Mac
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The latest MacBook and MacBook Pros (late 2008 models) both have a new “buttonless” trackpad which is bigger and made of a touch-friendly, and wear-resistant glass. The entire trackpad has been completely redesigned and it’s also one large button so it’s clickable everywhere on the surface. No separate button means there’s more room for additional multi-touch gestures and your fingers can move with ease on the smooth and silky glass surface.
Use two fingers to scroll up and down a page or a window. Pinch to zoom in and out in Safari, Preview, iPhoto, the Finder and even Photoshop CS4. Swipe the trackpad with three fingers together to go back and forth in your browser or navigate between photos in iPhoto and Preview apps. Rotate to adjust an image with your fingertips or use the new four-finger swipe gesture: up and down to access Exposé modes, left or right to switch between open applications. You can also right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area anywhere on the spacious trackpad to access shortcut menus.
The new improved Multi-Touch trackpad feels as good as it functions and the more you use it, the more you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. Apple designers and software engineers have spent a considerable amount of time working on the sensitivity, audio feedback and friction of the trackpad. They incorporated these great new Multi-Touch gestures and the result of all these efforts is one of the largest, and most ergonomic MacBook trackpad ever. With the breakthrough aluminum unibody enclosure and stunning LED-backlit displays, these new notebooks are truly spectacular!
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Apple has finally released new MacBook Pros
with the innovative and advanced Multi-Touch trackpad, first introduced in MacBook Air. New MacBooks are also available but they have no multi-touch trackpads. Both lines are sporting Intel’s new Penryn processors.
Now you can flip through photos, pinch, swipe, or rotate to enlarge text using just your fingers. The Multi-Touch technology from iPhone, iPod touch, and MacBook Air now comes standard to all Apple’s high-end laptops in an amazing Multi-Touch trackpad. The size of the trackpad seems to be the same as before even though it has multi-touch.
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Macrumors found a recent Apple patent application showing a Gesture Control Panel with options to configure Standard Trackpad, Basic Multitouch and even Advanced Multitouch file operations for opening, closing and saving files, as well as editing operations such as: cut, copy, paste, cancel, undo, etc…
These documents show the use of various combinations of fingers being applied to the specific Mac OS X interface (gestures for Expose and Dashboard). Clearly, Apple is working on new gestures using more fingers and combinations to expand the basic multi-touch functionality of the iPhone and the MacBook Air for upcoming versions of Mac OS X and new hardware products.
[Via Macrumors]
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Let’s take a look at the trackpad on MacBook Air. Not only is it larger but Apple has taken some of the multi-touch innovations developed for the iPhone and adapted them for MacBook Air.
You may be familiar with trackpad gestures on MacBook and MacBook Pro such as two finger tapping for a secondary click and two fingers scrolling. MacBook Air now allows you to pinch, swipe and rotate so you can navigate your applications more efficiently.
You can use pinch to zoom in and out. It works right in coverflow in the finder. You simply place two fingers on the trackpad – your thumb and forefinger work best – and drag them outward while keeping contact with the trackpad. With pinch you can easily switch between a larger icon view and a text view.
It works with Safari too. if you get to a page with small text, just pinch to increase the font to a more readable size. To move back and forth through web pages, instead of hitting the forward and back buttons, you can use another gesture called “Swipe”. Just use three fingers together. To page forward, swipe from left to right. To page backwards, swipe from right to left.
These gestures work in iPhoto too. You can pinch to get a closer look at a shot and swipe to move through a photo slideshow. You can also use a gesture to rotate photos. All you do is select the photo, place to fingers on the trackpad and rotate your fingers.
Those are just a few of the things you can do with trackpad gestures. The system preferences on MacBook Air has demos on how to use them.
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Steve Jobs is on stage right now in San Francisco for the Macworld 2008 keynote and he is introducing “The World’s Thinnest Notebook”. It’s called the MacBook Air and it has a multi-touch trackpad, 13.3″ widescreen LED backlit display, and 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. You can move a window in Mac OSX by double-tap and move. Rotate a photo by pivoting your index finger around your thumb. And of course, pinch-zoom. More infos on this new multi-touch notebook later!
From Steve Jobs Keynote:
“We’ve got a very generous trackpad, which is great. We’ve also built in multi-touch gesture support. We’ve taken that even further, you’ll actually be able to turn on all sorts of new gestures.”
“You can double-tap and move the whole window, not just the cursor. When you’re in a large photo you can pan around with two fingers. When you want to rotate a photo, just rotate your fingers. We learned in the iPhone and we’re putting it in our notebook computers.”
“If you want to go between photos, pan right, pan left — if you want to zoom, pinch in and out. Isn’t that great?”
From Apple.com:
MacBook Air’s revolutionary multi-touch trackpad lets you navigate your applications more efficiently.
MacBook Air includes an oversize trackpad with multi-touch technology. You can pinch, swipe, or rotate to zoom in on text, advance through a photo album, or adjust an image. This gesture-based input so successful on iPhone and iPod touch now comes to MacBook.
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Apple is looking for a reliability engineer to work on “supporting multi-touch panel development with Mac and iPod hardware groups”. The job description on Apple’s job site seems to confirm that Apple is indeed working to incorporate multi-touch technologies into future Macs but the timeframe for this integration remains unknown.
In an interview with the New York Times in October 2007, Steve Jobs said: “..multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer“. It’s obvious that Apple is not quite done with their iPhone and iPod Touch multitouch interface.
Source: Engadget
