Apple working on pressure sensitive touchscreens

I would buy a pressure sensitive Apple monitor in a heart beat. Drawing on my Wacom is alright, but it'll never be the same as pencil/pen and paper. Especially cool would be if you could set up a series of options on the pressure sensitivity. So, for example, you could set it so it knows you're using an actual paintbrush to interface with the screen.

Another cool thing would be a video game controller. Imagine something about the size of the iPhone that game developers could build customized button layouts per each game, for example.

Touch screen. Pressure sensitive. I'm sitting here using a laptop; I'm fine with the screen the way it is. Don't expecially want to touch it. But if it was where the keyboard was, tap it's a keyboard I can type, tap it's a DVORAK keyboard, I can type faster; tap, it's a tablet and I can write and draw with a pen. MAgic.

@Liquidmark:

The retarded mighty mouse could indeed benefit from pressure sensitivity: it would allow a user to right click without removing their other finger from the mouse. You know, the way it's possible to do on every. Other. Two button mouse. Made. Since the dawn of Time.

Only Apple could take something as simple as a right-click and overengineer it this badly.

I hope they'd integrate the pressure UI features so that they can work with existing pressure sensitive devices. Making extended pointing device events more mainstream would be a very good thing.

The real interface I'd like to see would be a multi-touch, pressure sensitive, tactile feedback screen using e-paper as the display technology.

I saw a demo of a pressure-sensitive touchscreen at a major company where I was working in 1990. You could do things like changing the volume of a video playing by pressing the software volume control icon down harder to make the volume go up more, or softer to get a slight change up. (I don't recall how they made the volume go down, whether that was a different icon, etc.)

But why has it taken more than a decade and a half to start seeing more mainstream products use touch control and features like multiple simultaneous touch and pressure sensitive touch?

you want a paradigm shift, go to http://www.dontclick.it/ that site changed the way I think about user interface design.

I'd love it if apple even implemented one of the things that I mentioned. One, because I could say 'Boya' and two well, it just makes sense that a pressure touch support would be the next phase in the iPhone/iPod technology, although I'm not sure how I would like to see it implemented across the apps.

Nail on the head, jonathan. Anything they can do to increase the number of "mouse events" on a device like the iPhone, the better.

It would necessitate a new way of thinking, and people would need to sensitize themselves to the nuances of movement and pressure required to perform a particular task...but that's kinda what we needed to do back in the 80s with the mouse, so I'm sure things could change again. Hell, the multi-touch screen alone is a pretty big paradigm shift.

what about click and highlight as you have the touch screen pressed harder? I think it would be helpful in doing the copy paste that people are complaining about, or just for highlighting stuff in notes.

maybe someday we will click and hold and then highlight, could access the bold, italic or other handy "highlighted on harder press" functions.

ive been waiting for something like notes to be updated with tabbed numbering, bullets, bold, italics, the stuff that helps set that marker tip font apart so i dont have to read over everything...just the important notes that i take.

maybe this is the answer

I think that could be hugely beneficial, not just for a tablet (which would be awesome) but forfuture iPhone/iTouch models. Even for something like volume control, instead of tapping the levels higher or dragging a bar with your finger, how hard or how soft you press could instantly raise/lower the level. And it would be great for adding right-click functionality to the iPhone/iTouch that would be intuitive, like, after selecting text, pressing firmly opens the menu, where as pressing softly let's you change the position.

Very, very cool.

Newton.