The Multitouch Aquaria Project

Linkdump

Monday 2011-03-21

I have mentioned a number of links to others in the Lenovo competition over the last few weeks, always promising to post them here. I am finally doing so.

Multitouch development in Ubuntu

For some reason, Canonical has hidden a bunch of multitouch information on this page on the Kubuntu wiki. Some, but not all, of it is duplicated on the Ubuntu wiki multitouch page. Highlights include a page on how to get PyMT working, the Ubuntu gesture UI guidelines, and testing.

I used mtview—which is available in the repositories in Natty—during the stage one presentation. It displays colored blobs under touches. Supposedly UCube is a similar testing tool for gestures, but I can’t get it to run (it crashes with a freetype-related error on both Maverick and Natty).

A screenshot of the mtview utility, with “mtview” spelled out in pastel blobs on the screen.

mtview in use. On the Lenovo S10-3t up to two fingers can be used to draw simultaneously.

Cando touchscreen

There has been some confusion about how many simultaneous touches the Cando touchscreen in the S10-3t supports. Reading the Linux driver source reveals a clear software limitation. Ubuntu utouch bug #627185 reveals this to be a hardware limitation. According to the comment by Stéphane Chatty, the author of the Cando driver (and many others as part of the ENAC Interactive computing laboratory), this is a common restriction, which explains why Canonical’s list of supported devices is so short. The Ubuntu multitouch stack seem to require three- and four-finger capable hardware for the full experience.

Other links

Atom feed

I have also added an Atom feed for posts on this blog, and reencoded the videos from the last post. They look much better, and I have also added a fallback for people using browsers that don’t support the open HTML5 video codecs (Theora and WebM).