12 points codeulike 2 days ago 8 comments
codeulike 2 days ago | parent
(PC Mag gave this device 3 stars out of 5 in 2005. Later that year, Apple quietly acquired FingerWorks and the technology driving the iGesture Pad became Multitouch on the iPhone)
swiftcoder 48 minutes ago | parent
Was multitouch the signature feature here? We had trackpads on laptops by the mid-90s
frmrtntn 47 minutes ago | parent
Yes. Apple eventually bought them out and used their tech as the basis for the iPhone's screen.
codeulike 47 minutes ago | parent
Yes this is how multitouch got started. At the time, the potential was not so obvious, hence the middling review by PC Mag
eichin 21 minutes ago | parent
Also, that particular product was disappointing compared to everything else they made - there was a full split keyboard, a half keyboard (about the size of the iGesture pad but had at least 5-finger multi touch as well as being combined keyboards and touchpads - the same "win" as the thinkpad or j-mouse, you can do gestural stuff without your hands leaving the keyboard.) Still had a lot of learning curve but they had broad sweeping gestures for open/close file and the like - though the one really odd one that I remember was "touch all four corners simultaneously" which would cause the keyboard to "type" about 80 characters of product and firmware version and "mode" information. (At the time all of the gestural mapping was in the keyboard itself, no drivers needed - and you could toggle some of the general "editing" gestures among windows/mac/emacs/vi presets.)
big_toast 44 minutes ago | parent
I always wondered how much of apple’s touch input/GestureRecognizer and related ideas came out of this acquisition. CoreAnimation and input have kept me on iOS. I hope the computer history museum can get an oral history from the people who worked on these one day.
codeulike 38 minutes ago | parent
It seems Apple's multitouch was absolutely based on the work of Fingerworks. E.g see this write up
https://arturojmoreno.medium.com/fingerworks-changing-the-wo...
I posted this OP because it's interesting to see how middling the reviews were. But combine it with a touchscreen and ...
khalic 26 minutes ago | parent
Great piece of tech lore