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.
Steve Jobs has just announced the new iPod Touch at Apple’s “The beat goes on” special event.
The iPod Touch is 8mm thin and it looks exactly like the iPhone with the same screen size (3.5-inch). It has multi-touch, Calendar, Contacts, Clock, Calculator, Videos, Photos, Settings, Cover Flow, Album Art, YouTube, Wi-Fi, Safari and a new application: the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store.
You can now browse the iTunes store and buy songs directly on your iPod.
The iPod Touch also has slide to unlock, and when you open it up, it has the home screen, which is similar to the iPhone.
Storage: 8GB and 16GB, $299 and $399. Ships in a few weeks (this month).
Demonstration of an interactive map on a big multi-touch screen. Seen at Chaos Communication Camp 2007.
It supports moving, zooming and resizing of multiple viewports at the same time.
