Even though the Androig G1 phone has touch screen capabilities, it doesn’t support multithouch out-of-the-box. Luke Hutchison posted a blog entry over the weekend detailing how to get multitouch working on your G1, as well as a few demo applications he wrote. He also posted a video showing multitouch working on the G1.
Hutchison made the necessary changes to the Android software stack, and also wrote a number of demo applications to show off the multitouch capabilities of Android and the G1. Note, though, that this is a proof-of-concept, and that performance isn’t up-to-speed due to the lack of OpenGL acceleration and the lack of kinetic zooming (should be “trivial to implement”, he adds). Hutchison also explains that the current API only implements step-wise zooming, taking the fluency out of the animations.
The implementation is completely forwards and backwards compatible; you can implement extra multitouch features into your applications, without breaking them for unpatched G1s:
The technical details: currently there is no way for an app to detect whether or not the phone has this multi-touch patch until the user initiates a multi-touch gesture, but at that point the size field of a MotionEvent in the onTouchEvent() method will have a value greater than 1.0. You can read multi-touch information by parsing this value, as shown in MultiTouchController.java in the demo apps below. Unpatched G1s will never generate a size value greater than 1.0, so you know that a size value less than or equal to 1.0 is a single-touch event regardless of whether or not the phone has been patched.
The remainder of the blog entry deals with how to patch your G1, which obviously comes down to flashing it with a community firmware. According to Hutchison, it is unlikely that multitouch support will ever make it to the G1 officially, despite the fact that there is support for it in the Android kernel. “In my opinion, it is unlikely that the G1 will ever get official support for multi-touch from Google in its lifetime, because it was never designed as a multi-touch device, and there are some limitations to multi-touch on this device,” he explains, “Google will also not accept upstream this specific workaround solution to hack multi-touch onto the G1, understanably so, as no multi-touch API has yet been proposed or agreed on. See this thread for more information.”
it works great, but it still is a little jumpy. but its definitely coming along good. Im an iPhone convert and I love the G1. Im using the ADP1 and I love the freedom we get with the Android OS
How about Xorg get the mouse from randomly jumping to a corner of the screen? That would be impressive.
It’s truly annoying with KDE4.x and your miss is under your control one moment and the next you have the Expose behavior ala OS X the next.
you can always disable the hot corners in the kwin config. Although you shouldn’t have to …
That’s not the point. It’s not the hot point that is the causal part of the reaction. It’s been this way long before KDE 4. It happens in Gnome, KDE, Windowmaker and more.
My hope is that Predictable Pointer Acceleration:
http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/PointerAcceleration
entering into X Server branch 1.6 manages these “resets” to the coordinate system points of either 0,top or 0,bottom or far right, top and far right, bottom.
I find this truly interesting. Apple has a patent to these technologies, and here are a bunch of people saying, “hey who cares I just want this feature…”
On this one I think I will stand on Apple’s side. Apple created a smart phone market when other’s were failing. Now that they have created it everybody wants to copy…
So you think that the patent should be enforceable, even though it clearly fails both the “non-obvious” and “prior art” tests?
LMAO! Sorry to break it to you, but the reality is that Apple is the Johnny-come-lately in a market where others were successful for years.
If anything, RIM, Palm, Symbian, Microsoft, etc, should be suing Apple.
No matter how many half assed Iphone features you add.. It’s still not an Iphone…
Have i mentioned that i still can’t stand linux.
That’s ironic, considering that the iPhone STILL lacks basic features that every other smartphone OS in existence has had for the better part of a decade.
But hey, there nothing new about Apple fanboys preferring style over substance.