Tag Archives: multitouch

Multitouch screencast overload

Software

Going a bit more deeply on how KDE SC 4.4 will support multitouch, here are 3 longer videos:

The first one shows marble. Is now possible (with the usual disclaimer on devices and systems that support it, hoping it will become a more pervasive feature) to zoom the earth with a two fingers gesture, making a retty natural interacion

OGG version

The second one shows Plasma: it’s possible to move, resize and rotate the widgets with two fingers, making them a bit more “real objects”. Another place of Plasma that supports multitouch is the “Blackboard” widget (painting with two fingers simultaneously ftv) and all the animated scroll widgets, such as the one used in the microblogging plasmoid and in the netbook and the webkit based widget.

OGG version

The last one shows in detail the Webbrowser widget, in particular two fingers scrolling (note that is still possible to select text with a single finger, while scrolling with two) and pinch zoom with two fingers again, all correctly maped to any transformation the widget can have.

OGG version

Cuteness 4.6

Software

Qt 4.6 has been released yay!

A while ago i received from Nokia a cute Dell Latitude Xt2 multitouch tablet pc, to produce some demos of a really really nice new feature of Qt 4.6: multitouch.

Qt provides two ways to acessing multitouch: one more abstract, where the type of gesture and direction of fingers movement already “parsed” so you already know if the user wants to zoom, scroll or rotate, that’s QGesture that’s useful to control for instance scrolling and zooming in a web browser.

If you want instead something more raw, the position of every finger now and on the last sampling, you have instead QTouchEvent. That’s useful if you want for instace paint with multiple fingers on a paint program or want implement some weird type of gesture not provided as stock. oh, and no It’s a rather different (and more simple) concept compared to Multi pointer X, since is a single event with multiple positions, rather than multiple simultaneous events.

So I tought that in KDE we have soe things that would make as an impressive demo with multitouch, so why not give it a try with Marble and Plasma :). So that’s the result (thanks to the trolls for the final edit):

This OGG version, unfortunately this is only a “raw” version, without music and titles, but gives the idea

It will be supported in KDE 4.4. Th only catch is that right now X11 doesn’t support it (..yet:p), so just as a tech demo will be possible to try it on the windows and mac builds of KDE

Multitouch, a preview

Software

Since I saw Plasma for the first time, I immediately imagined it as something really organic, where you can manipulate the objects on the canvas like one would do with real objects, just grab them with one or two hands and move them, rotate them, stretch them to make them fit as you like.

Now Qt 4.6 among a ton of new features has really qute multitouch capabilities, and made this possible, here is a sneak peek:

Won’t say more for now, more on that later :p

I did the first part of the video, than the trolls put some pepper into it (love the epic music :p)