Technocrat

Multi-touch moving into the mainstream already?

wowbagger
Tue Aug 05 13:48:00 -0700 2008
About+Technocrat.net
manage

Between the iPhone, Microsoft's Surface, and some of the laptop vendors committing to multitouch devices, has multi-touch moved into the mainstream?

One of the basic rules I follow is "Tell me when I can actually take delivery - until then, interesting but not exciting." There is a lot of excitement about multitouch, but can I "take delivery" - can I order a multi-touch display?

More importantly, can I order many displays? In other words, can somebody who makes thousands of devices a year get multitouch displays, or are they currently only for the Big Boys?

This happened with the Cell processor - that looked tailor-made for what I do for a living, but for one problem: you cannot get them if you are a manufacturer of thousands of units a year. You can buy PS3's in the store, and if you are Sony you can get Cell processors, but try to buy thousands of Cells a year, and IBM will pull a W. C. Fields on you: "Go away boy, you bother me!".

So, is multitouch in the same category? Does anybody have any leads on multitouch hardware? There are some well-connected folks here (yes Bruce, I'm looking at you!) - does anybody have any leads?

good thing I am not mainstream....

zogger
Tue Aug 05 15:59:32 -0700 2008
 manage

Why don't you just buy one at full retail, bust the thing open, get out the magnifying glass and see the name of the Chinese company (or logo or marque or some other identifying thing to start the search from) that makes them originally and go to them direct?

Multi-touch moving into the mainstream already?
Uncle Entity
Tue Aug 05 16:58:25 -0700 2008
 manage

This looks pretty cool.

Sponsored links on that page also sell the bits and pieces to do it yourself, I like the google earth demo.

Multi-touch moving into the mainstream already?
wowbagger
Tue Aug 05 18:20:18 -0700 2008
 manage

Uncle Entity: in fact I was looking at the Jazzmutant stuff just before I wrote this little submission.

Zogger: Actually, I suggested to the HW engineer to whom I was speaking that we go ahead and buy the Jazzmutant stuff, and take it apart to find the vender.

However, the problem can be that sometimes it is very hard to find the vendor on stuff like that: curiously enough some manufacturers go to great lengths to obfuscate the source of parts like that, to prevent someone from buying it and finding out "where they get those wonderful toys".

Besides, I know that we have a few entrepreneurs on the board, and I thought that putting a bug in somebody's ear might lead to wonderfulness happening sometime.

Multi-touch moving into the mainstream already?
zogger
Tue Aug 05 20:36:39 -0700 2008
 manage

If you got the part, look at it hard, do what mods you need to do, make your prototype, then get it cloned, contract it out. Thousands of units should be enough to get some company someplace to do it (and fully expect your clone to get recloned, such is life in the electronics whirrled now).

Good luck either way. Personally, got not much use for touchscreens at all, no desire whatsoever, I am on record for voice activated devices and programs, I don't want MY greezee fingers on any screen I own 0_o heh I look at my keyboard and shudder to think what the nice pretty screen would look like after 10 minutes.

As to IBM not giving a crap, so what else is new? When have they ever cared about low volume sales really? Yet another 800 lb rabid gorilla megacorporation near as I can see. My dad was into mainframes from way back in the 50s, lasted about a month or something with big blue, said he *detested* the entire culture there, moved on, stayed in mainframes until retirement, but not for them! They have never wanted to deal with anything beyond another medium sized corporation and on up, for the biggest bucks.. I tried to get some RAM from them for an ancient machine that had an empty slot, egadszooks what dinks! They'd rather *sit* on that stuff forever and two days than let it go cheap and clear out some inventory from stuff years out of production. Sure, they'd sell it for five times what the entire machine was worth. It is like the calendar stops completely the day they build something, that's the price, eat it raw suckah if you ever need it in the future. If they want to restrict the CELL, oh well, their call. I can see clearly why Apple just gave up on them, and look how big they are. Can you do it with a Sun multicore processor instead, or are they the same mindset and pricing schemes, or Sun doesn't have what you could use?

Multi-touch moving into the mainstream already?
mbourgon
Wed Aug 06 07:13:24 -0700 2008
 manage

What exactly is being done with multitouch? I own an iPhone, and the only times you use multitouch is to better zoom on a web page, and to zoom in/out on the maps.  And even those could be implemented with a single-touch screen.  Tap once in the center of the screen, then drag to zoom.  Tap once off-center, and drag to rotate. Yes, I've seen the original multitouch demo, and that's cool.  But most systems don't even use that - it's cool eye candy but that's it.

What cool apps are out there (for any system) that show off what multitouch is capable of?

 

Do you have questions about the site? Write to bruce at perens.com . List of all articles we've ever published. Source Code Developer's Documentation RSS XML Sitemap XML News Sitemap Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict Valid CSS! [Valid RSS]