Mac Life and Gizmodo are both reporting that Snow Leopard will add multi-touch gestures to all older MacBooks and MacBook Pros. This has gotten a lot of people's hopes up that three- and four-finger multi-touch gestures will be back-ported to all Apple portables that previously did not have them.

Unfortunately, this is incorrect. Apples own information on Snow Leopard's enhancements reads, "All Mac notebooks with Multi-Touch trackpads now support three- and four-finger gestures." (emphasis added)

This raises the question, what's the difference between a multi-touch trackpad and a regular one, and which models have it?

The multi-touch trackpad was introduced with the first MacBook Air in early 2008. Not only does it allow two-finger scrolling like older models, it also allows advanced three-finger gestures like swiping to go back in Safari.

One month later, the early 2008 MacBook Pro received the same trackpad, with the same gestures. The multi-touch trackpad gains this new functionality because it has an embedded controller chip, identical to the one in the iPhone and iPod Touch, which allows advanced input from more than two fingers at once.

Later, the unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros debuted with multi-touch trackpads, but also introduced new four-finger gestures, which will not be officially supported in the older MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros until Snow Leopard's release.

The original MacBook Air and early 2008 MacBook Pro are the only machines which will gain additional gestures via Snow Leopard. The only reason these notebook models are able to gain these gestures via software updates, while earlier MacBook Pros and all plastic MacBooks are not, is because they possess the multi-touch controller chip in their trackpads.

Just to break it down, this is a list of the only, and I mean only, notebooks that support multi-touch gestures, either now or after Snow Leopard:

MacBook Air (all models)
Early 2008 MacBook Pro
Late 2008 17" MacBook Pro
Unibody MacBook (all models)
Unibody MacBook Pro (all models)

If you have a MacBook Pro manufactured before early 2008 or any plastic MacBook, then Snow Leopard or not, multi-touch isn't coming your way...

It's impossible not to love a blog post that begins, "I found a way to remote control my R2D2 with an iPhone."

The video above shows the author, ggpipe, using the iPhone's accelerometer to control R2's dome. Pretty cool. In the future, he plans to use the phone to send text to R2's logic displays. We love it and can't wait to see a fully assembled, iPhone-powered R2D2!

It's great to see people extending the iPhone's capabilities, and homegrown remotes are a cool choice. A couple of weeks ago, we posted a story about a guy who turned his iPhone into an R/C aircraft controller, and last year we saw Delphi's Wireless Vehicle Access software that lets you control many of your car's functions. Keep up the good work, everyone!

[Via Rick Yaeger]

A tweet this afternoon pointed me to a post by Dave "MacSparky" Sparks titled The Netbook Experiment, in which he talked about his disappointment with a Dell mini 9 netbook. Since I was about to send out a tweet to the world at large announcing the sale of my Dell mini 9, I found it fascinating that Sparks had a similar experience to mine.

I wrote about creating a hackintosh (AKA hackb00k) out of a Dell mini 9 in a long post back in October of 2008, and at that time I was fairly impressed with the low cost and capabilities of the device. However, after actually using the mini 9 for six months, I find it almost useless as a "real computer" and have decided that it needs to go. The moral of the story? You definitely get what you pay for, and a $499 computer is not going to be a productivity tool. Even if you delude yourself into thinking that since you're only going to use it for email it will be a worthwhile investment, you're wrong. If you want to know how I came to these conclusions, read on.

Check this out, folks. Some enterprising young hackers have got an IR keyboard working with a non-jailbroken iPhone. With nothing more than $20US worth of parts and the iPhone 2.0 SDK, they built an adapter for the headphone port that talks with a modified version of the audio port modem microcontroller firmware.

Of course, this isn't a rig that my Aunt Ethel is going to run out and buy for her own iPhone, but it's the first time we've seen an external keyboard working with an intact iPhone. Back in the day, my Stowaway keyboard brought my Palm ///e to unknown heights of usefulness. I'd like to experience the same glee with my iPhone.

Update: We've heard from two separate developers (Ari Weinstein and Jake Marsh) that they've put together quick and easy methods for enabling tethering on 3.0 iPhones (an all-in-one tool and a full user guide, respectively). Check out the links for details.

When something so appealing as the possibility of wireless Internet access anywhere you go is dangled in front of you, is it any surprise when you reflexively reach for it? After developer Steven Troughton-Smith inadvertently turned on the tethering controls on his upgraded-to-3.0 iPhone, several people made a deliberate effort to enable the feature. Posts on personal blogs and at the MacRumors forums testify to the successful quest, and there's a specific walkthrough posted and a UK-specific IPCC file kicking around.

