Re: new API for MacBook Air for Multi-touch trackpad?
Re: new API for MacBook Air for Multi-touch trackpad?
- Subject: Re: new API for MacBook Air for Multi-touch trackpad?
- From: William Squires <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 05:03:05 -0600
On Jan 17, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Ricky Sharp wrote:
On Jan 17, 2008, at 8:08 AM, Uli Kusterer wrote:
On 17.01.2008, at 06:51, Steve Sheets wrote:
How soon until we see the API & interfaces for the new multi-
touch trackpad on the MacBook Air? Obviously the existing mouse
events do not provide enough information to describe using this
new hardware.
When this question was asked on Carbon-Dev, the poster was told it
would be made available in 10.6.
I recommend you file bugs and request this API to change Apple's
mind, because that certainly is too long to wait.
OTOH, it may be best to wait. AFAIK, there's only a certain set of
canned gestures right now and basically just one Mac model that
would benefit of any mods to 3rd party software. Apple may thus be
waiting to see just what other gestures may be needed (perhaps
making that extensible somehow?). And, also waiting for more
models to be out in the field.
When filing enhancement requests, folks may also want to think
about what other types of gestures their app would benefit from.
That may help Apple solidify the working set of gestures that apps
will ultimately be able to tap into.
It will be very interesting to see just how other vendors approach
this technology too. For example, on my Mac Pro, I obviously do
not have a track pad. But I do have a Wacom tablet. Would I
eventually be able to use multi-touch via that? Same goes for a
touch-screen.
No, I don't think so. They're just mouse replacements, so they're
limited by what a mouse can do. Probably the new multi-touch trackpad
has new hardware, and its own set of OS X drivers, I imagine. (i.e.
it's not just piggybacking itself on top of the USB mouse drivers.)
Finally, when filing the enhancements, definitely mention what
types of APIs you'd like. For example, the only way to currently
work with Ink events is to use Carbon APIs. I don't have an issue
in doing this, but it would have been easier to also have higher-
level Cocoa APIs to work with. Using the low-level APIs I have to
do some interesting things with coalescing ink events in order to
get a single NSString with all recognized data. A higher-level
Cocoa API could do this heavy-lifting.
___________________________________________________________
Ricky A. Sharp mailto:email@hidden
Instant Interactive(tm) http://www.instantinteractive.com
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