Apple gets the point - and click

Apple's Magic Trackpad was released last year. Photo / Supplied

Opinion

Apple has been pushing the envelope with input devices lately, and some of these actually belong to you. Your fingers.

Touch-screens have existed for a while - Microsoft's initial approach, Surface, was a massive, rather awesome touch-screen table that cost tens of thousands of dollars, while Apple's was, at first anyway, a device that fitted in your pocket and was affordable (while not exactly cheap) - then the iPad took this into a larger dimension.

There are lots of touch-screens out there now, but Apple kicked the whole thing off, effectively, with the first iPhone four years ago.

And sure, there were touchscreen devices before ... but who remembers them? At least many of the others are now as good as Apple's.

Apple revolutionised personal computing by introducing the mouse on a mass market computer. Just as Apple popularised the graphical operating system, Apple made the mouse a fundamental part of the personal computer. It released the first commercially available mouse in 1983 with the introduction of the Lisa. The Lisa Mouse (A9M0050) was designed by an outside firm (Hovey-Kelley).

It drew on a prototype mouse created by Xerox in the 1970s to use with its Xerox PARC Alto. The Lisa Mouse used a steel ball, while subsequent Apple mice used rubber balls. These got horribly gunked-up - and since then, input devices have been evolving steadily.

Did I say Apple didn't invent the mouse?

Apple didn't invent the mouse. However, Apple introduced it as a standard part of a consumer machine, and had it manufactured in large numbers. First. (I have to really point this out otherwise I get loads of PC fans going 'wah wah wah Apple didn't invent the mouse'.)

Touch, trackpads and Lion's new swipes

It may seem natural to most of us these days to use a mouse, but actually, it's an odd process. You move your hand around away over to the side while staring straight ahead, and watch a mirror of your hand movements in cursor or arrow form on the screen. Direct, on-screen touch is much more 'natural' since us humans have been manipulating things directly with our hands for rather a long time.

However, it points out a fundamental difference between a computer and smaller kinds of device. While it's more intuitive and natural to move things around with your fingers and press on them directly, this may never be an effective solution for computer users. If your monitor is out in front of you, your arms are going to get very tired. If it's flat on your desk, your neck will suffer.

With late night deadlines, pizza and large screens, it's all asking for trouble.

So Apple has steadily been transitioning the trackpad into a computer-input device. Way back in 1994, the second-generation of PowerBooks, the 500 series, introduced trackpads. (These may have been on other machines before this, but certainly not to generally remember.) Before this, Apple laptops had a palm rest and a built-in trackball pointing device in front of the keyboard.

Apple's Magic Trackpad (2010) is a larger, tilted trackpad you can place on your desk where you'd place a mouse. It's wireless and takes a couple of AA batteries for the connection.

With the Magic Trackpad, your fingers get to do more than just on-screen button-pressing, moving and rolling a nub or scrollwheel. It's not a good drawing replacement. It offers the same gesture support that a MacBook (and Pro) trackpad has, with pinching, and one and multi-finger swipes etc catered for. This may be more 'natural' and powerful than using a basic mouse, but I find it a little difficult to move things around on my monitor using a trackpad.

Of course, Apple's latest standard mouse combines the two - the Magic Mouse clicks, swipes, scrolls and has gesture support, and you can move the sculpted, curved and featureless mouse around in its entirety, just like a normal one.

Lion adds still more gestures to trackpads on Macs. The Launchpad, in the Lion Dock, also adds an iOS-like interface to the Mac OS. Press the icon in the Dock and your screen fills with those attractive icons of all your apps, like an iPad home screen. Drag one on top of another to create a folder. Open a folder and you can edit the name of the folder, whether or not the icons are jiggling.

Hold your mouse clicked on one icon and they all start to jiggle, a là iOS, but this jiggle-mode doesn't seem to add any capabilities (on iOS, this lets you move them around). Maybe there's something else waiting to be enabled in the final release?

Anyway, Launchpad is more useful than OS X's Spaces, which I never used. At least I can group my video apps, photo apps, design apps etc by dumping one application icon onto another. With a keyboard shortcut to launch Launchpad, I might use it a lot. (Four fingers placed on a track pad then pinch-swiped inwards launches it, but I typically use an extended keyboard and mouse plugged into my MacBook Pro.)

I guess the point is, trackpads get ever more capabilities, but I feel Apple is in between places it was, and places it wants to be, as far as Mac input goes.

Third parties

Most third-party USB input devices work with Macs, and many of the wireless ones do too, either natively or because they have Mac drivers with them, like many of the Microsoft mice (which are usually more ergonomic than the Apple devices, which sacrifice comfort for style and simplicity).

Wacom (I am assured it's pronounced 'wah-com') calls itself 'the human interface company' and has been in the tablet input space for a long time. Mac and Windows compatible Bamboo and Intuos devices give you a tablet and a pen, for fine drawing control and pressure sensitivity. Graphics designers swear by these attractive devices and they offer ergonomic advantages too.

The new Bamboo series adds these multi-touch gestures to the tablet along with a pen for fine graphics.

(A bridge Wacom device is the Cintiq, which actually does combine a full monitor that's pen-enabled.)


You can, of course, control your Mac, out of the box, with your voice - it's in System Preferences>Speech>Speech Recognition. But for complete hands-free, there's Dragon Dictate. This welcome migrant from the Windows PC world is nifty software that lets you speak, and those words appear on your screen. It's 'voiced typing'. It comes complete with a headset with a speaker and microphone. It does utilise Apple's inbuilt assistive voice control to some extent, but adds many tricks of its own.

Dragon Dictate learns your foibles - the more time you spend training the software and tinkering with it by adding words, the more accurate it becomes, so the learning curve flattens out fairly quickly.

To do a mouse click, you simply speak a command such as 'Mouse Click', 'Mouse Double/Triple Click', 'Press/Hold Mouse' or 'Release Mouse'. Optional modifiers designate one or more keys such as Command, Option, Shift or Caps Lock.

You can buy Dragon Dictate from the usual Mac outlets, and there are academic discounts. The vendor in New Zealand is MacSense.

Apple is still evolving its input methods and may take or add to third party efforts as it goes. There have been company acquisitions that open up many possibilities. Lion adds more capabilities towards a mouse-less future, and it's interesting to watch its Californian system and interface designers navigate towards a more intuitive future.

- Mark Webster