Apple's multi-touch technology seen spawning "mega-platform" - Page 5

You really have no vision do you? Or any real understanding of the practicalities of MT technology? A mouse or Wacom style pen may be precise, but there's only one point of contact with your onscreen objects, so you can only move one object or rotate one axis at a time. This may be fine in your little world, but to the design, music and film industry MT offers a huge advantage.

We don't have a click wheel on our desktops? Yes we do, it's called the scroll wheel on your mouse! That does exactly the same job and probably 90% of us use them.

As for comments like this:

I am too polite to comment!

lfe2211,

It is completely pointless to post publicly my qualifications, so check out your PM.

While making coffee for breakfast a short while ago, it occurred to me what the April Fool's joke might be.

As I've never read a major article in Discover that was faked, I realised that it wasn't an article at all.

On page 76, under the 'Mind Games" heading, they have their puzzles. This month the feature is Fibonacci.

This puzzle is named "Area Paradox", in which a square is cut into peculiar portions, and then reassembled into different shapes, one of which is claimed to have slightly more area than the original, and another, less.

As that's patently false, I spent several minutes attempting to figure out why it wasn't. But, after deciding that my mathematical skills are no longer up to the task, I turned to the answers page, only to find out that they had cheated.

So far, that's all I've found, but I haven't read the entire issue.

Can't wait to get home and read my copy of Discover, one of my favorites science magazines for years. The April edition is always fun, trying to figure out the "fake" article.

No, just objecting to the idea that it is a trivial matter in other domains. Easier, yes. Trivial? No. The reason that physics experiments are "a big mother f**ken deal" is driven in large part by the high cost of the major experiments. Hence the increased rigor to develop the justification for performing the experiment.

Financial is simply one aspect, yes. Physicists are top dog in science and arguably the hardest domain but Dr. Kornberg (Chemistry laurette) is no less brilliant than Drs. Smoot and Mather. While his research also spanned 20 years I doubt it cost as much as COBE and his X-ray crystallographic equipment isn't orbiting the earth with empty dewars. The number of significant experiments in other fields, due to smaller costs, likely outnumbers those of theoretical and astro physics.

Where lfe2211 seems to defend primarily physicists, I would say that applies to all sciences, hard or soft. Some easier perhaps. None trivial.

Vinea

There was never any flat out denial that a study could be incorrect in its conclusion. In fact the originial post indicated that the value of the conclusion is subject to the limitations common to any small study.

What started this is your cherry picking specific pieces of the presentation out of context to try to show it supported your assertion even though the conclusion were opposite.

If you had simply objected to the sample size I would have simply said "Yes, that's inherent in the kind of resources available to these kinds of study...12 is likely the bare minimum to have any statistical value whatsoever even with a single independent variable". This is EXACTLY what I said in another thread about the subject although we got slightly more technical (ie beyond my expertise in statistics).

However, I will not agree to the assertion that the study was poorly or incompetently designed as you suggest without having more information. And I will not agree that ancedotal experience has more validity than even limited studies.

Vinea

Fermi was being held to 2006 funding but congress came through with another $200M to DOE and eliminated some restrictions on how some of DOE's budget has to be spent. How much of that goes to Fermi I dunno but there should be no shutdowns or layoffs.

US expenditure is not stellar but not horrid.

I don't believe that the location for international collider has been determined. Fermi is, of course, the US DOE's choice.

CERN's large hadron collider is coming on line and CERN and Fermi are both searching for the Higgs' boson and presumably if Fermi has any money it will go toward that effort.

Vinea

High-five!


I didn't make an official decree demanding that no one post about Multi-Touch; I simplify gave my opinion. So just because you don't agree with me, you assume by defacto that I have a God-complex? You're the one with the attitude problem -- you don't have to patronize me just because you don't agree with me. Real mature.



If you knew me, you'd know that I have plenty of vision. Making qualitative statements solely based on one opinion of mine you don't happen to share isn't a great way to start your argument. And then than insulting my intelligence by implying that I don't agree with you because I'm too stupid to fully understand Multi-Touch technology? You're on a roll now, aren't you? And then you try to discredit me by trivializing my world as being small in insignificant? As it turns out, I spend a lot of time doing photography, designing web graphics, building websites, editing video... and get this -- I'm a student -- I have a huge scope of the world because I HAVE to.

