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MacBooks to Feature iPhone's Multi-Touch?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the don't-touch-me-there dept.

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"."

4 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I think this is just a software change! by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative
    Unless I'm being dense, none of the things you mention require multi-touch. They're just single-touch gesture detection routines. Looking at the author's website reveals that the only multi-touch support is two-finger or three-finger taps, and that this is not supported on all models.

    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!
  2. Re:What about the heat? by MsGeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. Multi-touch was hard to get right. by rolfwind · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    http://www.fingerworks.com/

    Look under news:
    http://fingerfans.dreamhosters.com/forum/viewtopic .php?t=678

  4. Re:I think this is just a software change! by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Informative

    other operating systems should be able to adopt similar features quickly! Doubtful. This is more than a case of "just software"; it's a sophisticated collaboration of hardware plus software. Apple bought a company called Fingerworks, founded by Wayne Westerman and his Ph.D. advisor based on his doctoral research[1]. They sold mouse-pad sized touchpad devices with gesture recognition as well as zero-force keyboards with integrated mousing/gesturing. These multi-touch devices effectively do low-resolution EMF imaging of the hand near the surface. No "mis-touches", the keyboard didn't generate false hits from "resting" on the surface, etc.

    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.