First look: Siri gains smart home controls with HomeKit in iOS 8. Feature By AppleInsider Staff Apple's new HomeKit tools for developers won't come with a centralized app like Health or Passbook, instead leveraging the ability of the iOS voice-driven personal assistant Siri to allow users to control the temperature, lights, locks and other accessories in a modern "smart home.
" With iOS 8 still in beta, HomeKit support within the operating system is limited, and a lack of available third-party apps means the controls cannot yet be tested. But Siri already responds to some HomeKit-related commands. The current responses from Siri in iOS 8 beta 2, and details revealed by Apple at this month's Worldwide Developers Conference, do give a glimpse into exactly how HomeKit will work with the virtual assistant. For example, users will be able to use natural voice to issue commands such as "lock my front door" or "turn on the kitchen lights. " With that in mind, Apple has given developers the ability to create and define their own accessory categories. FiftyThree. Air Stylus – use your iPad as a pressure-sensitive drawing screen.
'Air Stylus' Turns Your iPad Into a Drawing Tablet for Your Mac. Air Display developer Avatron Software today launched Air Stylus, an app that allows users to utilize the iPad as a pressure-sensitive, wireless drawing surface for over 30 graphics programs on the Mac.
The app is compatible with a number of pressure sensitive styli, including the Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus and the Adonit Jot Touch 4, and works with popular programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Pixelmator. Mac 101: Your input devices. For the last few weeks I’ve casually thrown around phrases like “hover your cursor over,” “press the Command key,” and “swipe to the side on your trackpad.”
And while I’m fairly confident that such suggestions are well within your powers to understand, it’s possible (likely, even) that you, your keyboard, mouse, and trackpad are not on entirely intimate terms. Use your fingers to use your Mac in OS X Mountain Lion. PredictGaze: Using the Camera in Your Phone or Computer for Gesture Control, Eye Tracking, Face-Rec and More. When we first saw the Leap gesture control interface for the Mac, we were blown away.
Earlier than that, gamers and hackers were taken by the Wii and the Kinect. Now a new group of creators is working on the latest in gesture-control interfaces, which ought to have an advantage over the current competition: It's software-based and requires no separate pieces of hardware, instead relying on the cameras now built into virtually every computer, tablet and smartphone. Predict Gaze. The Magic Finger adds touch input to everything. Autodesk Research Touchscreens have dramatically changed the way we use our gadgets—from smartphones to tablets to even our desktop computers.
Now researchers want to change things again by giving you touch controls using any sort of surface. How? By letting you give your gadgets the finger. Magic Finger: Always-Available Input through Finger Instrumentation - Publications. Disney Technology Turns Everything into a Touch Device. You're already used to touch-enabled PCs, tablets, and smartphones, but eventually almost everything in your house could have a touch sensor, including doorknobs, cereal bowls, sofas, water, and even your own body.
That's a reality scientists at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania -- part of the Walt Disney Company's commercial research arm -- are working toward with a new touch and gesture recognition platform called Touché. The new technology relies on “swept frequency capacitive sensing” capable of processing far more information than current touch sensors that monitor a single frequency to detect single and multiple finger movements. Disney Research: Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids and Everyday Objects. Kanal von anderl2k. Paranoid blog » iPinchMe - Applescripts bound to Hand Gestures. iPinchMe - Control your Mac using simple Hand Gestures iPinchMe is a small tool, that uses your Mac’s builtin iSight to capture your finger movements and executes user definable actionscripts when you perform simple hand movements.
Download iPinchMe Requirements: OS X 10.5 or later, USB Webcam Download Link: ipinchme.zip Disclaimer:This software is provided “as is” and in a HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL state. I take no responsibility for whatever happens when you use it Here is a short introduction on how to use it: Download and unpack the file.Start the program.While the prgram is initializing, hold your palm over the red box, so that it is fully covered. 'Air Stylus' Turns Your iPad Into a Drawing Tablet for Your Mac.
iOS 8's Variable Touch Sizing Bringing 'Surface Pressure' to FiftyThree's 'Pencil' Stylus. FiftyThree announced today (via TechCrunch) that its "Pencil" iPad stylus will be updated with a new Surface Pressure feature when iOS 8 debuts later this year.