The click wheel is not analogous to the mouse's scroll wheel because the mouse's scroll wheel couldn't function as a stand-alone, and there are considerable differences between a computer mouse UI and a click wheel GUI. A click-wheel interface on a computer would be disastrous. Scrolling of the wheel would represent the rotating through the selectable elements on the computer screen. On my visible computer screen right now, I can see a total of 131 selectable elements. What glorious fun it would be to scroll through all of those elements to get to the one I wanted to.

The mouse allows you to make small hand movements which translate to accurate larger movements. No improvement needed. Multi-touch allows you to make accurate movements over a SMALL surface area in a PORTABLE way. You don't need that for a desktop! Maybe for a tablet, but that's a whole other bag of issues there. For instance, what is the PURPOSE of the tablet? What interface do you NEED with that application of the tablet. If you're scribbling notes, a stylus is useful for handwriting-to-text recognition because some people can write faster than they type. Or if you have to draw something, again, a stylus would be more useful and accurate. For an iPhone, multi-touch is great because it's purpose doesn't require a stylus. And I'm sure the keyboard on an iPhone is a pleasure for the tips, but it will never be as accurate as a regular keyboard.

As far as vision, I have a lot of visionary projects going right now. A multi-million dollar development project, a national web site and service, and a revolutionary invention in a billion dollar industry.

Well, excuuuuuse me if I get the wrong impression when somebody says "Stop with the posts!" That doesn't seem like an opinion. That's an imperial edict. You want to know why you got slapped down? It's because you don't know anything about MultiTouch yet decided you were an expert. "Invented for the iPhone." You haven't done any research at all about MultiTouch other than reading about the iPhone. You don't know the first thing about it, have never touched a Fingerworks product, but consider yourself completely authoritative in saying it's worthless. You're as bad as the buggy whip manufacturers who claimed that that new-fangled horseless carriage would never amount to anything.

Here's another bit of news for you: Any time somebody brags they're working on visionary multimillion dollar projects, everybody knows they actually mean "visionary" as in only existing in their own minds. National website? I've got several of those, too. Actually, mine are international, like every other website out there. Revolutionary billion dollar invention? You have no idea how delusional you sound, do you? You sound like that guy on "American Inventor" who wasted 20 years of his life, tossed away his career and his marriage and was living out of his car, all for "Bullet Ball."

Unfortunately, I can't simply direct you to an article in Science, as it is restricted to members, but I can provide some quotes. From this article:



From this article:



In addition to PEP-II closing down, and the Tevatron closing down, there is also the CESR at Cornell that has closed down mostly already, and will finish shortly.


There's much more, but this should do it.

Kolchak,

On the basketball court, when you dunk exceptionally hard in the face of your defender, it's called a "facial". I do believe you have just delivered one hellacious facial on Mr. icfireball.

And now try doing all that when you're 15. So much for your whole "wasted 20 years of his life" theory.

I'm not arrogant, I'm just motivated.

But my whole point of my argument was that this has NOTHING to do with me. Attack ideas, not people.

You also assume that I don't know ANYTHING about Multi-Touch. I know as much as you know, so what makes you think that you're more qualified to say that Multi-Touch IS viable for other devices? And to be honest, Multi-Touch is not this abstract concept that's hard to get. So you touch the screen, and the computer recognizes gestures and acts accordingly. Revolutionary in practice yes (Kudos to Apple), but certainly not revolution in theory.

And one of my projects specifically deals with a touch screen interface by the way.

One last thing: while I am serious that I'm sick and tired of people over-hyping multi-touch, I was also partially joking as evident by my choice of words. Lighten up.


I believe the term these days is "TREATED"

And Kolchak is certainly treated.

But P.S. lfe2211, I've got to give you credit for humour. There are two things I hate in the world: boring people and pushovers. Closely correlated but not quite the same.

I would imagine that most of us here are, or have been students. What is that comment supposed to mean! I also know plenty of students who have very little understanding of Real World application and implementation. We study because we have to learn! I have completed my current desired level of education and also have several years of real world experience on top of that, as well as experience in between previous stages of learning. Being a student by no means gives you a huge scope of the world as you put it. That my friend is pure arrogance.


