Friday, January 15, 2010

The iSlate Slouches Toward Silicon Valley ...



Gizmodo's round up of Apple touch-pad rumors, here.

I won't go over them all, but it is coming, Apple's bald-faced lies to the contrary, and it will do something, and the consensus seems to be that it's going to be the iPhone on steroids.

An amusing side note: Five years or so ago, Apple gobbled up FingerWorks, a company that produced a multi-touchpad that was way ahead of anything anybody else had going. The iGesture™ was a boffo piece of hardware, with its firmware, and there was also a keyboard -- I bought one of each in 2002. The keyboard was too sensitive for me, but I still use the iGesture pad -- it beats every mouse or trackball or other style pad I've every tried, hands down.
(Editor's Note: If you want that Touch Stream™ keyboard? I'll sell it to you -- it has become a collector's item, apparently, and now goes for about $1500 ...)

Apple shut FingerWorks down, insofar as production, and somebody just parked the website, so you can book it that the iSlate -- if that's what they call it -- is going to have some spiffy multi-touch controls. With my iGesture, I can do all the mouse stuff, plus open and close files like turning a knob, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

Gonna be interesting ...

4 comments:

toby said...

you are the only other person I've run into who knows about fingerworks. I frequently regret not having bought their keyboard when I had the chance. they looked amazing. of course I doubt they'd work with current operating systems but still.

Steve Perry said...

I got the keyboard because I was having some RSI problems, but it was so sensitive that spilling a drop of water onto it would type a character. I found that I liked the Kinesis much better, but I kept the iGesture pad, which is still hanging in there

The keyboard still works with my current OS, 10.6.2

Steve Perry said...

If the iGesture craps out, the Wacom Bamboo is a fairly good multi-gesture replacement at a reasonable price. Comes with a pen, too, for precision work.

Edwin Voskamp said...

The best keyboard I ever used is unfortunately no longer made: it was made by Kinesis in the mid/late nineties. It's a split keybaord, attached to the arms of my chair (Herman Miller Aeron) with a rod both ends of which have swivel ball joints. It normally came with a touchpad in the left or right. Mine's customized to have a large trackball in the right. Every key programmable, off of the keyboard itself. Awesome.

Only downside it had was that the keyboard was wired. I still need to replace that with one of the wireless wire solutions

http://picasaweb.google.com/edwin.voskamp/DeskchairWithKeyboardAndTrackballBuiltInInTheArmRests#