Multitouch
Contents
2011-02-24 - GEIS 2.0, XInput 2.1 (Xorg MT), Qt4 Touch Support, and Ginn (gestures for legacy apps) landed in Natty!
2011-02-21 - GEIS v2.0 C Bindings Released
2010-12-01 - New GEIS v2.0 C Bindings posted
2010-11-23 - uTouch Architecture for Natty
2010-11-07 - Canonical and Codethink at Bostom GNOME Summit
2010-10-19 - Probabilistic Input for uTouch?
2010-10-16 - Multitouch and Qt
2010-10-13 - Ubuntu 10.10 Multi-touch Video
2010-10-07 - Multi-touch at UDS-N in Orlando, October 25th-29th
2010-09-21 - The Growing Linux Multi-touch Community
2010-09-02 - HCI at Canonical
2010-08-16 - Multi-touch Support Lands in Maverick
2010-08-16 - Gestures with multitouch in Ubuntu 10.10
2010-08-16 - Multitouch in Maverick
Overview
Supported Gestures
Unity has support for some system gestures, and you can try those out right away. Here's a list:
- 3 finger pinch to maximize/restore windows
- 3 finger press and drag to move window
- 3 finger touch to show grab handles
- 4 finger swipe left/right to reveal launcher
- 4 finger tap to open dash
If you are running Natty with the "classic" GNOME Desktop, utouch will be installed, but since you don't have Unity running, system gestures won't be available. However, by using Ginn configured for your window manager, you should be able to have a similar gesture experience.
Legacy Applications
Ginn is installed by default, and provides users with the ability to add gestures for applications that do not directly support gestures. Ginn supports everything from photo viewers and text editors to window managers!
Issues?
If you have questions, be sure to come back here and finish reading the wiki! Also, these links may help:
About
The Wiki
This resource features information about multitouch support for Ubuntu, including:
- drivers for a range of hardware
- a gesture processing system which does the heavy lifting of gesture analysis
- APIs for developers who want to build gestures into their apps
- support for gesture-based window management in Unity
uTouch Overview
The Ubuntu uTouch gesture framework includes several different components and is associated with various tools and projects:
- kernel drivers (evdev, mtdev)
- a display server (currently only X is supported; there are future plans for Wayland)
- Grail - the gesture recognizer
- GEIS - platform/distro agnostic API for gestures
- Support in toolkits (Qt, GTK)
- Support for legacy applications (Ginn)
See the "uTouch In-Depth" section below for more information on the projects various aspects (including current work). Architectural information is available there as well.
For the full list of projects related to uTouch, be sure to see the "Projects" section on this page:
A overview of the gesture interaction UX architecture is available at:
Joining the Community
Join our live webchat channel on IRC (browser app access to #ubuntu-touch on Freenode.net)
uTouch In-Depth
Multitouch/Definitions - A glossary of terms we use when discussing uTouch technology, both at the user-experience and engineering levels
Testing - This covers getting started, checking your hardware (and our stack), and community-driven QA
Development - How to contribute and related resources
Current Work - What's happening this cycle, including information on the current architecture
History - Work done in previous versions of Ubuntu, including information on previous architectures
Additional Resources - Information on research, Ubuntu brainstorming, and other related material