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MacBooks to Feature iPhone's Multi-Touch?
Gadgets Lover writes "According to CrunchGear's 'trusted source' that the upcoming MacBooks which are expected to be released around October will support the iPhone's multi-touch technology built into their touchpads.
The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook's files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone. (Yes, I know you can already scroll with them, that's nothing new. I'm talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone's screen)
On June 20th, CrunchGear reported, "The upcoming MacBooks will be about half the thickness of current models (which would be quite the feat) and they'll be made from new plastics/materials"."
It's not clear from his site which models *do* implement true multi-touch, or even whether what he has done requires it. It could be a timing-related kludge if all it supports is taps and not drags. (ie: if I get 2 or 3 clicks within 5 ms, I'll assume the user did those simultaneously and send event X not event Y)
The multi-touch touchpads on a Macbook(Pro) can scroll any window that has the mouse within its borders by:
- pressing one finger onto the touchpad
- *simultaneously* dragging a second finger up and down.
That's multi-touch. And there's no reason why window-resizing or other manipulation couldn't be done...Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Winbook, ( an old crappy PII laptop) had a Synaptics application called MoodPad that showed all the pressure points, and you could actually FINGER PAINT on the thing. Gestures is only a blink of an eye away.
Have you looked at servicing a MacBook? Flip it over pop out the battery and its just two screws keeping you from sliding out both the hard drive and replacing ram. Takes about 30 seconds.
Why can't Apple do the same
They did. To replace the HD in a MacBook, you take out the battery, remove a panel and the HD slides out. I wish they'd done that on the Pro too...
The Mac version of the BSoD is the Transparent Multilingual Screen of Doom. Another word for it might be familiar to Linux/*BSD/Solaris/xNIX users: Kernel Panic.
I have only had ONE on any Mac running Mac OS X. That was because I had the buggy version of the WiFi driver (fixed now) and I hit a WiFi access point that was malfunctioning.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
If you have the first version of the MacBook, you can't really do much other than software hacks and keeping your MacBook on a cooler pad to keep it cool. The Core 2 Duo was a major improvement heat-wise...it actually *is* a laptop rather than a lap cooker.
The MacBook Pro also has LED backlighting rather than fluorescent backlighting. This is very significant in that the backlight becomes pretty much immortal...it will last as long as the computer does. With fluorescents, eventually you have to replace the fluorescent tube, which is a pain. I'm sure that eventually the MacBook will get it, but not just yet.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Several years back, Apple bought up a company that made multitouch keyboards and pads and employed the two professors who made it. It's not just software, the hardware is fundamentally different than single touch.
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http://www.fingerworks.com/
Look under news:
http://fingerfans.dreamhosters.com/forum/viewtopi
Fingerworks vanished off the face of the internet a couple of years back. Apple quietly bought the company, its patents, and and the key researchers and engineers. Since then, they've been puting the Apple shine on their technology since then. Much to the likely delight of the "Fingerfans" the iPhone is the first product to ship with this technology since Fingerworks' was bought.
It *might* be possible to hack something together with a synaptics pad, but the hardware itself is likely deficient to do full-on multitouch. See section 1.3 of Westerman's thesis, linked below, esp. the pre-Fingerworks prototype hardware "producing a 50 frames per second (fps) stream of proximity images." I note that the Fingerworks devices connected via USB, but had on-device processing and firmware notably richer than what's in a simple touchpad. That alone may spell death to attempts at pure host-side multitouch with a "dumb" touchpad.
[1] PDF: Hand Tracking, Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface.
Not likely, that would almost certainly make the macbooks thicker as well as waste a lot of space them. Motherboards in laptops can't get a whole lot thinner than they currently so you're going to be adding on maybe a little less than a centimeter of thickness to the lid and moving the motherboard to the lid isn't going to make the base any thinner, because it still needs to fit the hard drive and optical drive. Plus, setting it up like that would basically leave a bunch of open space in the top and bottom parts of the laptop.
I suppose they could move the hard drive and optical drive up to the lid with the motherboard and leave only the keyboard/touchpad on the bottom half, but that would make it awfully top-heavy, almost assuring that it would flip over when you used it.
So no, I really can't imagine that they would ever do that.
Keep at it. Most typing mistakes, if you ignore them and move on, are automatically corrected, so if you just type out whatever word you wanted iPhone does a decent job of guessing.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
USB was going nowhere until the iMac came out with only a USB connection for mouse/keyboard/floppy. I don't even remember any x86 motherboards where the USB wasn't just some random jumpers and an optional cable that had the regular connectors on an expanstion slot cover (so you had to give-up a PCI/AGP/ISA expansion slot to use the 'on-board' USB. Apple made USB and the mouse prominent technologies for consumer personal computers, and now they appear to be trying to repeat that for multi-touch, which was invented by other people, just like USB and mice.
I've still got a FingerWorks keyboard in my Powerbook Ti - it was a drop-in replacement, and it rocks. I really love the fact you don't have to move your fingers off the keyboard to move the mouse (and that they offered a native Dvorak layout). I'd spend the night on Apple's front doorstep to be first in line to get a new Powerbook with an integrated Dvorak Fingerworks keyboard - but I'm not holding my breath. If they build it into the display, though - you still have to take your hands off the keyboard. Multi Touch does make playing games a challenge - where a 'normal' keyboard will detect two key presses independently (arrow up/arrow right moves diagonally), the FingerWorks sees one 'multitouch', so you have to define distinct functions for every required combination - although a seperate controller is the obvious solution for that.