I used the code from the application mentioned in the previous post and made a Mac OS X screen saver. Please note that you need Snow Leopard to use it because no earlier version supports multi-touch.
Since I am using mouse and trackpad input you have to press any button to quit the screen saver.
Download: Aurora.saver.zip
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
I had a really pleasant flight in the business class yesterday. The food was really god (serves on plates) and I had much more space than I needed.
I met Argiris finally at the airport in San Francisco and then we took a cab to Cupertino where we met Bridger who was already waiting for us. David will arrive on Saturday.
The appartment is really nice and the location awesome.
We went out to have some drinks and nachos and then went to bed at about 1AM.
Argiris and I woke up this morning at about 6:30AM because we couldn’t sleep anymore … jetlag.
We are now going to explore the neighborhood and grab some breakfast.
I did already mention this on twitter. I am going to spend the next ten months in Cupertino and Washington DC doing internships at Apple and Microsoft Research.
On Friday I will take the plane and fly business class from Cologne to San Francisco (stopover at Munich). On June 1 I will then start my internship at the QuickTime Player team on Apple’s main campus in Cupertino. The seconds week I may spend at WWDC to get up to date on the latest Snow Leopard features. The internship will take three months and I will reside at a nice appartment two blocks from the main campus, sharing rooms with three fellow interns from the US and Greece.
After the internship Bastian is coming over for a three week vacation on the west coast, including stays at San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Diego.
After the vacation I will fly home for about two and a half weeks to get my second visa from the US consulate.
On October 5 I will then start my research internship at Microsoft Research in Washington DC. At the Microsoft Medial Media Lab I will do research on data visualization via touch. I am going to explore new methods for medical data visualization using Microsoft Surface and other multi-touch hardware. The internship will take six months.
Due to non-disclosure agreements I had to sign, I won’t blog or twitter about secret stuff I am going to do. But I will write about my daily life and experiences during that time and I will add some blog posts about how I did get both intern contracts.
I resisted for a long time but I finally created a twitter account. The next months will be quite interesting (at least for me) and since I usually don’t open my blog editor for mini posts, I thought I might start using microblogging via twitter. So if you like you can now follow me an twitter as well. More on what will happen this year in a few days.