Philips has released a wireless mouse with "360° touch control™." Apparently the sensor on top lets you do circular scrolling, and you call also hold the mouse in your hand and use the touch sensor for pointing.
Link: Philips bluetooth notebook mouse.
(via Engadget)
This NASA video of the recent space shuttle mission shows some neat shots of a computer workstation with a big array of laptops (ThinkPad X series with TrackPoint and no touchpad), joysticks, and other physical controls. No touchpads or touchscreens in sight. Accidental touch contact would be a big problem up there.
Video is embedded below (click through for much higher resolution version at YouTube).
I've been watching the new (and kind of mediocre) TV show Defying Gravity, which is an interesting contrast to these pictures. The spaceship on Defying Gravity is much more pristine and has sexy touchscreens all over -- keyboards and joysticks are far too boring for science fiction.
(Via Boing Boing Gadgets.)
This is an excellent, detailed comparison by Lucas Mathis of the soft keyboard implementations on the iPhone and the HTC Magic running Android: Virtual Keyboards on iPhone and Android.
Lucas also has some other good posts on his blog about virtual keyboards.
Thanks to everyone who voted in my little poll a couple of posts back about the clickable trackpads on MacBooks. Here are the results:
I'm surprised there are so many "not sure," but maybe this just means that I didn't phrase the question well. The other thing I take away from this is that you like it but you aren't absolutely crazy about it -- 50% is pretty low. (And of course it should go without saying that this isn't anything like a scientific poll -- I just wanted to get an idea of what people think.)
It will be interesting to see how clickable touchpads fare in the long term. If you've read the tech blogs you know they're coming to some Windows PCs as well (see Gizmodo). I've written before about the potential of "three-state" touch input -- how it could make things like dragging easier as well as offering more types of input by distinguishing taps from clicks. People are very accustomed to the way things work now, however, on touchpads with separate buttons.
A great article about the little-advertised but very impressive accessibility features Apple has added to the new iPhone: My first experience using an accessible touch screen device (Marco's Accessibility Blog).
Marko writes mostly about the new voice over features. There is also a zoom feature and white-on-black color mode.
Kudos to Apple for putting serious effort into accessibility and (again) being way ahead of the pack.
If you've used one of the new MacBooks that has a trackpad that is clickable instead of having a separate button, I'm interested in what you think of it. I'd appreciate it if you could answer the following totally unscientific poll. If you want to explain your opinion or share any other thoughts, please leave a comment or email me directly. Thanks!
David Birnbaum of Immersion has posted a good review of Frank Wilson's 1999 book The Hand: How its use shapes the brain, language, and human culture, a book that's going on my to-read list... Excerpt:
The Hand by Frank Wilson is a rare treat. It runs the gamut from anthropology (both the cultural and evolutionary varieties), to psychology, to biography. Wilson interviews an auto mechanic, a pupeteer, a surgeon, a physical therapist, a rock climber, a magician, and others—all with the goal of understanding the extent to which the human hand defines humanness.
Wilson is a neurologist who works with musicians who have been afflicted with debilitating chronic hand pain. As he writes about his many interviews, a few themes emerge that are especially relevant to my interests.
Link: The Hand (tactilicio.us)