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I told some friends about the touchstream keyboard and they wanted to see it so yesterday I brought it to work. The guards at the gate were intrigued and asked me about it.

Several people at work were excited about it and planned to buy one but then, whoops! I checked the website. What a shock!

My guess is that the Figerworks guys were good at developing but terrible at marketing. I've never seen their products advertised anywhere and they never had a booth at any computer convention. Even Siggraph. They have a special mode for Maya software, the main computer animation program, but never advertised at Siggrraph where all the Maya animators go.

I found them because my hands were getting cramped working with a mouse all day and wished for a flat keyboard. I googled it and came up with Fingerworks.

I sure hope they were bought up by some company that plans to continue development of their technology.

I noticed that Apple's new trackpad can sense two fingers. Hmmm. Apple is notoriously secretive about their development so if they did buy Fingerworks, we likely wouldn't hear about it until Jobs had a product to release.

Dissappointing though.

An article posted yesterday (http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ ... issect.ars) shows that the mouse does use capacitive sensing, but I'm going to be really annoyed if this is the only way FingerWorks technology gets applied going forward...

Capacitive touch-sensitivity is pretty basic, has been around for ages and is no longer subject to patent, Multi-Touch is a whole another game. This mouse would not require a FingerWorks or Multi-Touch license nor would it in any way infringe on FingerWorks patents.

kablooie wrote: I noticed that Apple's new trackpad can sense two fingers. Hmmm. Apple is notoriously secretive about their development so if they did buy Fingerworks, we likely wouldn't hear about it until Jobs had a product to release.

But the new trackpad on the iBooks do have multi-touch or do I misunderstand the following which also can be found on the website of Apple:
"Take a Scroll
Scrolling through web pages or large documents on a trackpad can challenge even the most nimble fingers. That’s why every iBook G4 features a new trackpad with scrolling capability. Just drag two fingers over the trackpad to scroll vertically and horizontally or pan around any active window. Change this feature to suit your needs: Customize your trackpad settings or turn off scrolling completely via System Preferences."

When I found out about the touchstream keyboard it was already too late... I would love to have one and do hope the production will be continued by a company.

Greetings.

While that's very interesting, my first big question would be: If they have bought the MultiTouch system, which included the Mac-N-Touch replacement keyboard for Apple notebooks, why not just put those in there instead of some stupid little touchpad? It simply doesn't make sense, sort of like buying a whole brand new Jaguar just to get one of those nifty jaguar hood ornaments. It doesn't make sense. Even more so, why then discontinue the company? Its operations wouldn't inhibit Apple in any way. Course, there's always the point Apple folks are a big funny in the head in the first place.