This feature allows users to change the thickness of the lines they create by controlling how much of the pencil tip comes in contact with the iPad screen. Pencil’s tapered tip was inspired by the expressive richness of real pencil points, which allow creators to change the character of the line with the angle of the tip. Livescribe. Never Miss A Word. Smartpens Remember So You Don’t Have To Record everything you write and hear.
Tap anywhere on your notes to replay the audio from that moment in time. Livescribe 3 Smartpen Announced for iOS Devices with IR Camera, Content Recognition Capabilities. Paper-based computing company Livescribe has announced the Livescribe 3, the latest version of its popular Bluetooth smartpen for iOS devices.
The smartpen includes an ARM 9 processor inside and a high speed infrared camera at the top, along with an on/off twist ring and a lithium ion battery that lasts up to 14 hours. Elevate Your Writing From the integrated stylus cap to the Swiss-made tungsten-carbide ballpoint ink cartridge, the Livescribe 3 smartpen is a statement of elegant design that delivers the experience of a premium writing instrument. Putting The Smart in Smartpen The streamlined design of the Livescribe 3 smartpen conceals an astonishing amount of technology.
'Notability' Named App of the Week, Available for Free. Popular note taking app Notability has been named Apple's App of the Week, and as a result, it is available as a free download for the first time since it was released in 2011. Notability allows users to make sketches, take notes, annotate documents, sign contracts, record lectures, and more. It supports input via a finger or stylus and includes palm rejection to make note taking easier. In addition to touch-based input, the app has a built-in text editor and it also has the ability to record audio. Air Stylus – use your iPad as a pressure-sensitive drawing screen. Air Display 2. Use Air Display to turn your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch into a wireless display for your computer. Increase your productivity with extra screen real estate or mirror your Mac or Windows computer display to your iOS device.
Air Display now connects up to 4 iPads simultaneously to create unique presentations you drive from your Mac (multi-client support coming soon to Windows too). “You have a bunch of different options to turn your iPad into a second display, but we prefer Air Display as the easiest option.” — Lifehacker With Air Display, you can wirelessly extend your computer desktop to gain more space or you can mirror your computer's screen to your iOS device and control your computer with intuitive iOS touch gestures and/or Air Display's elegant built in keyboard. Got a Bluetooth keyboard? Leap Motion. Check out the LEAP: control your Mac with gestures for only $69. We all know there will be a day when the mouse and keyboard will become obsolete, but many think that day is far off.
However, that day just might be here with a new project called “LEAP.” As first noted by The Wall Street Journal, the LEAP, developed by parent company Leap Motion, allows you to control your computer by only using your hand. It is a little hardware box as small as a stack of playing cards that sits in front of the computer monitor and tracks your hands’ motions. As you can see in the video above, this is great while playing a game or even browsing the Web. From the looks of it, the LEAP is also very cheap—currently up for pre-order on LEAP’s website for only $69.99. The technology is very similar to Microsoft’s popular Kinect platform, which allows Xbox 360 and Windows PC owners to get active with their entertainment. Review: Leap Motion Controller. For the past couple days, I’ve been gesticulating even more than normal—at times, subtly, at other times, wildly—while getting to know the latest in gesture-control technology: the Leap Motion controller. Long anticipated due to its low cost ($80), unobtrusive sardine-can size, and purported accuracy and ease of use as demonstrated in some impressive videos, I was pretty excited to try out the device, which was released today.
Gestural interfaces like the Leap Motion controller and Microsoft’s Kinect have generated a lot of buzz over the past few years, and hopes are high that they’ll eventually become as common as the mouse and keyboard, if not supplanting them. Leap Motion Wants to Make Gesture Controls More Awesome. The Kinect brought on a whole new kind of gesture controls, and the iPhone helped bring multitouch controls to the masses. Customer Reviews: Leap Motion Controller, Gesture Motion Control for PC or MAC.