Archive for July 16th, 2008
Multitouch, TouchSmart, Lucid Touch
“Dell’s integration of multi-touch allows customers to use the full real estate of the screen, as opposed to just the touchpad like the Voodoo Envy 133 and Apple MacBook Air, and works with productivity applications they use every day, such as Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, Google Earth, etc. The free upgrade is easy to install with a Dell wizard that walks customers through the download process.”
Dell’s July 2008 press release.
“A finger tapped or swept across the high-resolution screen delivers quick access to information, entertainment and social networks. Without using a keyboard or mouse, consumers can play music and create playlists, zoom in or out of photos, and quickly check the weather or watch TV [featuring] a 22-inch diagonal, high-definition widescreen display.”
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Microsoft is working on improving Windows’ user interface for version 7, an OS release planned for 2010. However, both Dell and HP have launched products which already leverage multi-touch capabilities. It should be noted that Booth Apple and Asus have already integrated basic gesture based input into the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air’s trackpad and Eee PC 900 respectively.
On previous posts I’ve been sharing stuff on the so-called “minority report GUI” and “the trouble with computers” just to recall a couple of examples and, most recently, I uploaded some info about Microsoft’s Lucid Touch. So, this time around, what makes the news is the commercial availability of these technologies for the consumer market following the success of Apple’s iPhone. Speaking of Apple, they keep working on further advancing multitouch features for the Mac OS X, having filed some patents recently.
Multitouch technology for Microsoft Windows:
One of HP’s commercial on TouchSmart:
Making it work with Apple OS X by NUI, the Natural User Interface Group, using Adobe’s Flash:
| J. de Francisco |  |
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| Chicago, IL 15 July 08 |  |
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