It’s been speculated about for a while, due to FCC filings and the like, but it’s finally here. Today, Apple introduced the Apple Magic Trackpad. It’s based on the same multi-touch technology behind current MacBook Pros and can either replace or simply compliment your existing mouse. It has a glass surface similar to the MBPs and is 80% larger than the touchpads on MBPs. It connects through a Bluetooth wireless connection.
From Apple’s PR:
The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen. Swiping through pages online feels just like flipping through pages in a book or magazine. And inertial scrolling makes moving up and down a page more natural than ever.
Why would I bring that up here, you might ask.
Simple, anybody who has played around or used any of the current iOS genealogy apps for iPhones and iPads (iOS / iPhone / iPad Genealogy Software at MobileGenealogy.com), knows how easy it can be to navigate around some of them using a touch interface. Obviously those apps are built for such an interface, and I’m not sure how/if genealogy applications running on regular Mac OS X based systems can really take advantage of this in the same way that iOS-based apps do – there maybe a way for developers to build it into their software to allow you to navigate visual family trees.
Even if that’s not the case, we all do a lot of scrolling and zooming in and out and might benefit from this. Using the Virtual Tree in MacFamilyTree as an example, it would be easy to zoom in and out and move around it.
I may pick one up in the next few weeks, and if so I’ll post a review here. I am going to have to try one out in a store, but having used a MacBook Pro extensively, I think I might just be able to use it.