Techipedia

Introduction:

The touchscreen has two main attributes. First, it enables one to interact directly with what is displayed, rather than indirectly with a cursor controlled by a mouse or touchpad. Secondly, it lets one do so without requiring any intermediate device that would need to be held in the hand. Such displays can be attached to computers, or to networks as terminals. They also play a prominent role in the design of digital appliances such as the personal digital assistant (PDA), satellite navigation devices, mobile phones, and video games.

5-wire Resistive Touchscreen Technology
Surface Acoustic Wave Touchscreen Technology
Capacitive Touchscreen Technology
Glossary of Touch Screen Technology

Components and Working:

A basic touchscreen has three main components: a touch sensor, a controller, and a software driver. The touchscreen is an input device, so it needs to be combined with a display and a PC or other device to make a complete touch input system. 




1. Touch Sensor
A touch screen sensor is a clear glass panel with a touch responsive surface. The touch sensor/panel is placed over a display screen so that the responsive area of the panel covers the viewable area of the video screen. There are several different touch sensor technologies on the market today, each using a different method to detect touch input. The sensor generally has an electrical current or signal going through it and touching the screen causes a voltage or signal change. This voltage change is used to determine the location of the touch to the screen.

2. Controller
The controller is a small PC card that connects between the touch sensor and the PC. It takes information from the touch sensor and translates it into information that PC can understand. The controller is usually installed inside the monitor for integrated monitors or it is housed in a plastic case for external touch add-ons/overlays. The controller determines what type of interface/connection you will need on the PC. Integrated touch monitors will have an extra cable connection on the back for the touchscreen. Controllers are available that can connect to a Serial/COM port (PC) or to a USB port (PC or Macintosh). Specialized controllers are also available that work with DVD players and other devices.

3. Software Driver
The driver is a software update for the PC system that allows the touchscreen and computer to work together. It tells the computer's operating system how to interpret the touch event information that is sent from the controller. Most touch screen drivers today are a mouse-emulation type driver. This makes touching the screen the same as clicking your mouse at the same location on the screen. This allows the touchscreen to work with existing software and allows new applications to be developed without the need for touchscreen specific programming. Some equipment such as thin client terminals, DVD players, and specialized computer systems either do not use software drivers or they have their own built-in touch screen driver. 

Before smartphones took away keyboards and replaced them with slick touchscreens,T9 was the king of software on mobile devices.The predictive text entry method changed how people composed messages and allowed us to type faster than ever on tiny keyboards.

It gave us a glimpse into a world where phones would not just help people talk to each other from anywhere but also allow e-mail and act as instant messaging devices.

Last week, Martin King, 60, one of the inventors behind the T9 input method passed away in Seattle after a five-year battle with cancer.

The T9 idea came at a time when text messaging was just taking off. But typing these messages on a tiny keyboards crammed with just a few keys proved to be painful.

T9 or Text on 9 Keys, changed that. It allowed users to enter words by pressing a single key for each letter. Earlier systems had multiple letters associated with each key and users had to select one of them, requiring two or more taps on the phone keyboard.

T9 also combined groups of letter on each phone key with a dictionary ordered by the frequency of the use of the word. This let users type faster by throwing up words they used most frequently first and then letting them access other choices with the press of a key.

Users could also manually add words to be integrated into the T9 software. (Read this amazingly detailed article on how T9 was born and how it took off.)

T9 transformed how users interacted with their mobile phones. It took people beyond just voice calls on mobile phones, giving them the ability to type out short messages and longer emails. In fact, T9 became so popular and widespread it is still around today.

T9 was born out of the work that King and his co-founder Cliff Kushler did in developing products for people with disabilities. King had developed an eye-tracking communications device that would lay the foundation for his company called Tegic Communications in 1995.

As part of their work for the eye tracking device, King and Kushler looked at the most efficient way to input text using only a few eye positions. That research became the groundwork for a new kind of text input method called T9.

Tegic was sold to AOL in 1999 for $350 million and in 2007 Nuance Communications purchased the company.

