"As the Linux desktop increases in popularity, the user interface experience has become increasingly important. For example, most laptops today have multitouch capabilities that have yet to be fully exposed and exploited in the free software ecosystem. Soon we will be carrying around multitouch tablets with a traditional Linux desktop or similar foundation. In order to provide a high-quality and rich experience we must fully exploit multitouch gestures. The uTouch stack developed by Canonical aims to provide a foundation for gestures on the Linux desktop."
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Member since:2008-03-08
Throwing a few stones doesnt suddenly make them great contributors. They need to do more and work with the upstream communities too to make sure that any good work done survives beyond canonical/Ubuntu.
uTouch is a hack that isnt suported by the wider community (which has been working on xinput 2/2.1/2.2) where the major developers think that uthouch is doing things in the wrong part of the stack.
This will likely remain Ubuntu only technology where everyone else in the FOSS community goes another way.
The big question here is where are gestures interpreted and at what level. should the X environment interpret them? the toolkit or the application?
The people working in X Inout believe that X is the wrong place as it wouldnt know enough about the applications and they provide inpout to feed up the layer (which then GTK3 or the application can interpret or ignore as needed).
Canonical/Ubuntu feel that X is the right place as for the few gestures, they should be consistent and also would appear quicker and with less work in the short term (though then when there is a right way that works well, this will create more work).
Member since:2009-09-03
You probably hate having choice. Having to choose between Gnome, KDE, xfce etc. Having to choose between Gnome Shell or Unity. I like choices, I like it when people try to think outside the box, I like the fact I can choose between Git, Mercurial and others. I like the fact Fedora and Ubuntu decided to drop X and move to Wayland. Sometimes you're left with a few or a lot of choices KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc. sometimes one dies and another survives VHS/Beta, but having that choice in the first place is a great thing. It allows different ideas to flurish and gives everyone a chance to do it in a different, even if eventually not a better way.Canonical is giving you more choices, whether you like those options or not (I hate unity) they're still good to have.
So, the Xbox One disaster continues. Microsoft's policy for dealing with the used games market has reportedly leaked - and it's a clear and direct attack to destroy the used games market. Prices for used games will be set at the retail value of a new game, and retailers have to hook into Microsoft's computer systems and comply with Microsoft's terms and conditions.At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
The day has finally come! Jolla has finally announced the launch device for its Sailfish operating system - and by god this is a looker. It's decidedly different from other phones out there, but it has good specifications and carries a relatively reasonably price tag - EUR 399, and it's up for pre-order today, shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.
Why does Google get so much credit in the technology industry? Why, despite the company's many obvious failings, do many geeks and enthusiasts still hold a somewhat positive view on the all-knowing technology giant? A specific talk at Google I/O this week provides the answer.
OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
"Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening." That's one way to start an insider explanation of why Windows' performance isn't up to snuff. Written by someone who actually contributes code to the Windows NT kernel, the comment on Hacker News, later deleted but reposted with permission on Marc Bevand's blog, paints a very dreary picture of the state of Windows development. The root issue? Think of how Linux is developed, and you'll know the answer.
This is one of those news items that's fun to write, fun to read, fun to comment on, and where no one will be able to say anything unkind. It's all just one big ball of awesome fluffiness. TuneTracker, the BeOS radio automation software, has just released something very special: TuneTracker System 5, the first version designed entirely and specifically for Haiku. In fact, it actually includes Haiku in the software package. Better yet, TuneTracker also unveiled several system-in-a-box products - which have Haiku and TuneTracker pre-installed.
Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.They're here! Whether that excites you or not remains to be seen, but the Galaxy S4, which will most likely become the best selling Android smartphone of the year by a huge margin, has been reviewed by all the major sites, and there's lots of interesting conclusions in there - although I think most of you will get the gist.
Member since:
2009-09-03
Where are all those people claiming Canonical and Ubuntu contribute nothing for Linux and the open source community now?