I don't think you quite grasped the example I was trying to give here. You mentioned in a previous post that, in fact I quote:


The click wheel is analogous to the jog wheel, they function in very much the same way. As for their graphical user interfaces, well almost every modern OS supports them. Why you assume that the click wheel would be used as a primary input device here I really don't know, after all, we're talking about multitouch!

There are countless applications that rely heavily on a click/jog wheel as a primary input device, in fact who doesn't use their jog wheel to scroll through documents these days? I also have a click wheel on my keyboard and I use it a lot!

These are used in abundance in the music, 3D design and movie industries already. If you had done any studio video editing, you would be more than familiar with these. Below are some examples for every day use (none application specific):

http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/pr...B/EN,crid=1720

http://www.contourdesign.com/shuttlepro/

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/periphera...eel-214750.php

http://www.trust.com/products/product.aspx?artnr=15036

You see people do actually want these kinds of input devices. A mouse just isn't enough these days, we are doing far more with computers and we need to find ways to make them more versatile, intuitive and immersive. I think multitouch is an inevitable component in doing just that.


Yes this is true, although with a mouse, as I have pointed out before, you only have one point of contact with your GUI. In design, music and film, it is often desirable to have more.


Why you assume this I have no idea. Multitouch would actually be far more accurate over a larger surface area.


I can't help thinking that you're just not looking forward here, you're trying to apply multitouch to what we know and do now. Perhaps you see no need for multitouch in what you currently do, that may be the case. But I would almost be happy to lay down cash to say you'll be using it within the next few years.


As I do not doubt what you say, I'm sure many of us could lay down similar claims including myself.

It wasn't a theory. It was a simile. They do still teach about similes in school, don't they? That guy was "motivated," too, but it got him nowhere except on a road to ruin. You're still young. In years to come, you will come to realize just how silly your claims to future fame and fortune were. Those who can, do. Those who can't, boast on the 'net. I'll tell you now, admitting you're 15 yet claiming to be working on "multimillion dollar projects" has pretty much destroyed your credibility on this forum, even if others won't come out and say so out of politeness.

Having dreams isn't all bad. We all have them, and every last adult here can tell you of dreams that never came true no matter how much we wished and tried. Believe me, we've all been where you are. But what's really bad is when you lose touch with reality as that man on American Inventor did. He steadfastly insisted his Bullet Ball game would become an Olympic sport, despite four very successful businesspeople telling him it's nothing, pleading for him to get his life back and looking at him with more than a little pity in their eyes. Maybe you think you're going to make the next big computer game. I know somebody who has the same dream. He's sure he's going to make it big. I've told him 3D first person shooters and RPGs cost a fortune to develop and another fortune to market nowadays, and a one-man operation on a shoestring budget isn't going to blow the industry away. He's very intelligent, but just turned 41, hasn't held a job in five years and doesn't have much working code after ten years. Don't be like them.


Um, because I've been using it for years? I use MultiTouch, the real deal, every day. I have a FingerWorks iGesture pad that specifically says MultiTouch on it right next to my keyboard as I type. Do you want a picture of it? Are you sure you know as much as I do about it considering you've never seen MultiTouch in action in person, much less laid hands on it? You're making bad assumptions based on misinterpretations of secondhand reports of a device not even on the market yet. I'm telling you you're dead wrong based on over a thousand days of hands-on experience with MultiTouch. I'm not assuming anything. You demonstrate every time that you really don't know about it by making statements that are contrary to the reality I experience at my fingertips. You assume MultiTouch needs two hands. You assume Apple created MultiTouch. You assume it was created for the iPhone. You assume nobody outside of Apple has used MultiTouch extensively. You assume it can't work better than a mouse. You assume MultiTouch=touchscreen. Every last point wrong.


There you go again. Every time you put fingers to keyboard, you betray your ignorance, just like when you claimed people would have to use two hands to zoom with MultiTouch.

