Rotate, Pinch, and Swipe

The trackpad of Apple's new portable Air computer permits these multi-finger controls:

* Two-finger rotation to rotate objects.
* Two-finger pinch to zoom in and out.
* Three-finger navigation swipe.

See the application to CAD? I wonder which CAD vendor will be first to support these -- perhaps the finger motions are native and so a VectorWorks or Archicad can use them immediately?

Comments

[Henrik Vallgren]

What makes the Mac such an interesting place is that Apple seem to try harder. Consider graphics/OpenGL. Apple makes it multithreaded:

http://www.macworld.com/article/52435/2006/08/multithread.html

With Leopard, that support included the rest of the product line, not just the Mac Pro.

[John Nolin]

It sort of reminds me of a `stupid mouse tricks' mini-app that I had seen one particular MCAD developer put together for his personal use. Mouse or touch pad motions were linked to all the possible display commands; swirl for rotate, corner to corner for zoom, side to side for flip over, and so on. Part of the idea came from the old tablet and stylus macros. (remember those?)
So what was old is new again, and even though having the right idea is good, having it at the right time is better still.

[Stefan Boeykens]

Currently, my old Powerbook G4 allready tracks two fingers to scroll (both horizontal and vertical). I think my trackpad even supports more, but I disabled a few of the things it recognizes, since I tended to click to often when I wanted to simply move the cursor.

The two-finger scrolling is not fully supported in ArchiCAD, though. Vertical scrolling zooms, horizontal scrolling is ignored. Still unsure what to prefer: panning or zooming?

It seems much easier (and cheaper) to support this in the trackpad instead of on the screen.