Of course, it goes without saying that tethering your phone, in the absence of a carrier contract that permits such connectivity, is the sort of thing that may get you in a spot of trouble. Examples of such potential hazards include extremely large data bills, summary termination of your account, or hair on your palms. While jailbroken phones have been tethering for some time with few issues, past performance is no guarantee of future outcomes.

There's quite a debate going on in the Mac web over Safari 4's new user interface. Personally, I think the new tab implementation is hideous, so I was glad to see that Caius Durling has discovered a bevy of hidden preferences for Safari 4.

With a few quick Terminal commands you can restore sanity to your tabs, bring back the old URL completion behavior, remove CoverFlow from the Bookmarks view, and few other neat tricks. On the other hand, if crazy tabs float your boat, they're easy enough to restore in the same way.

[via Download Squad]

There's a very cool video at Ralf Ackermann's blog showing an iPhone receiving input from an Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Of course, it requires a jailbroken phone, but Ralf claims that it works in all iPhone apps that make use of the keyboard.

This reminds me of the Stowaway Keyboard I used with my old Palm IIIe. I didn't mind Graffiti as much as some others did, but attaching that keyboard to my Palm increased its usefulness many times over.

Of course, I'd love to use a wireless keyboard with my iPhone. Since I won't be jailbreaking, here's hoping Apple (or someone else) will make this available to scaredy cats like me.

As one might expect in the hubub following Hulu's decision to block Boxee users from streaming its content, a technical work around has now popped up. Over at Lifehacker they've got complete instructions for installing a plugin for XBMC / Boxee that will bring back the brain-softening stream.

It appears to be a relatively simple process that works for both the Apple TV and the Mac versions of Boxee. Of course, there's no telling how long this particular patch will work, though frankly it seems hopeless on the part of Hulu. After all, they have to make their content available to web browsers, so in the end all the XBMC / Boxee hackers have to do is fool the Hulu servers into thinking they're streaming content to a regular web browser's Flash plugin. So unless I'm missing something, from a technical standpoint it seems like as long as the XBMC community is willing to write patches I don't see how Hulu can keep their content locked up. Of course whether they might have some legal recourse is another matter whatsoever.

Update: Apparently the plugin is already broken. Hopefully, a new one will pop up soon.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted the news that Apple has filed comments with the US Copyright Office stating that the act of jailbreaking your iPhone is a copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, and therefore illegal. The EFF says that Apple is claiming that jailbreak apps still require modified versions of Apple's software, and Apple apparently believes that those versions are infringing on their copyrights.

The EFF responds, in turn, that "reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software," saying that yes, even though jailbreakers are using Apple's copyrighted code, they are doing so in a way that allows them functionality that Apple doesn't provide access to on their own.

At this point, of course, this is just a complaint in the copyright office, and Apple hasn't made any legal moves yet against anyone responsible for jailbreaking. As the EFF states, it would be extremely hard for them to go after individual jailbreakers -- if you buy an iPhone, it should be your right to "get under the hood," as they say, and do what you want.

But (and keep in mind that this is TUAW, not The Unofficial Legal Weblog, and we are not lawyers) it seems Apple may be able to try and make a case against anyone offering software that does modify or otherwise "misuse" their copyrighted code. We'll have to see if they explore that position more in the future. You can read Apple's full response here (27 pages). You can see the EFF's initial filings here.

Stay tuned for more news and analysis on the issue.

Good news for those of us who still have PowerPC-powered Macs lying around: while the new Garageband Learn to Play feature isn't actually designed to work with the old machines (part of Apple's switch to the new Intel chips), it apparently still does. If you've got iLife installed on your old Mac and double-click on the Learn to Play files themselves (hidden in /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Learn To Play/), Mac.Blorge says that they'll work just fine. Unfortunately, you won't be able to buy new lessons from the store (people are still testing -- there may be a workaround here eventually), but if you want to play the ones you've got, they should work, even if playback isn't perfect.

Additionally, if you want to try to do a little hex editing, you may be able to get iMovie '09 playing on a PowerPC Mac as well. That one's just dodging the PowerPC check, though, so there's a good chance that some things won't work right on the old machine. Either that, or Apple is just trying to build in random requirements to get us to upgrade. Conspiracy hats, anyone?

