Patents Reveal Ongoing Touch and Multi-Touch Research

[Nar1117]

I can only think that twisting your hand upside down to use your finger nails is going to get painful!

An interesting one though...

What? Assuming your fingernails are not miniscule compared to your fingertip, you would only have to tilt your finger forward to touch the screen with the very end of your fingernail. You wouldn't need to turn your whole hand over.

 

[MikeELL]

I now interrupt this forum for some useless stories about Wayne Westerman. Wayne (as he liked to be called) was my professor for several classes in college. He was (and most likely still is) a tad bit of a mad scientist and/or insane.

A group of friends and I who were in his class saw him on the stairwell 20 feet from class and we all shuffled up and said, "haha, beat you" just to be dumb and funny. The next day while walking to we saw him on the other side of the giant grass courtyard and he literally took off running in a dead sprint with all his books and his laptop in tow determined to actually beat us to class this time. He won, but he had to delay the start of class 10 minutes so he could catch his breath and get water.

Another time we had a bug in our circuit design causing a race condition. He helped us while showing us firmware updates to the TouchStream keyboard that helped counteract the effects of static electricity that can build up on your fingers. He got hungry so we followed him to get food where he continued to intersperse bits of help while telling us stories about how the Midwest is different than the East Coast in his monotone, very slow drawl that sounded reminiscent of Rain Man. The food place closed and he followed us back to the lounge in our dorm (the only place open at night you could work) and he played piano (he's amazing) while we continued to work. It was due by midnight and we turned it in 4 hours late with his help, with no points taken off.

He had some letter from Microsoft in his lab that was some veiled threat about piracy or some such nonsense. He hung it up and told us how he would rather go broke than sell out to the evil corporation that was Microsoft. I guess by going with Apple he got the best revenge he could.

He was a crazy, socially awkward SOB, but he was an awesome guy. I'm glad he's doing what he loves to do and getting paid.

Nice to hear that crazy academics actually do make a bit of $$ from time to time Now let me get back to my world changing invention

 

[JAT]

Am I insane? My fingernail works on my Touch right now.