The trackpad on the late MacBooks can track up to 10 or more (!) fingers at once. Fingerpinger is an external object for MaxMSP that we wrote around code from steike.com. It’s an experimental hack… but its fun and its free…

[ download ]

TrackPadSynth is a simple but fun example of what you can do with fingerpinger. It’s a standalone version, you don’t need MaxMSP to try it out…

Output

Fingerpinger provides the following data in realtime (about every 8ms, very low latency):

• Finger index
• Frame number
• Angle
• Major and minor axis of ellipsoid
• Position
• Velocity (x,y)
• Identifier
• State
• Size

Compatibility

You’ll need a recent Apple MacBook with Intel processor
MaxMSP 4.6 or MaxMSP 5

License

Fingerpinger 2009 by Michael & Max Egger is licensed under GNU GPL 2.0 http://www.gnu.org/
Code based on http://www.steike.com/code/multitouch/

Known Issues

Mouse gestures still work

On the latest MacBooks with 4 finger gestures, we could not find a way yet to suppress the gestures for Exposé, so you’ll be confronted much too often with flying windows when playing with fingerpinger. Any help for turning off this “feature” is greatly appreciated.

Compiling

Somehow we had to copy the MultitouchSupport.framework from /System/PrivateFrameworks/ to the xcode project folder to be able to compile the external.

Download

• Max External (version 2009-06-01)
• Source code
• TrackPadSynth is a simple but fun example of what you can do with fingerpinger. It’s a standalone version, you don’t need MaxMSP to try it out…

–Reference :