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Customizable 4-Finger Gestures Planned by Apple

New technology? Yeah, right...

Back in 1984 my mom came to the US, I used to live in Argentina then and she bought me a Casio PF-8000 Pocket Calculator for high school.

The great about this thing is that it had a huge zone-based touch-sensitive film on it that allowed you not only to type numbers and letters but also had handwrite recognition with "gestures" for backspace/delete, just like the iPhone has 27 years later!
I can't believe that technology hasn't really evolved much. Multi-Touch existed 2 decades ago and now everybody seems to have forgotten it was there...

Instead of stupid 4 finger commands, why not let the trackpad learn your own gestures... For example, writing your signature to be used as a password to wake up the computer... Or write the letter S to launch Safari or or P for Photoshop, etc... More commands could be learnt for individual users and stored on a database so u can have as many as u want at your disposal...

This little Casio saved my a$$ many times in school. I could type formulas, text, numbers or anything into it, save them to a memory and then the text would scroll on the LCD display... The best thing about it is teachers didn't realize it was a "computer" so I was free to have it on my desk and have all the answers to my tests... :p
Yeah, I used to cheat, so? :rolleyes:

So what's new, pussycat?

Read more here: http://www.voidware.com/calcs/pf8000.htm
 

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I find this absolutely useless, I don't use a track pad and find it stupid that I have to swipe 4 Fingers to do what I can do with a keyboard shortcut. I like Multi touch usefull in devices like the Iphone of a tablet PC but on a normal laptop? Bleh
 
ppdix said:
Back in 1984 my mom came to the US, I used to live in Argentina then and she bought me a Casio PF-8000 Pocket Calculator for high school.

The great about this thing is that it had a huge zone-based touch-sensitive film on it that allowed you not only to type numbers and letters but also had handwrite recognition with "gestures" for backspace/delete, just like the iPhone has 27 years later!
I can't believe that technology hasn't really evolved much. Multi-Touch existed 2 decades ago and now everybody seems to have forgotten it was there...

Instead of stupid 4 finger commands, why not let the trackpad learn your own gestures... For example, writing your signature to be used as a password to wake up the computer... Or write the letter S to launch Safari or or P for Photoshop, etc... More commands could be learnt for individual users and stored on a database so u can have as many as u want at your disposal...

This little Casio saved my a$$ many times in school. I could type formulas, text, numbers or anything into it, save them to a memory and then the text would scroll on the LCD display... The best thing about it is teachers didn't realize it was a "computer" so I was free to have it on my desk and have all the answers to my tests... :p
Yeah, I used to cheat, so? :rolleyes:

So what's new, pussycat?

Read more here: http://www.voidware.com/calcs/pf8000.htm
Click to expand...

Now this is what multitouch should be. This is the kind of technology that we should be seeing not the mediocre crap we call Gestures. Sort of a Multitouch version of Quicksilver.
 
Four finger swipes seem awfully cumbersome to me. Three finger taps work okay with good software to tell when you're doing that and not something else. But it would seem to me that developing more dynamic gestures (like additional variations on the swiping motion itself, pinching, twisting, etc) rather than just more swipes with more fingers would be better.

Also this direction is the exact opposite of the relatively intuitive nature of multitouch gestures on the iPhone -- there, the gestures are related to the action and hardly require training. Here the gesture is purely arbitrary.
 
mkrishnan said:
Four finger swipes seem awfully cumbersome to me. Three finger taps work okay with good software to tell when you're doing that and not something else. But it would seem to me that developing more dynamic gestures (like additional variations on the swiping motion itself, pinching, twisting, etc) rather than just more swipes with more fingers would be better.

Also this direction is the exact opposite of the relatively intuitive nature of multitouch gestures on the iPhone -- there, the gestures are related to the action and hardly require training. Here the gesture is purely arbitrary.
Click to expand...

Unless you have tried it, no, it's no more cumbersome than any of the other number fingers. It works just as well. You just need a slightly larger trackpad to fit all four fingers. I'm on an early MBP, and the 4-fingers is a wonderful addition.
 
only thing im confused about is on the main article where it says 4 finger swipe up/down activated expose. on mine, 4 finger swipe down activates expose and 4 finger swipe up shows the desktop. is that just a typo or is my macbook weird?

"At present, the 4-finger gestures only allow you to switch applications (swipe left/right) or invoke Exposé (swipe up/down). This preference pane would potentially allow you to instead assign these swipes to other functions, such as switching between Spaces, showing your Desktop, loading Dashboard and more."
 
ppdix said:
Back in 1984 my mom came to the US, I used to live in Argentina then and she bought me a Casio PF-8000 Pocket Calculator for high school.

