On Friday, Logitech pushed out the Touch Mouse app that turns your iPhone and/or iPod Touch into – you guessed it – a mouse that works over the network. (I wonder what this will be like on the iPad.) The app is free (iTunes link) and you’re going to have to download the Touch Mouse Server software (link to Logitech), but it’s pretty neat, no? The app more or less turns your iPhone into a Magic Mouse, I think. I’ll test it out when I get home. Here’s a list of supported features:
• Multi-touch trackpad with the option for two or three mouse buttons
• Two-finger scrolling
• Keyboard with Control, Alt, Command/Windows keys
• On-screen text display while typing
• Show or hide the keyboard at any time
• Trackpad and keyboard are available in landscape and portrait modes
I’m not a PC gamer, but Microsoft’s latest, the SideWinder X4 keyboard has some “advanced anti-ghosting technology,” which allows it to handle up to 26 key presses at one time. Here’s the spiel from Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group (you know, the guys who co-invented Surface) on how it works:
Most keyboards use a stack of plastic sheets that are printed with silver ink to create a grid of wires underneath the keys (see picture on right, below). When a key is pressed, a row wire connects to a column wire. This works well when 1 or 2 keys are pressed, but pressing more can lead to problems. For example, if two keys in the same row are pressed and then a third key is pressed in a different row, but the same column as one of the first two, all of those rows and columns become shorted together. There are actually five different key combinations that produce the same shorted rows and columns! Since there is no way for the system to know which set was pressed, only the first two keys are reported, with the others becoming “ghosts” – unreported key presses.
The X4 will be available next month for $59.95. Microsoft Hardware