Yesterday, we reported that in the first beta of iOS 5, Apple had removed gesturing functionality from first-gen iPad owners, making it impossible to navigate between apps on Apple’s breakout tablet with iOS 5’s four- and five-finger multitouch gestures.
Here’s the good news. You can get them back. The bad news? It takes a jailbreak to get it done.
Reader Dan Star wrote to us to tell us that as long as you’re willing to jailbreak your original iPad under iOS 5, it’s pretty trivial to restore gesturing: all you need to do is open the K848AP.plist and add this to get gesturing working perfectly:
iOS 5’s omission of gesturing for original iPad’s is one of the most puzzling aspects of the beta: is it planned software obsolescence on Apple’s part, or is it a simple bug? Clearly, the iPad 1 can handle gesturing just fine.
Anyway, give it a try and tell us how it works out for you!
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
24 responses to “Here’s How To Enable Gesturing On Your Original iPad Under iOS 5 Beta [Jailbreak Tweak]”
The additional multi touch gestures are way cool for the ipad, the pinch to home screen is quite useful but even better is the five finger up swipe to access all background apps. I signed up for a dev account and have a few UDID registration spots still open if anyone is interested. $8 iosdevaccess at gmail dot com
hey how did you open the .plist file to add “multitasking-gestures”
There are plist editors available for both Windows and Mac OS X.
Easiest way would go and get iFile, you can use it without buying it if you havnt.
It have a plist editor built it.
The plist is in /System/Library/CoreServices/Springboard.app
Hmm so you have to add the entry? Makes me thing even more that it’s just a bug.
Normally like with say multitasking or homescreen backgrounds for older devices (e.g. second gen iPod touch) the values are already in there, you just have to set them to true instead of false.
Wondering, are these the exact same that the tried in the 4.3 betas? (that you can also enable and any new jailbreak do. Just need the exact same key and a true value added.) Or have they changed anything?
I have multi-tasking gestures enabled…visible without any tweaks. The option was there straight after loading up iOS5.
What’s interesting is this iPad 2 has never been used for development before. I was previously using my iPad 1.
did this work for everyone else? not working for me.
I don’t understand. The only file I see in this directory is K48AP.plist, K848AP.plist is nowhere to be found. Am I missing something? Did anybody tried? What else is in the K848AP.plist?
This is completely wrong. You need to add
<key>multitasking-gestures</key>
<true>
to the end of the functionalities group in the K48AP.plist file. Every website I’ve read this on says it the same wrong way damnit…</true>
I can confirm this works.
It’s K48AP.plist, use PlistEdit Pro, Add a New Child : multitasking-gestures, Boolean, YES, Enyoy
i cant get it to work. i remember using this same method back when gestures first came out in like 4.3 and it worked, but now no matter how i do it, no luck.
nice, i finally got it. i used iphone explorer on my mac and copied the k48ap file to my desktop and opened it with the default mac plist editor. added new item, “multitasking-gestures”, boolean, yes value. copied the file back to the device and for some reason that’s what it took.