The great about this thing is that it had a huge zone-based touch-sensitive film on it that allowed you not only to type numbers and letters but also had handwrite recognition with "gestures" for backspace/delete, just like the iPhone has 27 years later!
I can't believe that technology hasn't really evolved much. Multi-Touch existed 2 decades ago and now everybody seems to have forgotten it was there...

Instead of stupid 4 finger commands, why not let the trackpad learn your own gestures... For example, writing your signature to be used as a password to wake up the computer... Or write the letter S to launch Safari or or P for Photoshop, etc... More commands could be learnt for individual users and stored on a database so u can have as many as u want at your disposal...

This little Casio saved my a$$ many times in school. I could type formulas, text, numbers or anything into it, save them to a memory and then the text would scroll on the LCD display... The best thing about it is teachers didn't realize it was a "computer" so I was free to have it on my desk and have all the answers to my tests... :p
Yeah, I used to cheat, so? :rolleyes:

So what's new, pussycat?

Read more here: http://www.voidware.com/calcs/pf8000.htm
Click to expand...

So your point is that you didn't have to learn the stuff since you could cheat.
 
ppdix said:
Back in 1984 my mom came to the US, I used to live in Argentina then and she bought me a Casio PF-8000 Pocket Calculator for high school.

The great about this thing is that it had a huge zone-based touch-sensitive film on it that allowed you not only to type numbers and letters but also had handwrite recognition with "gestures" for backspace/delete, just like the iPhone has 27 years later!
I can't believe that technology hasn't really evolved much. Multi-Touch existed 2 decades ago and now everybody seems to have forgotten it was there...

Instead of stupid 4 finger commands, why not let the trackpad learn your own gestures... For example, writing your signature to be used as a password to wake up the computer... Or write the letter S to launch Safari or or P for Photoshop, etc... More commands could be learnt for individual users and stored on a database so u can have as many as u want at your disposal...

This little Casio saved my a$$ many times in school. I could type formulas, text, numbers or anything into it, save them to a memory and then the text would scroll on the LCD display... The best thing about it is teachers didn't realize it was a "computer" so I was free to have it on my desk and have all the answers to my tests... :p
Yeah, I used to cheat, so? :rolleyes:

So what's new, pussycat?

Read more here: http://www.voidware.com/calcs/pf8000.htm
Click to expand...

This is nothing like what the iPhone does; it’s not multitouch. This is just a plain old touch sensitivity. Multitouch allows you to touch the screen in multiple areas (at least 12 in Apple’s implementation) while still allowing the hardware to track each individual finger. This allows for more sensible gestures, like pinching and rotating, as opposed to drawing a squiggly line to zoom in or something like that. It also allows you to do something like hold multiple "keys" down on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard (like holding "Shift" + "A" at the same time, instead of tapping "Shift" and then tapping "A").

As for using your trackpad for gestures, see something like http://www.flyingmeat.com/flygesture/ or the Abracadabra plugin for QuickSilver. Personally, though, I prefer using multiple finger swipes to do things as they require far less accuracy. Swiping down with three or four fingers is a lot easier than drawing a loop-de-loop or whatever with my mouse, only to have the computer not recognize the gesture anyways.

likemyorbs said:
only thing im confused about is on the main article where it says 4 finger swipe up/down activated expose. on mine, 4 finger swipe down activates expose and 4 finger swipe up shows the desktop. is that just a typo or is my macbook weird?

"At present, the 4-finger gestures only allow you to switch applications (swipe left/right) or invoke Exposé (swipe up/down). This preference pane would potentially allow you to instead assign these swipes to other functions, such as switching between Spaces, showing your Desktop, loading Dashboard and more."
Click to expand...

Show Desktop is an Exposé feature. Your Mac is normal. :) When they introduced Exposé in 10.3 you had F9 - All App Windows, F10 - Current App Windows, F11 - Show Desktop.

ppdix said:
Excuse my ignorance... What is Quicksilver?
Click to expand...

It’s most commonly used as an application launcher. You hit a hotkey (default Control-Space), and a small little window pops up that lets you type in a couple of letters of an application, and then you can launch it. It’s faster than Spotlight, though, and for keyboard junkies it’s a lot faster than using the Dock.

They’ve expanded it to do many other things, though. Through plugins you can do stuff like using hotkeys or gestures instead of typing it out. You can add files and folders, iTunes music, contacts, bookmarks, etc. to its “Index” of items, and you can do more than just open these items (there’s “actions” for tagging files, rating music, copying stuff, revealing things in Finder, displaying text in large type, math functions, etc. etc. etc.).

