by Keith M (via: tuaw)

Back before the iPhone was formally announced, there was talk that Steve Jobs was simply not happy with the product because Apple’s engineers couldn’t figure out how to eliminate all of the physical buttons. There was just no practical way to put the functions of a power switch or home button into a touch-only interface. But all of that hasn’t stopped Apple from trying.

A recently-filed patent by Apple clearly shows that the company means business when it comes to sleek, clutter-free interfaces. This particular patent aims to take advantage of multiple sides of a device (in this case, it appears to be the iPad, as pictured), including parts of the casing, in order to perform functions that physical buttons currently handle.

Talk of an interactive case has come up before, but with this new patent, it’s clear the minds at Apple are still churning about in search for that holy grail of button-free, ultra-portable devices. I’m just not so sure there will be a way to get rid of them entirely — who wants to have to resort to a paperclip to reset their device?

Here’s yet another thing the iPhone can do: it’s a universal remote. This ThinkFlood RedEye system includes a dock that communicates with your iPhone via WiFi, creating those infrared (IR) signals that your AV components obey.

Like our favorite Logitech Harmony 900 remote, the RedEye’s macro operation is sophisticated, letting you create “actions” that turn on multiple components for, say, watching TV, or watching a Blu-ray disc. You can arrange the buttons on the touchscreen however you want, and you can even use multitouch slides to control functions such as volume.

Besides its steep $188 price, the only disadvantage we see is that when you’re watching TV, it’s better to have physical buttons that you can operate without looking at the remote. But that eyes-free multitouch function takes care of channel changing and volume, the main functions you use while watching TV. Nice. Take a look at the video of the RedEye in action:
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Now that Windows 7 has been released, multitouch is now substantially supported in one of the big two operating systems around, and countless new all-in-one desktops are being released with built-in touchscreen functionality.

Fans of the other big operating system — OS X — have got to feel a bit left out in the cold, though. Although Apple is firmly on board with touchscreen and multitouch to drive the interface of their iPhone and iPod Touch line of devices, the venerable iMac all-in-one has been left out in the cold… sort of.

Sure, it has the Magic Mouse, which — like its predecessor, the Mighty Mouse — is getting a very lukewarm reception, but there’s no on-screen multitouch in the new 21.5 inch and 27 inch iMacs. If you want to use multitouch in Snow Leopard, you need to do it by stroking the back of your Magic Mouse.

Still, the after market has you covered. Troll Touch has released analog resistive touchscreen kits for past iMacs and MacBooks, and the latest update to the iMac and Macbook line-up have seen them revise their product line. They now offer touchscreens for the 21.5 inch and 27 inch iMac as well as all unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Putting a touchscreen in your Mac is an expensive process. The iMac kits start at $1099, while a Macbook touchkit starts at $699. Still, if you’d rather manipulate your desktop by swiping your greasy digits across the screen, both kits can be found now on the official Troll Touch website for your DIY installation.
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Steve Jobs said people don’t read any more. But Apple is in talks with several media companies rooted in print, negotiating content for a “new device.” And they’re not just going for e-books and mags. They’re aiming to redefine print.

Several years ago, a modified version of OS X was presented to Steve Jobs, running on a multitouch tablet. When the question “what would people do with this?” couldn’t be answered, they shelved it. Long having established music, movie and TV content, Apple is working hard to load up iTunes with print content from several major publishing houses across several media.

Two people related to the NYTimes have separately told me that in June, paper was approached by Apple to talk about putting the paper on a “new device.” The R&D labs have long worked on versions of the paper meant to be navigated without a keyboard or mouse, showing up on Windows tablets and on multiple formats using Adobe Air. The NYTimes, of course, also publishes via their iPhone application. Jobs has, during past keynotes, called the NYTimes the “best newspaper in the world.”

A person close to a VP in textbook publishing mentioned to me in July that McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press are working with Apple to move textbooks to iTunes. There was no mention of any more detail than that, but it does link back to a private Apple intern idea competition held on campus, in their Town Hall meeting area in 2008, where the winning presentation selected by executives was one focused on textbook distribution through iTunes. The logic here is that textbooks are sold new at a few hundred dollars, and resold by local stores without any kickbacks to publishers. A DRM’d one-time-use book would not only be attractive because publishers would earn more money, but electronic text books would be able to be sold for a fraction of the cost, cutting out book stores and creating a landslide marketshare shift by means of that huge price differential. (If that device were a tablet, the savings on books could pay for the device, and save students a lot of back pain.)
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Apple’s latest operating system update, Mac OSX Snow Leopard, should be ready to roll on August 28, and while Apple says the new OS is “refined, not reinvented,” it’ll become the de facto competitor to Microsoft Windows 7 come October. We love a good argument, so here’s your fodder: five innovations for each OS being touted by their respective makers.
Mac OSX Snow Leopard:

Exposé Interactivity: The feature that shows all windows together is no longer a simple means for switching among them. It will be possible to drag content fromsnow leopard one previewed window to the other. Exposé will also work for individual applications by clicking and holding their icons in the dock. As a workaround for the miniscule preview windows in the dock, these improvements aren’t bad.

