multi-touch-dev team mailing list archive

[Florian Echtler <floe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 08:01 -0600, Duncan McGreggor wrote:
> On 10/09/2010 02:25 AM, Henrik Rydberg wrote:
> >> 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?
> > I believe what you would like to look at is the drafts of XI2.1.
> Florian, in case you don't follow the xorg-devel mail list
> (http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg), that is the place
> where all of this is being discussed in great detail. Daniel Stone is
> already making great progress, and Chase will be jumping in soon to help
> out as well, now that Maverick is released.
> Best-case scenario is that a beta of XInput 2.1 will be available within
> 6 months or so. Do note that is very optimistic :-) But hey, I'm just
> that kind of guy. Besides, it's Daniel and Chase working on it... I
> think miracles aren't too much to expect :-)
Duncan, thanks for your information. I'm on xorg-devel, although I
haven't really followed the low-level protocol discussion closely. 

> 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.
By gesture support in this context, you mean things like multi-finger
scrolling, pinch-zoom and so on? Also highly interesting, however, this
is a longer-term perspective. For the moment, I'm just focussing on
getting a quick hack to enable multitouch-related development in Firefox
- i.e., the MozTouch* events. See also the discussion here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=599001

In fact, this is nicely complementary: MozTouch* events means low-level
support for apps inside Firefox, while the higher-level stuff (for
Firefox itself) is likely almost separate from that. I think that for
the very first approach, it's even sufficient to just use regular
multipointer input, that's probably the easiest to emulate anyway.

Florian