An alternative app is called LaunchBar (it’s not free though).
 
Who, in his right mind, would vote negative on this story? What is not to like about custom, user-defined four finger gestures?

pcorajr said:
I find this absolutely useless, I don't use a track pad and find it stupid that I have to swipe 4 Fingers to do what I can do with a keyboard shortcut. I like Multi touch usefull in devices like the Iphone of a tablet PC but on a normal laptop? Bleh
Click to expand...
Motioning my hand to the trackpad to do a four finger swipe is, for me, a lot faster than reaching with both hands to two separate keys (the fn and F9/F10/F11 keys). The trackpad is so much larger then the keys, it's way easier to find and reach for as well.
 
nevrozel said:
Related to the news, there is a way to enable 4 finger gestures on any 2008 MacBook Airs/Pros.

Have a look here
http://www.super-poultry.com/2008/12/4-finger-multi-touch-for-older-mbps/
Click to expand...

Dude! That is awesome, I have been thinking about trying to get the four finger gestures on my MBP for a while but never looked into it. Has anyone here actually tried that and does it work? I am a little nervous deleting some things that it asks for but I might just backup and give it a go, so worth the four finger multi touch!
 
mrkgoo said:
Unless you have tried it, no, it's no more cumbersome than any of the other number fingers. It works just as well. You just need a slightly larger trackpad to fit all four fingers. I'm on an early MBP, and the 4-fingers is a wonderful addition.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the insight -- I guess it still seems quite cumbersome to me, and perhaps I am a bit on the clumsy side also. :eek: But I hold to my point that it isn't particularly ergonomically sensible in the way that (most) iPhone gestures are -- there's nothing about a four finger swipe that particularly relates it to what is being done.
 
SugaredJuggler said:
Dude! That is awesome, I have been thinking about trying to get the four finger gestures on my MBP for a while but never looked into it. Has anyone here actually tried that and does it work? I am a little nervous deleting some things that it asks for but I might just backup and give it a go, so worth the four finger multi touch!
Click to expand...

I just did this and it works great! I recommend it to any MBP owners out there that really want the 4 finger gestures.
 
SugaredJuggler said:
Dude! That is awesome, I have been thinking about trying to get the four finger gestures on my MBP for a while but never looked into it. Has anyone here actually tried that and does it work? I am a little nervous deleting some things that it asks for but I might just backup and give it a go, so worth the four finger multi touch!
Click to expand...

I don't know what that site says, but I've been using 4-finger on my MBP (early '08) since 10.5.6 showed up. I didn't down load the files, but edited my own - it's actually bigger hassle, because OSX caches the files and it requires some cache deleting and reboots. Downloading the files should work, assuming they've changed the appropriate things.
 
Furrybeagle said:
This is nothing like what the iPhone does; it’s not multitouch. This is just a plain old touch sensitivity.
Click to expand...

I was referring to the swipe left gesture that the iphone has. It was done like that 25 years ago. The Casio, just like the iPhone, had Zones on its screen. Of course the iPhone has more but the purpose is the same. Moving from one zone to the other the screen recognizes the sequence and draws the right character or command.
It should be super simple to implement. Just wait and see. A third party will think of it and they will make a bundle.
 
ppdix said:
I was referring to the swipe left gesture that the iphone has. It was done like that 25 years ago. The Casio, just like the iPhone, had Zones on its screen. Of course the iPhone has more but the purpose is the same. Moving from one zone to the other the screen recognizes the sequence and draws the right character or command.
It should be super simple to implement. Just wait and see. A third party will think of it and they will make a bundle.
Click to expand...

That's gesture recognition, not multitouch.

Anyway, it's much harder to implement in a standard touchpad, because the pad is used for normal navigation of a pointer around the screen - how do you separate that from an actual gesture? THAT is not easy. It was easy on the calculator, because it didn't need to interpret normal touches as anything else.
 
The site speculates that this functionality may find its way into Snow Leopard though it has not yet been spotted in the developer builds. Meanwhile, owners of previous generation multi-touch MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs are hoping to get four-finger gestures enabled on their machines with a future software update.
Click to expand...

One could only hope this would happen, i still wonder why they haven't enabled it for all the MacBook Pros, and MacBooks.
 
I, for some reason, have had no recent constructive comments on anything cool. So may I just say...Hell Yeah! Of course, I will have no opportunity to take advantage of these...my plastic MB is jealous
 
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