Earlier, in my review of Apple’s new Magic Mouse, I expressed my confusion as to why Apple wouldn’t incorporate more multi-touch gestures on the device. Certainly, a part of it is the way you hold the thing, but it seems that something like a double and triple finger click would be easy enough. One commenter wondered if there was some technical reason with the multi-touch implementation as the reason why Apple wasn’t doing that. A neat program disproves that.
FingerMgmt is a simple OS X app that allows you to track points of contact on multi-touch inputs. It was built with Apple MacBook trackpads in mind, but yes, it works with the Magic Mouse too. As you can see in the screen capture below, the Magic Mouse has no problem following up four points of contact relatively easily. It works for five too, but at that point, the surface area on the top of the mouse becomes the issue.
The newer, large MacBook trackpads meanwhile can easily distinguish up to 10 points of contact (after that, I ran out of fingers, obviously, as I’m not Count Rugen from The Princess Bride – “the six-fingered man”).
So while the Magic Mouse isn’t as versitile as the trackpads due to both the way they are used and surface area, it’s perfectly capable of doing some other interesting things with multi-touch. In the future, I suspect we’ll see Apple add two-finger click, and three-finger click options, as well as a pinch-to-zoom option. Maybe even a three-finger swipe if Apple is feeling really wild.
[via Daring Fireball]