Triumphant Return of Multi-Touch
January 9th, 2007 by Jerry
Anyone who has seen or heard about my crazy keyboard knows how fanatical I am about the technology. Imagine a touch-sensitive surface (or display) that can track more than one finger at a time and interpret their independent movements as gestures. This is multi-touch. My keyboard uses it over the entire keyboard surface, and it allows typing, mousing, scrolling, and other gesturing on the same surface. No reaching for a mouse.
A while ago, the company (Fingerworks, Inc.) was bought by someone. Nobody knew exactly who bought them, but it smelled like Apple, the Fortress of Secrecy. (I had a few specific clues.) Everyone (who cared) was worried that Apple bought them to absorb them and keep them from competing, like some other west coast company.. I knew that if anyone was going to bring the multi-touch technology to the mainstream, it would be Apple.
Apple just announced their iPhone (lawsuits possible from the holder of that copyrighted name, Cisco). The input for this phone is entirely multi-touch (with the exception of the one button on the front). They didn’t even change the name of the technology. I heard that Steve said that they own the patent to it, and they do, since they have obviously bought the company that started it and did a pretty good job developing it before being bought.
Now if they would just come out with an input device similar to my keyboard, my mourning for the fate of Fingerworks would be completely healed.
One Response to “Triumphant Return of Multi-Touch”
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on 01 Feb 2007 at 4:08 pm Eric JacksonJerry, Do you believe that there are people out there who are still interested in the FingerWorks keyboards? I have in my possession more than 100 MacNTouch circuit keyboards with QWERTY and DVORAK overlays. We were using FingerWorks technologies in the development of a Steno-writer (DigiTouch) when they were bought out. We also have enclosures that can be used to house the units as an external USB driven keyboard. Ejj