multi-touch-dev team mailing list archive

[Duncan McGreggor <duncan.mcgreggor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello multi-touchers!

Those of you with 3M or N-Trig hardware can now expect an out-of-the-box 
touch experience that "just works" on Maverick, please file bugs if it 
doesn't. A first cut of multi-touch support for Ubuntu has landed, 
including drivers for a range of hardware, a gesture processing system 
which does the heavy lifting of gesture analysis, APIs for developers 
who want to build gestures into their apps, and support for 
gesture-based window management in Unity.

The uTouch gesture framework includes several different components:

 * libutouch-geis - ("Gesture Engine Interface and Support") which 
provides a consistent platform independent interface for any system-wide 
input gesture recognition mechanism for toolkits and applications
 * libutouch-grail - ("Gesture Recognition And Instantiation Library") 
which handles the raw data processing and provides higher-level gesture 
abstractions for developers to consume
 * gesturetest - which helps show the streams of events and data, 
useful for debugging and planning

The utouch metapackage will pull in everything you need. It will be 
installed by default on UNE ("apt-get install ubuntu-netbook" for the 
full experience on your desktop, or "apt-get install utouch" for the 
touch-related pieces only). It should be available shortly.

A big "thank-you!" to the crack team of engineers working on this 
at/with Canonical:

 * Chase Douglas
 * Stephen Webb
 * Henrik Rydberg
 * Rafi Rubin
 * Ikbel Boulabiar
 * Duncan McGreggor

Additional insight and support was provided (both directly and 
indirectly) by the following:

 * Stéphane Chatty
 * Peter Hutterer
 * Ara Pulido
 * Carlos Garnacho
 * Neil Patel
 * Cody Russell
 * Ted Gould
 * David Barth
 * Alberto Milone
 * Mathieu Virbel

In addition, the design work that underpins and guides the effort is 
published at http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfkkjjcj_1482g457bcc7, thank 
you to the folks responsible.

All of the relevant code is being hosted on Launchpad under a top-level 
project group:

  * https://launchpad.net/canonical-multitouch

We'll add to that project group over time. For the moment, we'd like to 
highlight the following projects that form the core of our stack:

  * https://launchpad.net/canonical-multitouch/utouch-grail
  * https://launchpad.net/canonical-multitouch/utouch-geis

We set up a PPA so that you can work with the latest and greatest. You 
can start using what's there by entering the following in your terminal:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:utouch-team/utouch
  sudo apt-get update

There are a number of touch-related applications and frameworks that are 
under active development. They are beginning to aggregate on Launchpad 
under the HCI project group - if you'd would like to contribute new 
multi-touch-aware software, consider doing it as part of that project 
group to share resources such as lists, news, translation teams and so 
on with other folks interested in the same field:

  https://launchpad.net/hci

For those of our readers coming across this announcement in various web 
archives, you can keep up-to-date directly by subscribing to the mail 
list on this team page:
  https://launchpad.net/~multi-touch-dev

Stay tuned!

-- Canonical Multitouch Team