Apple's New Products

Apple announced a few new products this morning on their online Store.  New iMac, new Mac Pro, and a totally new product that I saw rumored a couple weeks ago, called the Magic Trackpad.

For years I've had a Fingerworks iGesture pad, I've been using it off and on since about the 2001 timeframe.  I found it to be the neatest and easiest way to navigate my computer's interface differently from the mouse ever.  I'm a big proponent of the keyboard, and hate taking my hand off of the keyboard to mouse, but for some reason I found the iGesture Pad fun to use (especially doing things like cut, copy, and paste.   Fingerworks was founded 1998 at the University of Delaware (a couple miles from where I live) and produced keyboards, pads, keypads, all to help with RSI and to introduce gesture based navigation into the world.  They weren't exclusively Mac based, in fact, they worked on Linux pretty well as well, of course, on Windows.  Which, back then, is what I used.

Apple bought Fingerworks back in 2005, coincidentally, when they started working on the iPad (before they started working on the iPhone.  They started working on the touch tablet first).  Presumably for their patents, and innovations in the technology.  If you've used an Apple product since about 2006 or 2007, you've used Fingerworks-based technology.

Two finger scrolling, three finger swipe, pinch to zoom and pinch to un-zoom, the whole Magic Mouse, the finger manipulation on the iPhone and iPad.

In this line, comes the Magic Trackpad.  Which is kinda like my old iGesture Pad (which is sitting right here -- not in use currently).  It's a trackpad that mimics the trackpad on the laptops.

There are, however, a couple things still missing.  Like these features:

• Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, and Redo.


• Web based browsing movements.


• How about actual File movements (save, open?).


• I mean, look at them all.

However, since that's basically all software based, I am hoping that Apple builds that stuff into the interface now that we have the hardware.  Here's hoping.