The Sensel Morph is a different kind of “keyboard” for the iPad or Mac. It’s a pressure-sensitive panel onto which you can slap various silicone overlays, turning it from a QWERTY keyboard into a piano, a movie-editing controller or many other specialized interfaces.
It’s a customizable, wildly imaginative input device designed for musicians, video editors, illustrators, writers and other creative types.
Admit it. There’s two major things you still want from OS X: multitouch support, and 4K support. 4K support would make the Retina iMac finally possible, and as for multitouch, this is where the laptop and desktop market is heading despite Steve Jobs’s protestations about “gorilla arm.”
It’s taking Apple its sweet time to deliver the above, but you don’t have to wait. Sharp has just announced OS X compatibility for their 32-inch 4K touchscreen monitor.
Winter is coming (in the Northern Hemisphere at least), and with it cold weather, frosty mornings, overcoats and gloves. And not much puts a cramp on your smartphone-toting style more than a pair of gloves or mittens. I should know — I one spent a winter in Berlin and was often forced to use the tip of my nose to launch the maps app on my iPod Touch.
The answer is Touchscreen Gloves.
Have you ever had to say that you’re terrible at something just so you can get some preferential treatment, even though you’re really not as bad as you claim? It’s silly, but sometimes it works.
That’s what happened to Samsung today. In order to not get their products banned from the Netherlands, Samsung had to tell the court today that their multitouch software is really terrible in comparison to Apple’s.
A U.K. judge has ruled in favor of HTC over claims that the Taiwanese smartphone vendor infringes four of Apple’s patents for touchscreen technology, including its famous slide-to-unlock feature. Judge Christopher Floyd decided that HTC’s smartphones are not guilty of infringement, and that three of Apple’s four patents are invalid.
Editing videos can lead to a great sense of fulfillment when you’re all done and showing off the fruits of your labors to a packed house of admirers, but you have to admit that the grunt work can be kind of a slog. Anything that makes the editing process a little faster or a little bit simpler has my vote for being a tip worth knowing about.
iMovie ’11 has a host of under-the-radar tricks that will help you take your editing workflow up a notch. One sweet trick that both saves time and impresses other video editors is using multitouch gestures right on the trackpad.
If your Mac has a multitouch trackpad, there’s a simple but amazing tweak you can make that could revolutionize the way you use your computer.
Do you love typing on your iPad, the feel of your digits drumming atop virtualized letters glowing out of slippery glass? No, we thought not: for serious typing, few do, which is why the iPad keyboard case market is doing so well. So I have some haptic problems with this Kickstarter project to bring a wireless multi-touch glass keyboard and mouse to market. Aesthetically, though? Gorgeous.
Steve Jobs has unambiguously said that Apple does not see a place for an iMac or MacBook with a multitouch display in their line-up of Macs. Citing the problem of gorilla arm, Jobs says that touch needs to be something that can be done in your lap, not accomplished reaching across the table. Trackpads and multitouch mice are the future of Macs.
Seems pretty unambiguous, doesn’t it? Then again, this is the same guy who just a year ago said that Apple was “pretty skeptical” about the cloud, when they were already working on iCloud. So guess what? Despite what Steve Jobs says, Apple’s also working on multitouch iMacs.
When he first showed off OS X Lion last year, Steve Jobs explained Apple’s reluctance to add multitouch displays to their line of iMacs by saying that multitouch needed to be horizontal to be pleasant to use. Use it in a vertical position and you’re always leaning forward to poke and prod the screen, leading to what Steve Jobs calls “gorilla arm.” That’s why Apple has only brought multitouch to the Mac through peripherals like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. Even so, some patents have shown up over the past year that suggest that Apple’s been experimenting with multitouch-capable iMacs with pivoting displays that pull down to a more appropriate horizontal orientation when a user wants to interact with on-screen elements directly.
If you want to see what such an iMac might look like in the flesh, though, check out HO’s latest TouchSmart PC. Look familiar? Yup, that’s right: it features a pull-down design that drops the multitouch display into a horizontal position to reduce arm fatigue… just like in Apple’s patent!
Yesterday’s dev release of iOS 4.3 revealed a myriad of new features to Apple’s already robust mobile operating system, but what’s prompting the most comment this morning is the new multitouch gesture introduced that allows you to pinch with your whole hand to return to the homescreen.
Now BGR is claiming that this new gesture is the first step to removing the physical home button from a future iPad. Nonsense, says I.
Steve Jobs says that multitouch must be horizontal, but for some reason, I don’t think this is quite what he had in mind: the Table Connect for iPhone is a close-to-complete project that marries a 58-inch multitouch surface with your jailbroken iPhone 4 through a 30-inch Dock Connector… not only charging your iPhone but turning your desk into your iPhone.
I’d want one to perch my iMac, but seeing as how I’ve never once seen the surface of my desk underneath its perpetual detritus of tobacco ash, beer bottles and discarded Starbucks cups, it might be money ill spent.
[via Engadget]
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6h-hpNZDFo
At last week’s Back to Mac event, Steve Jobs made a pretty compelling argument against imbuing multitouch into desktop and notebook displays. He argued — rightfully, I think — that multitouch is only workable ergonomically when a gadget can be positioned horizontally: if you have to keep leaning forward to interact with a touchscreen, you quickly develop gorilla arm.
I was pretty satisfied with that answer as to why Apple wasn’t exploring multitouch displays in their current iMacs, Mac Pros and MacBooks, but if you’re not adverse to a case of gorilla arm or two, Troll Touch is now offering a couple of options to bring multi-touch to Apple’s 27-inch LED-backlit Cinema Display.
Yesterday, Steve Jobs took the stage for the Back to Mac event and finally put the kibosh on the idea of touchscreen iMacs. He made some excellent points: namely, that multitouch really requires a horizontal configuration instead of a vertical one, making it only a really pleasant-to-use experience on a device like a tablet or smartphone.
Makes sense to us.If you’re just dying for the touchscreen iMac experience, though, why not transform your iPad into a semblance of one with the PadDock, which will turn your iPad into a tiny approximation of a 10-inch iPad. It contains built-in speakers, 360 degrees of rotation and the ability to charge and sync your iPad while it’s connected.
I mean, look: the PadDock is really just an iPad speaker dock with a novelty shape. That’s cool, but you may well not want to spend $100 on it, especially since the iPad in a vertical docking configuration is going to be subject to the same ergonomic difficulties Steve Jobs says is stopping Apple from bringing multitouch to the displays of their laptops and desktops. But take a good look anyway,because this is the closest to a touchscreen iMac you’re going to get this short of a really ingenious Hackintosh.