I'll try to make it easy for you to understand: Apple did not invent MultiTouch and deserves no kudos for that. FingerWorks invented MultiTouch years ago and they had the patents to prove it. Not a MultiTouch-like technology, but THE actual, original MultiTouch technology. Apple bought FingerWorks' patents after they went out of business and is adapting MultiTouch to the iPhone. Google "apple fingerworks." Here, do a little reading: FingerWorks' website. Learn a little about the gestures with their user guides for products thousands of people have bought and used. You will find not one, solitary two-handed gesture of the type that you ridiculed in an earlier post based on false assumptions.

You're going to find that a lot of things are easy in theory but difficult in practice. Ask any artificial intelligence researcher the difference between theory and practice. Or heck, go watch any episode of Mythbusters. Read the argument between Melgross and Vinea in this very thread about how often theories (I'm referring to your certainty of success) turn out to be wrong. There's a quote from Thomas Edison that you'll find quite true if you intend to keep experimenting. As he struggled to develop the first working light bulb, somebody had asked him if he had any results to show for years of research, to which he said something like, "Results? Why, yes, man, I have a lot of results. I know of several thousand things that will not work!"


And there again, you prove you know almost nothing about MultiTouch. It does NOT need to be a touchscreen, although obviously on a small device like the iPhone, a touchscreen is essential to save space. And you will not find a touchscreen that will accept input from multiple contact points for your project.


Again, bad assumption. I can and do exactly the same thing with my iGesture pad. A single flick of my fingers can get my cursor from one edge of my 20" display to the opposite edge of my 19" display. Yet, I can do a lot of work in Fireworks or Photoshop accurate down to a single pixel, limited only by the steadiness of my hand and the sharpness of my vision, the same as working with a mouse. And in fact, your assumption on this is completely wrong. Think about it. If you want precision, you want gross hand movements to scale down to fine cursor movements, not vice versa. Would you get precision if every 0.001" of hand motion translated to 1" of on-screen cursor motion? A slight hand tremor would send your cursor halfway across the screen! It's the principle behind the pantograph. A principle behind the surgical robotics systems. Also the same principle behind increasing the magnification in Photoshop so you can more easily pick out single pixels. Much easier working at 400% than 100% because less precise hand movements are needed.

Again, don't assume. Youth are just as, if not sometimes more, capable of great things. Many adults are very arrogant about this. Anyways, I have a track record at any rate. These aren't empty boasts. I'll have to get the building project done or I'll fail my independent study. We (we being me and a group of several other students) might be getting a grant for this invention project, and this website idea I have it something no other website does.

Again as I said, Multi-touch is revolutionary in IMPLEMENTATION, but not in theory. It's a simple theory, but complex and scarcely used in practice. And that's why I said Kudos to Apple...for IMPLEMENTING it. I was already aware FingerWorks invented it.

Give me specifically examples of things that NEED multiple contact points. Again, like I said already, don't start a pissfest. Attack ideas, not people.

"
Vinea old chap, I think you missed many of the points in my rather lengthy post. I am a practicing immunologist/biochemist. I do not think that work/ideas/concepts/rigor in my field or any of the other biological/chemical sciences is "trivial" , absolutely or relatively, compared to work/ideas/concepts/rigor in theoretical physics. I said as much in lauding the great achievements in medicine, immunology, genomic science, etc. What I did say was that in my field, testing an hypothesis is far easier on a practical level compared to theoretical physics wherein one is dependent on a very few high priced mega-structures called particle colliders to test hypotheses. The queue to use such structures is, as you know, quite restricted and quite selective. Hence, the theoretical physicist is very limited in his ability to, for example, test the validity of an hypothesized property of a particular subatomic particle (take yout pick) or , Holy Einstein , demonstrate that different subatomic particles correspond to different vibrations of strings (as predicted by string theorists).

But again, alas, I digress from the intent of this Mac Future Hardware forum.

Icfireball,

May I suggest that before you become the next Bill Gates, you improve your written communication and listening skills. I think that might help you immensely in achieving your rather. dare I say it, lofty goals.

lfe2211, my good chap, methinks you are, perhaps, somewhat verbose, but as the great philosopher Spinoza didn't say, lofty language, a thesaurus, and an appeal to your profession and education do not a solid logical argument make.

Psychodoughboy,

I do in fact agree with everything in your post.