Smart Services: Control-clickers will delight in new context-sensitive menus that appear when you perform the Windows-equivalent of a right click. For instance, highlighting and control-clicking text in a Web browser lets you send the text to an e-mail or import it to iTunes as a spoken word track.

Smaller Install: Pony up the $29 to upgrade to Snow Leopard, and you’ll get 7 GB of your hard drive back. That’s not a feature, per se, but it’s certainly an innovation. The last thing we want is an operating system that’s continually gaining weight.

VoiceOver: Though it won’t be used by the majority of Mac owners, VoiceOver is arguably the most expansive addition to OSX. This tool for visually-impaired users essentially turns the trackpad into a screen reader, supporting special gestures to switch between windows and audio feedback when clicking.

Chinese Character Input: Okay, most of us won’t use this feature either, but it’s still pretty cool. After opening an input window, users can draw sketch Chinese characters on their trackpads and then select from a list of possibilities. It’s as good a reason as any to start learning.
Windows 7:

Invisible Windows: The answer, of sorts, to OSX’s Exposé lets users turn all open windows into bare outlines by moving the mouse to the screen’s bottom right corner. From there, shaking a window makes all others minimize, and shaking it again brings them back up. A related window-management feature lets you quickly size windows to half the screen, allowing for side-by-side comparisons.

Jump Lists: It’s no longer necessary to hunt through a folder of recent documents to pick up work where you left off. By right-clicking icons Windows 7′s new dock (a feature cribbed from OSX), users can jump to recent documents or perform common tasks, such as resuming an old playlist in Windows Media Player.

Internet Access to Home Media: Got two computers, or a friend who wants to look at photos from your last get-together? Clicking a button within Windows Media Player opens up photos, videos, and music for streaming to other PCs. No party will ever be safe again from your weird musical tastes.

Touch Friendly: Should the touchscreen craze finally take off, Windows 7 will be ready with a mode that’s tailor made for tablets. Start menu and taskbar icons are larger, and Web browsing can be done with a finger. Multitouch is also supported, with pinch and twist gestures for zooming and rotating.
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HTC Touch HD
HTC Touch HD: multi-touched by the hand of Ballmer?

Pictures and video of a mysterious leaked handset running HTC’s TouchFlo 3D OS suggests Windows Mobile 6.5 will embrace multi-touch.

If Windows Mobile 6.5 does support multi-touch, it’ll put it back in the game against the iPhone and finger-friendly Android phones like the HTC Hero.

This news reaches us before any WinMo 6.5 screen has been repeatedly jabbed in anger as the initial launch isn’t due until October 1.

It had seemed that Microsoft were waiting for late 2010, and the scheduled release of the alleged back to the drawing-board re-write that will be Windows Mobile 7.
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The last MacBook standing.

Apple’s lowest-end laptop occupies a special place in the Mac spectrum. As of WWDC 2009, it’s the last MacBook standing in the lineup–all the other Apple notebooks are now MacBook Pros. The MacBook (we can call it “the” MacBook, now) also is the last to retain the polycarbonate white plastic glossy casing that once defined a whole line of machines.

While the MacBook’s more pedestrian appearance may not catch the eye as much as the unibody aluminum MacBook Pros, don’t be fooled by its throwback looks–inside, Apple’s done a good job of keeping the components on par with its more expensive brothers. In fact, the white MacBook has very comparable specs to the lowest-end 13-inch MacBook Pro. Its 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo processor is close to the MacBook Pro’s standard 2.26 GHz one, and the Nvidia 9400M graphics processor is the same one that’s in the MacBook unibody 13-inchers, so the gaming and media capabilities are comparable.

Depending on your specific needs, for $999, you’re getting a real bargain with the last MacBook. You can either approach this as “for $200 more I can get a MacBook Pro,” or “I can get something nearly as good as a MacBook Pro and save $200.” The latter perspective, however, requires you to be willing to skip some of the Pro-level features.

