For most people, ‘whatever’s in reach’ usually ends up being the best way to clean their phone or tablet’s screen. But to avoid scratches, or just trading fingerprints for a layer of lint, you really should be reaching for a microfiber cloth. And that’s made extra easy if you’re keeping cozy under this throw. More »
We may soon see a day when your iPhone and iPad physically deform at your touch and your MacBook has a disappearing keyboard, according to a patent Apple has been granted.
All previous Chromebooks have been unapologetically utilitarian — cheaply priced, cheaply built, and a bit crude. But the Pixel is different than all the rest.
If you’re a fan of long fingernails you’ve probably already developed special techniques for using touchscreen devices. But Sri Vellanki, the creator of a fingertip stylus called Tech Tips, feels women shouldn’t be limited to what technology they can use because of their fashion choices. So she’s developed a touchscreen-friendly fingernail that works like a high-precision stylus. More »
Shenzen New Degree Technology was one of the companies showing its stuff in the Eureka Park portion of CES 2013, and this China-based hardware startup had some impressive tech to show off related to touch input. Combining capacitive and resistive touch-based input with a means to make it work even on solid stainless steel surfaces, Shenzen New Degree hopes to pave the way for a wide range of new products with built-in controls that are highly durable, retaining their touch sensitive abilities even after considerable wear and tear.
The interesting thing about Shenzen New Degree’s tech is that it can provide both the levels of accuracy and sensitivity it manages while still also remaining durable enough that you can pour water on it, as the company showed me at their booth in Eureka Park. The environmental toughness of this implementation means it’ll be able to be used in a wide range of applications where touch devices would be exposed to the elements, like in kitchen appliances, outdoor digital keypads and parking meters, and the high sensitivity will make for a much better user experience than the resistive touch tech generally used in most commercial-grade touch panels.
Another benefit, as you can see in the video above, is that the panels can detect not only standard number sequence codes, but also the degree of force used to press, meaning that if someone wanted to not only have the numeric entry, but also the force with which it was entered as a secondary security measure, they could easily do that. All in all, it’s a pretty amazing component technology that I’m sure we’ll see picked up by a lot of OEMs fairly quickly.
By now it’s almost impossible to find a winter glove that doesn’t work with touchscreen devices. But if you’ve got a favorite pair that predates the iPhone, this AnyGlove potion will let you use them with a touchscreen display without having to resort to sewing conductive thread onto the fingertips. More »
For the moment, your arsenal of touchscreen gestures is effectively limited by the number of fingers you can use. a ten-finger gesture isn’t going to be particularly helpful for most of us. New tech that can tell the difference between fingertips, knuckles, and fingernails however, could throw some more variables into the mix. More »
If tablets had one achilles heel preventing them from personal computing dominance, it would be their awkward touchscreen keyboards. But the makers of the ASETNIOP keyboard think they’ve found a better alternative. An on-screen keyboard with just ten keys that lets you access every letter of the alphabet with multiple keypresses, like playing chords on a piano. More »
In addition to light sensors, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, did you know most tablets and smartphones have a built in magnetometer? Its immediate benefit might not be obvious, but as this video demonstrates, it could let you use magnets to interact with your devices instead of boring old fingers or styluses. More »
Legendary jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock stops by Sesame Street explain the inner workings of the state-of-the-art (in 1983, at least) Fairlight CMI synthesizer and it’s monochrome touchscreen monitor to a bunch of seven year-olds. Among them, a girl that would one day play Will Smith’s cousin on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and go on to child-star obscurity. And people want to defund PBS. [Open Culture via It’s Okay to be Smart] More »
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