New Apple patent reveals ‘Advanced Multitouch’
A recent Apple patent application depicts mockups of an OS X “Gesture Control Panel” with options for a Standard Trackpad, Basic Multitouch, and Advanced Multitouch. Although the trackpad and basic multitouch options have already made their way to Apple’s laptops, the advanced multitouch features are very intriguing.
This screen shows options for Expose and Dashboard with actions requiring the use of four fingers:
File operations will use the thumb and forefinger for actions such as Open, New, Save, and Close:
The interface even has gestures for editing operations such as Copy, Cut, Paste, Undo, Select All, Tab, and Cancel using a thumb and two fingers:
The patent also claims that the Advanced Multitouch interface will be able to distinguish between the different combinations of fingers to assign them different actions.
The only questions that remains is when will Advanced Multitouch make it to Apple’s computers? We already can’t wait.
Tags: advanced multitouch, apple, gestures, multitouch, touch, trackpad
February 20th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I’m getting tired of these types of patents. Most people dont’ realize how harmful they are. So apple can create a device that responds to human gestures and prevent others from using the same logical gestures? Copyright the code if you want, but patenting human movement is nuts. Especially since there’s a limit based on human bodily capabilities. So now somebody else has to pay apple for a 2 finger scroll? Why not patent 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 finger scroll so everyone has to pay you for being such a genius apple?
Apple is no hero. They stifle innovation just like Microsoft by doing this. Sure it’s a lot of work, but they have plenty of trade secrets without patenting gestures, and their products should stand on their own as something people want to buy, without preventing others from creating something similar, with or without knowledge of apple’s work.
Hopefully these will fail, apple will still make the product, Others will make their own and finally computing will evolve.