[Ubuntu-ma] Multi-touch Support Lands in Maverick

[allili khalid]

Multi-touch Support Lands in Maverick

Canonical is pleased to announce the release of uTouch 1.0, Ubuntu’s
multi-touch and gesture stack. With Ubuntu 10.10 (the Maverick
Meerkat), users and developers will have an end-to-end touch-screen
framework — from the kernel all the way through to applications. Our
multi-touch team has worked closely with the Linux kernel and X.org
communities to improve drivers, add support for missing features, and
participate in the touch advances being made in open source world. To
complete the stack, we’ve created an open source gesture recognition
engine and defined a gesture API that provides a means for
applications to obtain and use gesture events from the uTouch gesture
engine.

Our multi-touch work began in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, when we worked to get
additional touch hardware supported in the Linux kernel, particularly
the Dell XT2, HP tx2 tablets and the Lenovo T410s laptops. With that
in place, and active development in X well under way, we reviewed our
options for gesture recognition in Linux. The Maverick cycle has seen
us produce several prototypes for gesture recognition software and the
Ubuntu archives now include the results of that effort.

The world’s expectations of software experience are being raised by
advances in mobile computing. We are bringing that revolution to the
Linux desktop: for window management and applications. Though our work
at the application level has only just started, we are certain that
multi-touch and gestures will be central to the way we use Linux
applications in future.

The success of touch in applications depends on several key factors:

    * toolkit integration of gesture APIs
    * touch support for legacy applications
    * designing new applications for finger-based interactions

Work has begun on all three fronts in Ubuntu, and we expect it to
remain an area of active interest over the next few releases up to
12.04 LTS.

Ubuntu is the fruit of collaboration across the huge Ubuntu community,
and also the amazing work of many other communities that form around
individual projects and initiatives like Debian. The uTouch framework
enables work to begin across many of those communities to make touch a
first-class interaction model in open source desktop and mobile
software.

Existing contributions in other projects have provided fertile ground
for uTouch. To name just a few:

    * Stéphane Chatty at ENAC has lead much multi-touch hardware
support in the kernel
    * Peter Hutterer at Red Hat defined multi-pointer X and proposed a
multi-touch protocol for a future version of X
    * Carlos Garnacho of the GNOME community has done multi-touch work
in X and GTK

We’re look forward to continued collaboration, ensuring that Linux
remains the preferred platform for people building cutting-edge
devices and software.

Canonical is working with manufacturers of touch-enabled products and
those of their underlying technology in order to bring innovations in
user experience to a broader audience. Our aim is to bring the
natural, tactile experience of the world to the desktop, window
manager, and applications you value — all the software that you depend
upon to get things done and have fun. Touch will be part of the Ubuntu
Netbook, Desktop and Light products from 10.10 and beyond.

Source : http://blog.canonical.com/?p=414

-- 
Khalid ALLILI
(+212) 0669406086
kallili at gmail.com
khalid at allili.net
www.allili.net





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