We've learned to be highly suspicious that the GPS, camera and microphone in our smartphones can be used to track our every move, listen into our conversations and watch our most intimate moments. But what about the act of tapping and swiping our screens? Can that be used by a bad actor? Researchers from CSIRO's Data 61 have found just that.
pptPlex, a Microsoft Labs-created add-in for PowerPoint that makes presentations more interactive, hasn't seen a lot of development since it appeared back in 2008. A new update gets the add-in working for users of the forthcoming Office 2010 release.
Firefox 3.5 includes support for the multi-touch features of the latest and greatest MacBooks, but leaves out a "twist" motion that moves forward and back through browser tabs. A quick about:config hack brings it back.
Most of the multi-touch gestures available to iPhone and Apple laptop owners don't require anything special, hardware-wise—except a patent licence from Apple. Linux users, however, can get some of that multi-finger goodness in three quick steps.
One under-the-radar feature that came along for the ride with the recently released Firefox 3.1 Beta was multi-touch support for the latest generation of MacBooks. If you've got a new MacBook, the latest beta release supports swiping, pinching, and twisting your way through Firefox history, tabs, and more.
Owners of MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads can try out an experimental Firefox 3.1 build that supports finger gestures—swiping left and right for back and forward, pinch zooming, and twisting between tabs, amongst others. The gestures may or may not make it into the final 3.1 release, but at least one developer finds the tab-switching twist a big convenience.
Windows only: Microsoft Office Labs has released an open source multi-touch application framework called Touchless that uses your webcam as the input. Right now the Touchless Demo lets you play with four proof-of-concept ideas: Draw, Image, Snake, and Defend. The first is a free-form drawing application, while Image is an image manipulation utility that allows you to zoom in or out and move around on a map with marker gestures. The other two are games (Snake is exactly like the classic, and Defend is up to four-person Pong). To set up a marker that Touchless tracks, just grab something colorful, click Add A New Marker, then draw a circle around the object. From there on out, Touchless will monitor that marker wherever it is in the shot. Right now the application is a little clunky, but as a proof-of-concept it's not bad (and it's fun to play with). Before long multi-touch may not be limited to people who can afford several thousand dollar equipment, after all.
