A followup five years in the making
On October 18, 2002, I posted that I wanted some things:
[L]ike the TouchStream ST, which is a mutant cross between a keyboard and a touchpad, except it can register multiple finger touches, and tell your fingers apart, so in addition to being a mouse it can do all sorts of nifty gestures. (Heck, that list isn't even all of 'em.) I'd really really like to try it out, because it looks like it'd be insanely useful and cool.
I managed to pick one up a few weeks ago.
I got it for free -- the computing center had one they surplussed out to the rest of the campus computing people -- though of course it's only 'mine' in the same sense that the laptop is mine or the Treo is mine; it all belongs to the office. It's an ST/LP -- the difference between the two models being the unattached angled metal stand/wristrest. Learning the gestures has taken some time, but they can speed up things immensely, and I'm practically touch-typing on the thing now.
Drawbacks? The company has gone out of business (its R&D guys/owners are now working for Apple in UI development and are presumably responsible for the multitouch stuff in the iPhone). And the software to configure the device won't run on an Intel mac (though all the actual setup driving the device is in firmware, so you can configure on a Windows box or a G* mac and use it with an Intel mac fine).
I'm really liking it. If you were to try to buy one, it'd run $700-$1000 on ebay (current auctions and buy it now prices), so if it weren't for the Computing Center's yard sale and serendipity I'd never have gotten the chance.
(As for the rest of the post, I don't really watch TV anymore, so a DVR is a little pointless, and I'd now rather have the GP32's successor, the GP2X. Though there are other priorities...)
[L]ike the TouchStream ST, which is a mutant cross between a keyboard and a touchpad, except it can register multiple finger touches, and tell your fingers apart, so in addition to being a mouse it can do all sorts of nifty gestures. (Heck, that list isn't even all of 'em.) I'd really really like to try it out, because it looks like it'd be insanely useful and cool.
I managed to pick one up a few weeks ago.
I got it for free -- the computing center had one they surplussed out to the rest of the campus computing people -- though of course it's only 'mine' in the same sense that the laptop is mine or the Treo is mine; it all belongs to the office. It's an ST/LP -- the difference between the two models being the unattached angled metal stand/wristrest. Learning the gestures has taken some time, but they can speed up things immensely, and I'm practically touch-typing on the thing now.
Drawbacks? The company has gone out of business (its R&D guys/owners are now working for Apple in UI development and are presumably responsible for the multitouch stuff in the iPhone). And the software to configure the device won't run on an Intel mac (though all the actual setup driving the device is in firmware, so you can configure on a Windows box or a G* mac and use it with an Intel mac fine).
I'm really liking it. If you were to try to buy one, it'd run $700-$1000 on ebay (current auctions and buy it now prices), so if it weren't for the Computing Center's yard sale and serendipity I'd never have gotten the chance.
(As for the rest of the post, I don't really watch TV anymore, so a DVR is a little pointless, and I'd now rather have the GP32's successor, the GP2X. Though there are other priorities...)