In its beautiful tribute to King, the Techflash blog talks about how King tried to solve problems:

King was diagnosed with cancer five years ago. But it didn't stop him from starting a new company called Exbiblio.  His co-founder at Tegic, Kushler is now part of a company called Swype that is changing text entry on touchscreen phones.

About four billion phones worldwide still use T9 software.

5. Jaguar
The Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., was built by Cray. If the name sounds familiar, that's because Seymour Cray dominated the computing world from the 1960s through the 1980s. His Cray-2 was the fastest computer in the world for four years in the '80s. Earlier this month, Jaguar got a makeover, upping its speed to 260 teraflops. Like many other supercomputers on the list, Jaguar is used to conduct a variety of security and scientific research.

4. Ranger 
Unlike the other supercomputers at the top of this list, Ranger is a system intended to be open. Sun Microsystems worked with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas and a team of academic institutions to build Ranger, which has one-half a petaflop (the next step up from teraflop) capacity. Researchers at academic institutions in the United States whose hearts beat faster at the possibility of crunching "parallel algorithms" and doing "scalable visualization," can submit proposals to have the system run their numbers.

3. BlueGene/P at Argonne
Another Big Blue system is the BlueGene/P at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill. Argonne, along with Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Berkeley, was part of the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear bomb in the 1940s. It's the first national laboratory in the country and one of the largest. Argonne still conducts nuclear research, but is also conducting research in environmental management, energy resources, and a variety of scientific fields.

2. BlueGene/L
IBM's BlueGene/L system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., is nothing to sneeze at. It can do 478.2 trillion operations in a second, which it does in collaboration with Los Alamos and Sandia. BlueGene/L can run nuclear computer simulations, replacing underground testing. Thankfully.

1. Roadrunner 
Earlier this month, Roadrunner became the first computer ever to reach the one petaflop per second level. Translation: it can do one thousand trillion calculations in the blink of an eye. That's 15 zeroes. That's so fast, even analogies can't touch it. Roadrunner, named after New Mexico's state bird, is operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory. IBM designed and built the record-breaking system, which will be used to do energy, astronomy, climate, human genome research, and to keep the nation's nuclear stockpile safe. Beep-beep.

Well, here is FBML....(Face Book Markup Language)

Adding Static FBML Application to Your Facebook Fan Page allows your page to become more fully functional, appearing more like your blog or a web page.

It’s easy to do and something necessary if you wish to include images, YouTube videos, or opt-in forms on your page.

Following these steps you’ll find it’s very easy to add, and add them now because soon Facebook will not allow new pages to be added with FBML.

Now that you have added the application, in the ‘Edit Page’ menu you will see an ‘FBML – FBML’ entry. Click ‘Edit’ for this entry and then add the Title which will appear on the Tab (Boxes will be going away soon).

In the content field you can paste almost any HTML including Forms from your auto-responder, CSS,  and images.

Do not set the width of any image or item greater than 520 pixels, which  is the maximum for FBML application tabs.

Click ‘Save Changes’ when you are finished.

Going back to the ‘Edit Page’ menu, find the FBML application by your given title in the previous step, and select ‘Application Settings’ this time.

Next to the ‘Tab’ option, click on ‘Add’. If it only has ‘Remove’ as an option, then it has already been added.

At the bottom of your existing FBML edit windows you will see ‘Add another FBML box’, under the ‘Save’ / ‘Cancel’ buttons. There is a limit but I’m not sure how many you can create before this link would disappear.

Facebook is going to do away with static FBML and move to iFrames, which is an HTML element that uses javascript. According to Facebook, “By the end of this year, we will no longer allow new FBML applications to be created, so all new canvas applications and Page tabs will have to be based on IFrames and our JavaScript SDK. We will, however, continue to support existing implementations of the older authentication mechanism as well as FBML on Page tabs and applications. [Emphasis added.]“.

So anyone that is thinking of adding the static FBML should do so now, so that Facebook may allow those existing FBML tabs to keep them after the change.

To add more functionality for your fan page by including your blog’s feed, check out Adding Your Blog RSS Feed to Your Facebook Fan Page.

And as long as you do it soon, adding static FBML to your Facebook Fan page is easy and allows a great amount of flexibility in creating an attractive Facebook fan page!