At any rate, this isn't unexpected -- we're two years past the official switch, and of course at some point Apple had to move on with their new software. For the moment, you might get things working with a few tweaks, but eventually you'll have to look at replacing that old G4 if you want to run the shiny stuff.

MacMod.com has announced their honorees for the best mods on Macs that they saw last year, and you can see all of the hacks and mods over at their site right now. Most of the mods are case modifications, like the very slick iPhone custom, and the "Xbox G4," as seen above, which is a Powerbook G4 modded into the case of an Xbox 360 (with working ring of light!).

I find it interesting that despite all of the slick case designs and gadget melds, the winner ends up being a software hack (well, it's actually more than a software hack, but still, you won't find any neon tubing in this mod, just a beige case): Leopard running on a PowerMac 8500. The mod itself ends up being a fine trip over the history of Apple's current software, its past machines, and all of the gooey chips and hardware inside. Very cool. Kudos to all the modders for their work -- we can't wait to see what 2009 brings to the mod community.

A little while ago, we posted about Gregory Cohen's eeeMac -- he modded an eeePC into an OS X-running ultraportable, including adding a little Apple icon on the back. And now, he's posted how he did it all on a blog, so that if you've got a few Saturday afternoons, an eeePC to destroy, and a big interest in making a really tiny (fake) Mac, you can do it too. And even if you don't want to crack the case and do a little modding, you can still try to just get OS X running on the little machine -- Gregory has done all the hard work for you and boiled everything you need down into a 22mb disk image (you'll also need a retail OS X disc, of course).

Very cool. I'd never have the time or insight to put one of these together, but I can definitely marvel at the achievement.

Around here, we used to call her "the unstoppable Erica Sadun" -- well, not to her face, but sometimes when she wasn't paying attention. The Queen of the iPhone Hackers has leveraged the undocumented video-out features in the iPhone 2.2 SDK, in cooperation with the clever folk at Freeverse Software, to produce the first playable demonstration of an iPhone game that displays on an external monitor. The one-off build of Moto Chaser plays best on a 2nd gen iPod touch (since it's got the fastest base hardware) and uses the device accelerometer for steering. On an HDTV, it outputs a respectable 20fps at 640x480.

Erica's post at Ars goes into the details of the work that Bruce Morrison and his team at Freeverse did to bring this custom build to rapid fruition, and it notes that this is in no way a product at this point; it's just a tech demo, although an impressive one. I had the opportunity to see this build in person earlier today at Freeverse's offices, and the surprising thing is how natural it seems to use the iPod touch as a game controller for big-screen play. With a less-intensive offering (a quiz or music guessing game would be ideal) and a design that takes advantage of the iPod's screen for simultaneous content display... well, I'd be game for that.

Video embedded in the 2nd half of the post. Check it out, and let us know what your dream game would be for a video-out setup from your iPhone or iPod touch.

While you're geeking out with your techie friends building battle bots or pumpkin cannons, why not give your dog a little love at the same time?

TUAW reader Stephen Myers sent us a link about a fun little project he worked on. He wants to be able to check on his dog's well-being and reward the dog with treats from anywhere he can use his iPhone. Stephen found out about ioBridge, a company that develops electronic monitoring and control modules that connect to any Ethernet network and can be controlled via an encrypted web front end.

Myers used an I/O module and servo smart board from ioBridge, a servo, an old CD spindle case, some cardboard and wood scraps, a large syringe plunger, and a webcam to build his device, and then used the ioBridge web interface to create a widget that controlled the device. No programming was required. The system generated javascript that was then embedded into a web page optimized for the iPhone screen, and now Myers can check up on Cooper, his dog, and give Cooper some treats.

Myers has many more details about the system in his blog entry, and he will be writing future posts about how he's using ioBridge and X10 controllers to turn lights on and off in his home -- from his iPhone.

Be sure to check out the YouTube video below!

Perhaps you've seen a Volkswagen Beetle driving around with a flower in its dashboard bud vase. People put all sorts of things in there, but we say ditch the gerbera daisies and go for something more useful.

Bug owner Nathan Barry has hacked his bud vase to accommodate his iPhone. By sawing away one slot for his USB car charger's cable and another to steady the iPhone, he made a clever stand that's easy to see from the driver's seat.

Good job, Nathan! My iPhone can be found bouncing around the passenger seat when I'm in my wife's car. The audio jack in my car is hidden inside the arm rest, which is even less convenient. Yes, I've tried FM transmitters but decided that they're manufactured by Satan himself.

So, how do you listen to your iPhone (or iPod) in your car?