The MacBook comes with two USB 2.0 ports, a mini-DVI port, a FireWire 400 port, and both a headphone and mic jack. The 160GB hard drive can be upgraded to a maximum of 500GB when ordering, a first for a MacBook. The polycarbonate body, as always, feels sturdy and well built, if thicker than the aluminum versions, and the pleasingly minimalist glossy plastic exterior and matte white interior might be more prone to picking up scratches and staining.
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Saturday, May 09, 2009 – 11:43 AM EDT

“Apple has seeded developers with a new version of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard),” Arnold Kim reports for MacRumors.

“The build (10A354) adds one particularly interesting new feature to Apple’s Mac operating system: Chinese handwriting recognition specifically for multi-touch capable machines,” Kim reports.

“This could open the door to more novel uses for Apple’s multi-touch trackpads or even suggest a more robust full-screen multi-touch screen as has been rumored,” Kim reports.

More in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: Multi-Touch™ is a trademark of Apple Inc.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "James W." for the heads up.]

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Even though Microsoft is no longer actively developing pptPlex, a new release of the pug-in is now available for download. The multi-touch-enabled version of pptPlex is designed to integrate seamlessly with Windows 7, the Redmond company informs, and to take advantage of the multi-touch capabilities of the operating system. This of course, provided that the next iteration of the Windows client runs on top of touch-capable
hardware. But just because a new build of pptPlex is now available for download, it does not mean that the Office Labs are bringing the project back to life. It appears that making pptPlex take advantage of the multi-touch functionality in Windows 7 is nothing more than an experiment.

“When we wanted to try out the new multi-touch capabilities of Windows 7, pptPlex seemed like a good application in which to do some experimentation. We liked the touch interaction and thought we would share this updated version of pptPlex with anybody out there who has a multi-touch enabled device running Windows 7,” revealed a member of the Office Labs.

Microsoft introduced pptPlex in mid-August 2008, based on the Plex technology. Designed as a plug-in for Office 2007 PowerPoint, pptPlex can turn presentations into zoomable canvases. As you will be able to see in the video embedded at the bottom of this article, the natural user interface of Windows 7 in combination with a pptPlex canvas is nothing short of a match made in heaven.

“If you have a multi-touch enabled device and Windows 7, you may want to download this version of pptPlex. Otherwise, we recommend using the original version. Here are the gestures enabled in the multi-touch release of pptPlex: touch to zoom in, two finger tap to zoom out, swipe left/right and flick to move to the next/previous slide; pinch and pan works as expected,” the Office Labs team representative added.
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Multi-Touch pptPlex Demo

The iPhone and iPod Touch can become the dominant gaming platform because of constant connectivity and the App Store model, NGmoco founder Neil Young says.

In order to be successful at creating iPhone games, NGmoco founder Neil Young asked one question: What would Nintendo do? Speaking at a keynote at the Game Developers Conference on Monday, Young said many expected Sony (NYSE: SNE)’s PlayStation Portable to mop the floor with Nintendo’s DS because it had much better specs and strong multimedia capabilities, and was easier to port games to. But Nintendo was able to dominate the handheld gaming market because it emphasized the unique features of its hardware and designed games that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Young said developers should adopt a similar philosophy when making games for Apple’s smartphone and utilize things like the iPhone’s touch screen, accelerometer, location information, and connectivity to create a great gaming experience. “Don’t let the haters tell you it sucks compared to the DS or the PSP,” Young said of the iPhone as a gaming platform. “It doesn’t. It’s good. It’s clear that the quality of iPhone games is eclipsing its console counterparts, and that’s even more acute when you compare it against the prior generation.”

The iPhone 3G can become a better platform for mobile gaming than Sony or Nintendo because it’s always connected, users always carry it, and there aren’t many first-party games to compete with, Young said. When you include the iPod Touch, Apple’s 30 million users equals a larger installed base than the DS or PSP at the same point in their lifespan. But more importantly, Apple’s App Store has revolutionized distribution by creating a frictionless way for users to search for, buy, download, and install games over the air, Young said.

“It’s like having a Wal-Mart or Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) in your pocket,” Young said.

Since its debut last year, the App Store has seen more than 800 million apps, and there are more than 25,000 mobile programs in the catalog. The most popular category by far is games, as Young said it represents about 60% of the market. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the major game developers, as companies likeElectronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) and THQ have released high-profile games for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The App Store represents a tremendous opportunity for game publishers of all sizes, but Young said this can also make it tough to get noticed among the crowd because there are about 165 new apps a day. He said companies need to focus on their “superpower,” or a distinguishing feature that makes their product stand out.

Additionally, gaming on the iPhone will lead to different life cycles and price points that developers need to get used to. For example, Young pointed to his company’s game “Rolando,” which is scheduled to release three iterations over 11 months with about 40 hours of game play for less than the price of a DS or PSP game. But this can still be profitable because the App Store distribution model strips away a lot of costs and because of the viral nature of the game.

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