“Although traditionally tight-lipped, Apple Inc. in a recent job posting has revealed plans to incorporate multi-touch display panels in more of its future products,” AppleInsider reports.
AppleInsider reports, “A solicitation for a ‘Senior Panel Process Engineer’ posted to widely known job site on Thursday seeks an individual who will ‘lead the engineering activities to develop the new process and design for the multi-touch panel used in Apple products.'”
“The Cupertino-based company said the individual will serve as a focal point in the designing and the process development of advanced multi-touch panels from concept to product ramp,” AppleInsider reports.
More in the full article here.
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Latest Mac OS X Leopard build shows OS still a work-in-progress – March 02, 2007
Think Secret dishes on Apple’s Final Cut Pro 6, Final Cut Extreme, new high-end Apple displays – March 01, 2007
iPhone debuts third-generation PC user interface: Apple’s Steve Jobs changes the world – again – February 20, 2007
RUMOR: Apple prepping completely redesigned Intel Mac Pro, new display line – February 14, 2007
Researchers have bigger plans for ‘multi-touch’ beyond Apple’s iPhone – January 19, 2007
Wired News: Steve Jobs’ iPhone shows the future – January 12, 2007
Video of how Apple’s rumored touch-screen Tablet Mac could work – February 13, 2006
multi-touch multi-everywhere
This is great.
And Windows will look like a sad little office computer with those quaint funnly little mouses. tee-hee.
Multi-touch widget. The whole widget.
i’m thinking it would be nice to have some sort of multi touch pad to replace the mouse and/or current trackpads. manipulating the screen directly is neat but the angles are all wrong with laptop and desktop screens. Tablet computer a different thing altogether
Yes, a multi-touch remote with a virtual keyboard so that you can manipulate your Mac/TV from across the room.
MW-covered. As in – Apple has the bases covered.
I want to multi-touch myself. Again.
“And Windows will look like a sad little office computer with those quaint funnly little mouses. tee-hee.”
Sure. Try holding your arm up in front of your PC screen 8 hours a day and understand why touch screens which have been around for decades are not more popular.
It’s only really viable for handheld devices.
Also ask yourself why touchpads which have likewise been around for a while only find favor on laptops.
Hmm… I don’t know about this… Sure with a professional work it would be great but for the common user? What gives having a touchscreen iMac while gaming? Image editing yes… But still having a greasy screen while watching a movie… I’ll pass on this … though good job Apple on thinking different.
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I’m surprised by the number of people dashing off comments of what multi-touch is NOT good for when this subject comes up. Of course it is not going to replace the desktop keyboard for typing or accounting. But there are a myriad of fantastic applications for a tablet screen, from gaming to art to photo manipulation, mapping etc. It is an organic natural input device for applications that most of us haven’t even thought of yet. I don’t think for a minute that Apple is considering replacing the the vertical iMac screen with a multitouch version. That is an ergonomic disaster. But I can envision a desktop (a real desktop) with a built in, adjustable angle, multi-touch screen that would be a welcome addition to many tasks.
MaXz0Rz!
The common user could use a multi-touch keyboard to have different key layouts. How about a guitar neck display for GarageBank? What about specific movie editing controls, like a jog wheel, for iMovie? Instead of having a keypad that you don’t use when in iTunes, how about a clickwheel?
I also disagree that replacing an iMac screen with a touch screen would be a disaster. You could easily zoom in and out on items, move documents around, select text or movies or songs to play, scroll through the new backup (Timewarp?) in Leopard, move files around, etc. You wouldn’t want to type on a verticle surface, but you could do quite a bit of other useful actions.
What surprises me is that so many analysts, etc. seem genuinely surprised that Apple would be moving to add engineers, etc. for multi-touch uses. There’s no way a company develops such a complex and absolutely unique input system just for one portable device. That’s another reason why iPhone runs on Leopard – multi-touch goodness is coming to ALL Macs!
What’s GarageBank?
“What’s GarageBank?”
It’s where you buy a safe, put it in your garage and offer to store your neighbours money in it and lend out some at a nominal rate… The key difference is that it is not FDIC insured…
Why are some people so ignorant and always jump to conclusions? The whole concept of multitouch is notJUST a touch display, but more about HOW you touch it… In other words…
“It’s the software stupid!”
