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Preview of Synaptics's Next Generation Input Devices
crookedvulture writes "Next year, Synaptics's ForcePad will bring pressure sensitivity to touchpads. It can track five fingers independently, each with up to a kilogram of effective force in precise 15-gram increments. This look at Synaptics' next-gen input tech goes hands-on with with ForcePad, among other new PC inputs. The ultra-slim ThinTouch keyboard, recently acquired through the purchase of Pacinian, combines secretive switches with a side order of capacitive touch. And then there's the latest in touchscreens, the ClearPad Series 4, which purportedly cuts tracking latency by 70%. That's captured on high-speed camera at 240 frames per second."
To preempt all the pedants: By "kilogram" they probably mean 9.8 newtons, which is the gravitational force exerted on one kilogram at sea level.
So "click harder" will be a valid solution, now, so that the computer can finally understand urgency. Great!
... isn't apt-get good enough?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
So "click harder" will be a valid solution, now, so that the computer can finally understand urgency.
How long until someone makes a window manager that allows pressure to control the priority of a window's process?
apt-get is good if you already know the name of the package that adds support for a given laptop computer model's pressure-sensitive trackpad, such as if you're following a tutorial. If you're trying to search for a package, on the other hand, you need an interface that makes search easier.
The article mentions a touch sensitive space bar:
In addition to smarter touchpad management, the capacitive sensors can be used for other functions. A concept video suggested that swiping one's fingers across the spacebar could be part of an auto-complete typing scheme. Auto-complete seems entirely unnecessary for a proper keyboard, unless you're a hopeless hunt-and-peck type, but the spacebar does seem ripe for thumb flicks or pinch gestures. I'd love to be able to move the cursor left and right by sliding my thumbs across the spacebar, for example. Switching between applications by waving one's hand left and right over the keyboard would be pretty cool, too.
Does anyone really think that would work well? I already disable the touchpad on my touchpoint (i.e. little red eraser tipped joystick) keyboard since stray touches on the touchpad cause phantom cursor movements, would a "smart" spacebar be useful?
But your Honor! I wasn't applying unreasonable force when I bashed the perp's head with a 10kg dumbbell! I was merely applying unreasonable weight!
Whats that in Midiclorians
So from what I'm reading, there's no travel at all? Makes me wonder about injuries from "clicking" with no tactile feedback. The article mentions enabling an audible cue, but I don't know if it's quite the same as *feeling* a pad click. Unless the expectation is to be using tap-to-click instead, which I personally don't like. I tend to keep a fairly light touch on my track pads and wind up accidentally clicking all over the place if I don't disable it.
Sorry but nothing will make me use a touchpad (or a touchscreen for that matter). They can coat it with leprechaun dust and ground up unicorn horns and rub it with Cheetah blood and I'll still beat it 3:1 on speed and practically limitlessness on accuracy with a mouse. If you don't believe me, run a high speed shooting gallery app. I think my record is 9 per second with a mouse. With a touchpad, maybe 1 every 5 seconds. It does have to pop up a target underneath the cursor at some point, lol.
What's the point? Most OEMs cheap out on licensing the full Synaptic feature set anyway, so you don't get full multi-touch support on that Dell, even though the hardware supports it.
Instead of possible recovery strategies we should have pounced on your idea 2 years ago!
Say a small group of slashdotters sit down and dream up how we want gnome3 to be and listed those features somewhere private. Then, we try to come up with the opposite of those features, and submit them like crazy to the gnome design community.
Thus, all of the "features" and "changes" we asked for would not get implemented, leaving at least some of the stuff we wanted to be "dreamed up" by the gnome designers, thinking they know what's best for us like always.
Say a small group of slashdotters sit down and dream up how we want gnome3 to be and listed those features somewhere private. Then, we try to come up with the opposite of those featuDX
But someone have that, the roadmap and goals for GNOME3; this work is accomplished.I think all we really need to do is tell the GNOME developers "job well done, keep doing exactly what you're done already" and that will be enough to redirect the entire project's goals. They won't stand for that.
"Switching between applications by waving one's hand left and right over the keyboard would be pretty cool, too."
My Dell's Synaptics pad does this...my palm goes anywhere near that pad, and it registers a mouse click. Drives me nuts trying to get the sensitivity adjusted right.
This would be great to use with a DAW when nothing else is at hand, producing music without dynamics can be a real pain.
Weight is force due to gravity. You are thinking of mass.
I think all we really need to do is tell the GNOME developers "job well done, keep doing exactly what you're done already" and that will be enough to redirect the entire project's goals. They won't stand for that.
That may work, but if my 2 year old toddler is any indication, reverse psychology only goes so far. Eventually they will accept the praise as legitimate instead of always trying to refute you.
Like apt-cache search ?
And how many people who know about apt-get are aware that apt-cache search exists? The advantage of a GUI is that it makes more things discoverable.
~15 years ago (circa 1996 or so), touchpads emulated the kinetics of thumb-manipulated trackballs, and I didn't mind them too badly. Then, sometime around 1999, all the manufacturers started to de-tune their virtual kinetics to accommodate users who used their index fingers. The difference isn't subtle. Your thumb's range of motion is limited, and the first-gen touchpads used the same algorithms as trackballs to interpret a motion that can loosely be described as "kind of towards the left, somewhat downward" as "move the pointer directly left" (and vice-versa).
Once in a blue moon, I'll trip over a modern touchpad that *almost* gets it right, but manufacturers view them as commodities, so even when I find one in real life that doesn't suck, there's no guarantee that the identical laptop ordered from Newegg will have the same one.
I have a hunch that the touchpads in laptops can do more than the generic (or official) drivers offer, but low-level documentation for them is nonexistent (in the public space, at least). I still spend an occasional afternoon looking at Linux source hoping that someone has leaked a driver that gives a determined driver the ability to tweak it in nonstandard ways.
Insofar as "multitouch" goes, the idea is actually nothing new. Users had the idea 10+ years ago. The whole problem was with the touchpad firmware itself, which reported only a single x,y location (or a single velocity vector). All you need to implement "pinch type" multitouch is a touchpad that reports raw events, and does it quickly enough to preserve the trigger order. If I see "finger down at (x,y)", then "finger down at (a or u, b or w)", it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together and figure out that the values closest to x,y probably are one point, and the remaining two values are another. From that point, it's just a matter of tracking them quickly enough to ensure that the jump from sample to sample doesn't exceed the difference between the two (so you can keep track of which value is which over time).
Also, multitouch touchpads that support 3+ fingers aren't necessarily able to support completely arbitrary touches, or touches that are truly simultaneous. For example, supporting a "3 fingers swiped vertically" gesture is one thing... supporting "3 fingers moving with completely independent motion along paths that cross" is another mater entirely. A "3 fingers to scroll" gesture would be implementable even with old touchpads with simple matrices, as long as they report ALL contact points instead of just the first or most dominant pair. You'd just have to notice that there are 3 different x values that differ by approximately N units, and notice that the 3 x values all have y values that are similar & changing at a similar rate.
sense the force, i do.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
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