FingerWorks iGesture Pad (2005) | Hacker News Reader

FingerWorks iGesture Pad (2005)

uk.pcmag.com

17 pointscodeulike10 comments

(PC Mag gave this device 3 stars out of 5 in 2005. Later that year, Apple quietly acquired FingerWorks and the technology driving the iGesture Pad became Multitouch on the iPhone)

I always wondered how much of apple’s touch input/GestureRecognizer and related ideas came out of this acquisition. CoreAnimation and input have kept me on iOS. I hope the computer history museum can get an oral history from the people who worked on these one day.

It seems Apple's multitouch was absolutely based on the work of Fingerworks. E.g see this write up

https://arturojmoreno.medium.com/fingerworks-changing-the-wo...

I posted this OP because it's interesting to see how middling the reviews were. But combine it with a touchscreen and ...

I used these for years and really enjoyed the typing experience. Fond memories of pinching to paste without having to reach down to the trackpad.

Is this article appearing today to prime us for the introduction of the touchscreen MacBook on the 28th of October?

The multitouch trackpad which Apple clearly got from this company is one of the main things that keeps me as a mac user. Just nothing quite like it.

Was multitouch the signature feature here? We had trackpads on laptops by the mid-90s

Yes. Apple eventually bought them out and used their tech as the basis for the iPhone's screen.

Yes this is how multitouch got started. At the time, the potential was not so obvious, hence the middling review by PC Mag

Also, that particular product was disappointing compared to everything else they made - there was a full split keyboard, a half keyboard (about the size of the iGesture pad but had at least 5-finger multi touch as well as being combined keyboards and touchpads - the same "win" as the thinkpad or j-mouse, you can do gestural stuff without your hands leaving the keyboard.) Still had a lot of learning curve but they had broad sweeping gestures for open/close file and the like - though the one really odd one that I remember was "touch all four corners simultaneously" which would cause the keyboard to "type" about 80 characters of product and firmware version and "mode" information. (At the time all of the gestural mapping was in the keyboard itself, no drivers needed - and you could toggle some of the general "editing" gestures among windows/mac/emacs/vi presets.)

Great piece of tech lore

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