It’s the ability to interact with the things on the display in a whole new way… I for one and more than ready to eliminate my mouse… It’s become an annoyance in so many ways… I’d NEVER go back to a command line interface… And the idea of function keys is long dead. After all, we have 16 of them across the tops of our keyboards, and most go unused by most apps and most users. Keyboard shortcuts are handy, but wouldn’t it be a whole lot more useful to be able to make use of gestures?
Really, the multi-touch display is a step beyond Wacom’s over-priced ($2500) Cintiq. Styluses are perfect for drawing, but so are fingers (Artists who do charcoal drawing, use their fingers to smudge and blend).
As for the dorks who have greasy fingers… I have two suggestions for them…
1: Don’t eat KFC at your computer (or, really… at all!)
2: Wash your fucking hands more often!
Seriously, though… If the front of the display were flat like an iPod, without a bezel that current computer displays have, it’s easy to wipe them off with a cloth (Apple already includes a cleaning cloth with their displays – I use mine regularly) to keep the display pristine.
Oh, and as for gamers… seriously dweebs… get a life.
I wouldn’t go so far as totaly abandoning my mouse. Might as well go back to pen and paper. Ergonomicaly your arms will get pretty tired real quick touching your screen all day. The mouse will still be the quickest way for zipping around screen clicking things. But a touch screen combined with mouse, keyboard, (voice recognition maybe) would make the computer much more accessable to more people.
I agree with lbuschjr. If we could do away with physical keys and have a virtual keyboard that responded to my touch with vibrations you could have any number of virtual customizable keyboards. I agree that getting rid of the mouse in this situation most likely isnt possible because even on my laptop I MUST use a mouse whenever possible because it is just so much easier. But having the addition of the virtual keyboard and touch screen i could see myself having to rely on the mouse more and maybe giving the touchpad more of a shot.
*rely on the mouse Less
I’d like to try a multitouch keyboard, one where I can tweak the angle of the right and left side of the keyboard, if you know what I mean. Just imagine a keyboard that’s infinitely configurable. You could even remap the control keys or put them where you like. Totally customizable. For Asian languages like Chinese this might be even more useful.
No longer will we have one size fits all keyboards. We could have keyboards sized to everyone’s hands and fingers.
As for tactile feedback, they’ll need to create sound when keys are pressed, like the sound out of the wireless mouse, that clicks as the scrollball is moved. That’s audio feedback and not a real click.
consider a fold open laptop like an oversized DS. One conventional display sitting upright, one touch display sitting horizontally that could work as a keyboard, touchpad, scroll wheel gesture based display or other formats based on the context where it is used.
fingerprints on the touch display wouldn’t matter much if there was a real display, perhaps non-touch, that was used for actually looking at things.
localizations could take on a whole new meaning if the keyboard was localized too. One piece of hardware usuable everywhere….
Who said anything about multi-touch everywhere, or Apple abandoning traditional inputs?
From reading the tea leaves, I’d say Apple’s interests are in developing multi-touch iPods & building a line of iPhones.
Oh a cool all-touch TV remote would be sweet too.
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All this said, serving “as a focal point” means you’d probably answer directly to Jobs. Any takers for the post?
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hmmm…
don’t like your querty keyboard, drag the keys around
left handed and want your numeric keypad on the other side, move it.
want a scroll wheel instead of a numeric keypad, change it
do gestures on the touch display, see the result on BOTH displays
lots of flexibility, doesn’t take much thinking to think WAY different.
I saw previews of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard showing a new multi-touch vibrator. However, I don’t think they have a real handle on it at this time.
Hm.
I think you guys are thinking in the box.
Who said you would touch your monitor?
What if the screen is laying flat on the desk and when your finger hovers over the MT pad the cursor follows your movement and when you want to do something you then touch the pad.
Pinching(zooming), scrolling, clicking and typing on a number pad would all be just as easy as with a mouse. Just think of all the other stuff it could be made to do with the click of a shortcut key on the keyboard(it could be MT as well).
The only times you would touch a screen would be on something like the iphone, ipod, and a tablet mac.
This would be an awesome product to license to GPS, car stereo, and medical equipment manufactures.
Maybe even someone like Sony or Nintendo could use this for there portable game systems.
my 2 pennies
A touchscreen keyboard would be great. Spills just wipe off. The keyboard could change to reflect the currently running application. Say if your watching a dvd, the keyboard could change to the control bar. You could even resize the controlls to make it easier for the elderly or disabled. The blind however may find a totaly flat keyboard diificult to use.
The blind however may find a totaly flat keyboard diificult to use.
I thought the blind find the screen being something difficult to use.