Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewO | Hacker News Reader

http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Faqs#Does_the...

> Does the Touch Book support multitouch?

> No. And we don't think that it's an issue. Multitouch is interesting when you want to zoom in / zoom out. At 1024×600, the Touch Book screen is big enough so that you don't need to zoom all the time as you have to do it on the iPhone.

Hmm, that seems to be missing the point a little bit... It's like saying, "Does this laptop have a trackpad?" "No. The mouse is great and all when you want to highlight text, but we find that using shift and an arrow key works just fine. And now you won't have to worry about accidentally moving the pointer like on some _other_ computers."

View on HN

Isn't multitouch patented by Apple?

Multi-touch support is a necessity if you want a screen keyboard.

Why? Most phones other than the iPhone don't support true multi-touch and it hasn't been an issue for them. The only major use case where I've seen it be a problem is with games that have controls that need to be pushed at the same time.

Double tapping to zoom works fine... in fact I can't tell you the last time I pinched on my iPhone, I always double tap.

Typing on mono-touch displays has not been historically a problem because until now you had to type with one finger or a stylus. If you want to type with both hands and more than one finger, mono-touch will be an ocean of pain.

the best part of my macbook is scrolling on the mousepad with two fingers. both vertical and horizontal scrolling works. i find other computers (and git gui, which is the only app on my mac that doesn't handle mouse pad scroll touches) virtually unusable because i have to do something special to scroll. scrolling is key to internet browsing and coding.

so....can it rock scrolling without multitouch? i doubt it (since it would be confused with moving the mouse somewhere)

X11 supports that type of scrolling on my Eee running Arch (I don't remember if it was there by default or if I had to turn it on, though), albeit only vertically. Note that the Eee's trackpad doesn't have multitouch; thus, I see no reason that this couldn't manage it. Of course, I don't use it much, because the trackpad is a bit too small for it to be useful, but still.

I have multi-touch scroll on one of my notebooks under Ubuntu. The other's trackpad, unfortunately, doesn't support multi-touch.

Imagine my surprise when finding out my old, cheap notebook knew how to work such magic...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com