Stefan Hafeneger

So everybody is talking about Windows 7 coming out on Thursday. One of the major features is multi-touch.

Well, of course that is true, but don’t we have that in Leopard already? Sure, Leopard has just gestures but isn’t that what most applications need? (I am excluding the famous multi-touch photo applications that are fun to use for about an hour but honestly are not very productive.)

Now Windows 7 has also direct touch through several hardware products. Again, it is fun to use this for about an hour. But after that you use your mouse again.

So the question is, do we need more than gestures on a desktop computer? Well, in most cases probably not. But still there might be a few situations where this could be handy.

But did you know that Snow Leopard (which is available since about two months) has this as well? Sure there are no input devices for the Mac yet which let you use direct touch, but the trackpad in all the new Macbook (Pro) models has a multi-touch trackpad that is capable to recognize more than four touches (which is currently the limit on all hardware devices for Windows 7) which you can use to do some fun stuff.

To demonstrate what you can do already today without any further hardware or special SDK I wrote a small application that you can try out. Launch the application and generate some touches on your glass trackpad. For the full experience enter full screen mode.

Download: Aurora.zip

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 07:21 PM and is filed under Cocoa, Coding, General, Mac Stuff, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.