multi-touch-dev team mailing list archive

[Duncan McGreggor <duncan.mcgreggor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/07/2010 03:29 AM, Florian Echtler wrote:
> Hello list,

Welcome, Florian -- thanks for saying hello and sharing your research
with us!

> just wanted to say a quick hello to everyone here. My name is Florian
> Echtler, and I've done quite some multitouch development during my PhD
> thesis, particularly with respect to gesture recognition. 
> 
> I've briefly exchanged emails with Chase Douglas some weeks ago, and we
> agreeed that there's a lot of similarity between our concepts. As they
> were developed completely independent, it's probably not the worst
> direction to take :-) (If you want to have a look yourself at what I
> did, I'd be delighted if you to hear your opinion about chapter 3 of my
> thesis at http://mediatum2.ub.tum.de/node?id=796958 ).
> 
> Implementation-wise, I've developed libTISCH - see http://tisch.sf.net/
> and https://edge.launchpad.net/~floe/+archive/libtisch - which does some
> things very similar to utouch, although tries to be OS-independent. (In
> retrospect, all the effort to get it to run across Linux/Mac/Win was
> probably a waste of time :-/ ).
> 
> Right now, I've put further work on libTISCH on hold for a while and am
> experimenting with the newly introduced Firefox multitouch support
> which, I think, is also quite promising as a development platform. 

You should coordinate these efforts with Cody Russell (he's on the list
too). We had a team sprint (if you're unfamiliar with the term, it's
briefly described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(software_development)) in August
and Cody spent a few hours that week checking out Firefox's MT support
in Windows. It looked like a pretty straight-forward task to map GEIS to
the FF gestures. We're going to be discussing this at the upcoming
Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) session here:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/appdevs-dx-n-firefox-gesture-support

We are planning, at the very least, to explore FF gesture support in
Natty, and possibly work on some gesture implementation code for FF if
the exploration goes well. We're going to be a little light on the MT
team this cycle, so if you (or others in the community) would like to
assist in getting gestures for apps into Ubuntu for the new cycle, let's
stay coordinated. Your assistance could really accelerate gesture support.

Also, note that UDS for Natty is going to in Orlando, Florida Oct
25th-29th. Remote participation is possible for those that can't travel.
Here's the site:
  http://uds.ubuntu.com/

Thanks,

d

> So right at the end, here's one question after all: I'm considering to
> build a quick hack for Firefox to support multitouch in Ubuntu. This is
> pretty straightforward using XI2, however, what I didn't quite get is
> whether XI2 will currently deliver _multi-pointer_ events for
> _multi-touch_ input. What would be the preferred way here?
> 
> Many thanks for reading so far,
> Yours, Florian