If the ILC won't be available then Tevatron will likely be kept alive. In 2009 we'll have another administration, possibly from another party and Congress has been realtively more supportive than this admistration has been. Given that DOE has said no ILC likely for an extra 5 years my guess is congress will keep the Tevatron longer rather than have a 15 year gap even if the Tevatron will be outclassed by the LHC.

SLAC is getting the LCLS in 2009 which is an exciting instrument although not for high energy physicists. Losing the PEP-II is a shame but I believe that the LCLS is a good trade. Its also not like the US is starving the scientific community or even the high-energy/nuclear physicsts given the $500M spent at CERN. The priority has shifted in favor of other research areas but DOE has $4B alone.

If we don't get the ILC then you can close the chapter on US HEP.

Vinea

PS As an aside...one GLAST instrument was built at SLAC and NSF is funding particle and nuclear astrophysics at $16M a year. Source? Your Science article. Why assume I don't have access? Provide link then excerpt.

I didn't disagree with your sentiment, just the wording. Look up pedantic in Google and you get to see my picture...

Vinea

Yeah, sure. Kids always think they're far better than any who've come before. "Might be getting a grant." Pray tell, when was the last time a bunch of teenagers got a multimillion dollar grant? Will I find your name among the Intel Science Talent Search winners or even the finalists? Extremely doubtful. And even those kids -- who ARE incredibly gifted and brilliant rather than just claiming to be -- don't get million dollar grants. Where's the patent for your revolutionary billion dollar invention? Sorry, you are completely full of yourself. Everybody says their website does something no other website does. You're 15, so you don't remember the last time everybody made that claim and then the bubble burst. From everything you've said, I don't think I'd be sticking my neck out very far by saying you won't be attending MIT or Caltech.


If you already know about FingerWorks, then why did you make the asinine statement that "Multi-touch is a technology invented for portable use," when no FingerWorks product was ever designed for portable use, except when plugged into a laptop? FingerWorks did implement it. Try reading for once. FingerWorks had mass-produced products on the market for years incorporating MultiTouch. They didn't keep it in the lab.


You already brought it up yourself with another of your inane assertions. You wrote, "With a mouse, I can easily click and drag the corner of a photo with a slight twitch of the hand, whereas with multi-touch, I'd have to lift both arms and make a huge pinching motions." All stunningly wrong. With a mouse and MultiTouch, you need to move the cursor to the corner of the photo and drag to resize. You're confusing window resize with zoom, which is not the same thing. A one-handed "spread the fingers" gesture ANYWHERE on the screen or on an iGesture pad could let me literally zoom in and out blindfolded at this moment if I wanted to, not that that would be very useful. It's just one small example of all of the stupid, ill-informed statements you've made and continue to make. You think you will be working with a touchscreen and therefore you know MultiTouch, which you continue to stubbornly and mistakenly equate with touchscreens. You know nothing. MultiTouch can be used with touchscreens but does not absolutely need to be. And an awful lot of people were working with touchscreens before you were born.

Give me specifically examples of things that need more than one mouse button. Yet for some reason, five-button mice with scroll wheels dominate the market and even Apple doesn't sell one-button mice anymore.

The Tevatron is as good as dead. The funding is winding down rapidly. $16 million a year isn't even scratch, as the article indicated.

Two problems with the Tevatron now. While it's high density makes several searches easier than it will be with the LHC, the energy levels are not high enough to do much new physics. Much of the staff is already in the process of leaving, and many of the scientists have already accepted other positions, a number at CERN.

We need a new facility. That's the reasons old ones are being closed down. Remember that many of these facilities are designed to find one thing, and if they find it, the rest of the life of the machine is spent on lesser activities. After a while, it becomes too expensive to keep them running. Then a new facility is already in the planning, and possibly, in the building stage.

But our big project was cancelled, and nothing else major has been approved since.

I assumed that you didn't have access, because the time we discussed Science, was when I mentioned it, and stated that one needed to be a member to access the articles other than some of the news, and such. You expressed astonishment that a scientific publication would restrict access to members. I assured you that they did.

As they plaster that members passwords and screen names are reguired every time you attempt to access an article, it was an easy assumption that you didn't know that, and so didn't have access. Otherwise why were you so surprised at what I had said about it?

*Sigh*

Only time will tell.

It's interesting how things change when we have seen it from both sides of the age barriers.

