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.
Multitouch screens are catching on beyond the iPhone and iPod Touch. CNN has licensed Jeff Han’s Multi-touch technology for their new interactive displays to bring visual clarity to viewers about the network’s political coverage of the caucuses and primaries. Its inventor, Jefferson Han (founder of Perceptive Pixel), calls it the “Multi-touch Collaboration Wall”. The interactive wall allows multiple people to interact with real-time data and on-screen elements simultaneously – photos, videos, Google Earth maps, live streams of Web sites, charts, etc…
It’s the same technology we have on the iPhone but it’s being used on a large screen and with more than two fingers. “Think of it as a giant iPhone with a hundred fingers on it” said David Bohrman, CNN’s vice president and Washington, D.C., bureau chief. Bohrman first saw the Multi-Touch technology demonstrated at the TED 2006 conference and recognized its potential for election coverage. CNN plans to employ the display for other types of coverage. “It has enormous capabilities,” Bohrman said. “We will be using it a lot over the next year.” Jeff Han says: “Once the election calms down, you can see how this might work for other kinds of news, like financial, weather or sports.”
The cable network unveiled “The Magic Wall” in early January for the Iowa caucuses to analyze and break down results. CNN has used it to cover Super Tuesday and for every primary contest since. In The Situation Room, John King was zooming in and out of electoral maps by pinching together or spreading apart fingertips on this oversize multi-touch screen, as many of us now zoom-in on Google Maps with the iPhone. King shrunk one graphic by making a pinching motion around its borders; he made another expand by drawing his fingers apart, exactly like the gestures used to manipulate the photos on an iPhone. He was also grabbing and dragging graphic elements to position pie charts around the screen at will.
Apple added new models of iPhone and iPod touch with double the memory for customers who’d like to carry more music, photos, and videos with them. The iPhone now comes in a new 16GB model for $499. The 8GB model remains at $399. And the iPod touch now comes in a new 32GB model for $499. It joins the 16GB and 8GB models for $399 and $299, respectively. 32 GB flash memory stores up to 7,000 songs, 40 hours of video, or 25,000 photos. These new models of the most revolutionary multi-touch mobile phone and best Wi-Fi mobile device in the world are available immediately.
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.
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.
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.
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