.

Rob

Jay Gokhale

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:23:38 PM4/10/13
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Mac trackpads can take far more complicated inputs than a simple three button mouse so this 
should not only be possible to implement, it should be more intuitive that mouse controls. 

Rob McDonald

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Apr 10, 2013, 3:45:27 PM4/10/13
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Jay,

Welcome to VSP. At some point between Jan 2012 and now, we have added
key-click combinations for 3D control to VSP. If you go to the 'Help'
menu and then 'Key and Mouse Commands...', you'll find a description
of all the options.

I did add one gesture-based motion. A two-finger click and drag to
translate the model. Unfortunately, this seems to have stopped
working in Mountain Lion.

Although MacOS supports lots of different gesture combinations with
the trackpad, they are handled in a non-standard way. Consequently,
the GUI toolkit we use (FLTK) does not have support for most of them.

The two-finger scroll was passed through by MacOS as a scroll wheel so
that it would seamlessly work with legacy applications written for
scrollwheels but not trackpads.

Until Windows, MacOS, and Linux standardize on the set of gestures
they support -- or cross-platform libraries like FLTK provide a
consistent set of gestures across OSs, it will be hard to justify VSP
developer time to develop and maintain low-level touch/gesture support
for all the platforms. The same obstacle prevents us from supporting
other cool 3D input devices like those from 3Dconnexion.

The potential for trackpad or touch-based interfaces is very real.
Two or three-finger drag to translate would be intuitive. Pinch to
zoom would be potentially good as well. I do not think that
two-finger rotate would do much for 3D rotation -- at least the way it
is implemented for things like Google Maps. However, it may be
possible to have the two fingers simulate grabbing a virtual sphere
and rotating it in 3D space.

Rob
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