As everyone it took me some time, though not more than a day or two, to get used to natural scrolling in OS X Lion, but now I really like it. If feels natural because it feels like you put your fingers on the page and pull it upwards to scroll down, and vice versa. The same thing goes for the four finger swipe to switch between spaces and full screen applications. Hold the current space, and pull it to the left to reveal the space or application on the right.

It does not, however, work that way with the three finger gesture to go to the next or previous page, which also works as the back/next button in my browser. Visualizing the pages of a document or in your browser history as numbered pages going from left to right seems the most natural (if you read from left to right as I do). But swiping to the left brings you to the previous page, not the next. I ask you to go into mission control. Do a four-finger swipe to the left, and then a three finger swipe to the left and see what happens (you will go to the next space, and then go back to the previous space). Same direction, different result.

The trackpad gestures take little time to get used to, the direction doesn’t really matter that much because you get used to it. But because these swipe gestures are inconsistent they still causes me to make the wrong gesture. I hope those human-interface geniuses at Apple will realize this too and, most importantly, fix it.