macOS · trackpad · app switching
Put three fingers on the trackpad and turn your wrist. A wheel of your apps appears at the pointer, the needle follows your hand, and every app clicks as you pass it. Lift your fingers and you are there.
In development. Not available for download yet.
Three moves
Your thumb stays put as the pivot, index and middle finger rest beside it. The fingers have to lie still for a moment before rotation starts counting — that catches swipes in the sieve, so the wheel stays away when you only meant to scroll.
Every 12 degrees of hand rotation moves the selection by one app and the trackpad clicks. The resting position is in the middle, so you can go both ways and the furthest app is 36 degrees of wrist away — not 180.
The chosen app comes forward, even when it is hidden or minimised. The wheel disappears. If you change your mind, run to the end of the arc and lift your hand there.
Two gestures
Two grips can summon the wheel. They differ in the number of fingers, so they never get in each other's way — both can be on at once and the app knows which one you are doing.
The thumb stands still as the pivot, index and middle finger sweep an arc around it. Physically it is the motion of turning a knob on a radio.
The hand sweeps ±16° around the thumb
The needle turns ±40°
Index and middle finger rotate about their midpoint. Longer reach, but macOS has its own rotation on the same grip.
Both fingers sweep ±20° around their midpoint
The needle turns ±50°
The thresholds were measured on one hand. If a gesture does not fit yours, the settings show live where your hand is and where the threshold sits.
Interactive demo
A simplified demo in the browser — the same selection maths, only you drag with a mouse instead of a trackpad. Drag around the centre, use the scroll wheel, or the arrow keys.
← → one position · Home End to the ends · drag or scroll for fine control
Four looks
The look changes only how the dialer appears. The number of positions, the assigned apps and the gesture stay the same — the same turn of your hand picks the same app in all four.
The right semicircle from the design handoff. A frosted band carries the icons, the centre stays clear — under the wheel you still see the document you are leaving. The app name sits on the left.
End stops
Icons all the way around, the name in the middle. Past the last app comes the first one again, always at the same step.
Wraps around
Just a thin ring, a mark at the selected app and the name in the middle. The smallest intrusion on the screen.
Wraps around
A horizontal row of icons at the pointer. No wheel at all — useful when a circle over your document gets in the way.
End stopsA drawn circle promises there is no end, so it wraps. A half arc and a row of icons show their ends, so the selection stops there and the end stop clicks differently from a normal step. The step of the hand is the same in every look.
Settings
Settings are stored in a readable JSON file, not in system preferences. It can be opened, diffed and edited by hand.
Measured, not guessed
The trackpad measures 156 × 96 mm, but the coordinates it reports run 0–1 on both axes. Computing the angle from those would mean the same turn of the hand moves the selection by one app at one wrist angle and by three at another — an error of up to 11 degrees. Mac Control Wheel converts the touches to millimetres first and computes the angle only then. It reads the sensor's size from the device, so this holds for an external Magic Trackpad too.
Rotations, swipes, pinches, scrolling and dragging are recorded as a corpus of frames and replayed through the recognizer as tests. The ranges come from there: a real rotation slides the hand across the pad by at most 1.5 mm, the lightest swipe by 2.2 mm. The threshold sits in that gap, not in the middle of guesswork.
The list of apps does not reshuffle between invocations. If the order changed, so would the movement needed to reach a given app — and the muscle memory the whole wheel exists for would have nothing to stand on.
What the app sees
Where it is