And experience barriers.

That's an odd comment for me to have made given that IEEE locks up content from non-members and I use their stuff a lot. If I said something that dumb I was clearly wrong.

In any case, I'm presumably not the only reader and other folks will undoubtably have access given these are common periodicals. As it is, I do have access to a lot of online journals simply from what I do. Saves me the cost of personal subscriptions but also contributes to "too much stuff to read in a month" syndrome.

The downside is that it's not useful on the train or airplane unless I have the foresight to DL it ahead of time and I have batteries, etc. Paper is sometimes best.

Vinea

Duh...didn't comment on the Tev...half of this is national pride and there will be experiments that are fine for the Tevatron if it still exists.

Yes, we dropped the ball on SSC. ILC is the next thing if we get it. If we don't...well, like I said, you can then close the chapter on HEP in the US. Until then it seems premature to say that the US isn't supporting the community.

A little competition never hurts anyway. Wanna bet the second the Chinese gets close to putting a man on the moon that we see a big inject into NASA's budget?

Vinea

Sorry if this has already been posted, and sorry to interrupt the flame-fest, but:

http://www.fastcompany.com/video/pla...ctid=422563006

Please sweet little baby Jesus give us a redesigned, 8-core, multitouch Macbook Pro. I want to be able to do the things in that video

Y'know, as impressive as their demo is, one would be exhausted in short order what with all the flailing arms. Smaller scale objects (a la iPhone) seem to make more sense where the range of motion is more constrained.

Hmmm...you do realize that the multi-touch interface as shown by Han is better suited for larger displays? Take a piece of paper the size of a 15" or even 17" screen and think about gesture manipulation on that scale. Useful in some cases but not nearly as much as say on a 30" surface.

Fingers are somewhat large and typical UI controls deisgned smallish (ie as targets for a mouse pointer). You'd want to redesign most elements to be more finger sized...which works just fine on a large 30" MT ACD. Not quite as well on a 15" MT MBP screen.

For example if you look at the posting screen on this forum in the additional options there are two check boxes very close together (Automatically parse links and Disable smilies). These would have to be made larger and further apart. Likewise pull downs, buttons, links and other elements.

The 17" MBP unfolded with two 17" LCDs would be better but at the cost of having a poorer keyboarding experience. The 17" MBP is somewhat unwieldy (doesn't fit in most hotel room safes, computer packs, etc) and I wish I had gotten the 15" version.

The Starfire MT demonstration had the entire work surface (desk) as a MT environment.

It seems (off the cuff) that large or small seems to be the sweet spots for MT gesture based interfaces. That and tablets but you still suffer from the same tablet limitations of today but perhaps Apple can figure out a good way to include a physical keyboard when desired. Say docking a tablet body into a laptop "dock" or perhaps just a flip top MBP.

For a 15" tablet surface, I'd want the ability to use a stylus as well as MT.

Vinea

You mean like folks that write on whiteboards/blackboards for long periods? Eh...as a collaborative environment the wall works reasonably well.

And the surface CAN be horizontal like a draftsman's table and you manipulate objects as you would pieces of paper or other objects on your desk.

Vinea

I used to work on a drafting table... I'll take a mouse or Wacom tablet any day over that experience again...

Don't worry... the flame fest already died out.

Yeah, these things come and go.

Mel,

I'm still on the road. What's the Discover fake April Fool article?

You must have missed my post.

It looks to be the problem on page 76. The "Area Paradox" problem related to the Fibonacci secquence.

I still haven't read everything, but what I did read seemed fine, except for this.

Thanks Mel.

Well, I was thinking of a shallower angle than most drafting tables are set. More like a Cintiq which isn't a) sunk into the table and b) typically I don't use completely horizontal. But folks do work at more vertical work surfaces like whiteboards and drafting tables.

The argument that folk's arms will get tired keeps ignoring the fact that the MT surface can be a comfortable distance, elevation and angle for users. Its not just stuck to the "on the wall" form factor.

The MT system we bought from Mitsubishi is completely table top. It's meant for 4 person collaboration I believe...the one we have I think is the same one you see in the demo where some HCI folks modded Warcraft to be controlled via a MT/gesture based interface.

Vinea