Category: Apple

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Touch me there… and there.

You probably know about Single-touch screens.  If you have ever used a SmartBoard, Tablet PC or any other sort of touch sensitive device you will probably have noticed that you can only have a single point of contact.  If you try and draw on a SmartBoard in two places at once, it takes an average of the two locations and draws the line halfway between the two contact points.  Getting used to writing on a SmartBoard without touching the screen is a bit disconcerting at first but most people pretty quickly adapt.

Likewise, the reason that you can’t write on a Tablet PC with just your finger and why it requires a stylus pen is that it’s really the only way to give the screen a single contact point, allowing you to interact with the panel using the stylus tip while having it ignore the rest of your hand resting on the screen while you write.  Basically, most of the touch devices we are familiar with will tolerate a single point of contact only.

So what we really need to move forward is a multi-touch screen.  I was rather impressed when I first saw Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone at the last MacWorld Expo, especially the way he was able to interact with the screen by touching it in more than once place at a time.  The shrink and expand gestures for images were particularly fascinating; the way you can resize an image by stretching or pinching it with your thumb and finger.  Very cool stuff.

Apparently the  multi-touch technology was developed by a guy named Jefferson Y Han.  You can see a video of the touch screen technology being used here… watch it all the way through, as it starts off with just arty farty stuff, but gets into some very interesting deveopments with the image handling…

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/89sz8ExZndc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Apparently, it seems that Han originally developed the technology and was approached by Apple to go work for them, but he declined.  Seems like Apple managed to licence the technology from him though for use in the new iPhone.  I don’t really know any further details of that deal and I’d only be speculating if I tried, but it certainly seems an interesting development and one which could bring some cool new ideas to the traditional user interface over the next couple of years.

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The World According to Steve Jobs

I have a great deal of respect for Steve Jobs. As one of the founders of Apple Computer, Next Computer and Pixar Studios, I think he’s a pretty amazing guy and his impact on the world via his contributions to the computer industry are huge.

If you’re interested to hear what advice a guy like Steve Jobs might give a young school leaver when it comes to life and success, then you might enjoy watching this video of Steve giving the commencement speech at Stanford University last year. In it he offers his thoughts about what matters most in life and what success really means.

What I thought was interesting is that he was not saying the things that “the system” promotes, namely go to school, get a good education, get a good job and work hard for the rest of your life. Instead he talks about diversity of learning experiences – connecting the dots, as he calls it – and how learning should be for life, in areas that fascinate you, about things which make you passionate. His message is that life is way too short to spend doing things that don’t make you excited every day.

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One Fast Mac

I bit the bullet and bought an extra Gb of RAM for my Macbook Pro yesterday, bringing it up to its maximum memory capacity of 2Gb. It’s a pretty fast laptop anyway, but I was finding that when I had a lot of big programs open, and particularly when I was running Windows using Parallels, it would occasionally have a bit of lag when switching between running apps. Not any more…

The extra gig makes a big difference to the way that non-Universal apps run. Apparently there is a fair bit of memory overhead required for Rosetta (Apple’s built-in emulation layer that enables applications written for the PowerPC chip to run on the new Intel-based Macs), and even with the Macbook Pro’s standard gigabyte of RAM it works the machine hard to run Rosetta apps such as Office and Photoshop.

For anyone using a new Macbook or Macbook Pro, I’d suggest seriously thinking about adding that extra gig. I’d say it’s definitely worth it, although you ought to shop around as the aftermarket memory from places like Crucial seem to be much cheaper than buying memory directly from Apple.