Gestures With Multitouch In Ubuntu 10.10

jitendraharlalka writes "Mark Shuttleworth recently announced on his blog that the first cut of Canonical's UTouch framework is ready and will be available in Ubuntu Maverick. He goes on to talk about the development of 'touch language' by the design team. The 'touch language' will allow the chaining of basic gestures to create complex gestures. The approach is quite different from the single magic gestures implemented elsewhere. In Maverick, a few Gtk applications will support gesture-based scrolling."

Comments

It's just a toy

[KiloByte]

Having tried multitouch, it's useless in the long term. It is a nice gimmick to show in an advertisement, but for using it for longer than 15 minutes at a time, it's not a good idea -- you'll hand will get sore in no time.

Even for mobile devices, there is simply no better thing than the good old keyboard. If you try the on-screen touch thingy on an iPad or most Androids, it may be enough for typing a single line of text. On an N900 with a proper physical keyboard, you're in good shape after several hours of typing. And since you can't have that many distinct gestures, traditional keyboard shortcuts are so much better.

Re:It's just a toy

[shmlco]

Your hand will get sore? You're kidding,right?

There was probably some guy like you shaking his head thirty years ago. "Mice? Sorry, I tried one and it's totally useless. You always have to take your hand off the keyboard to do anything at all."

"Not to mention how sore your hand will get mashing buttons and dragging it around your desktop."

Re:It's just a toy

[JanneM]

Swype is very overrated. Works fine for 90% of what you write (if you're using a well supported language), and makes the remaining 10% a pain to use. If you use more than one language, or want to use uncommon or non-standard vocabulary that 90% drops to something like 60% or worse.

Besides, swype doesn't need multitouch. I agree with the OP; it's a nice gimmick but not particularly useful.

Re:Good job Mark, you've overcomplicated it ...

[h4rr4r]

Redhat makes half its money from RHEL.

You can even sell GPL software that uses closed art, for example.

I have bought GPLed software on my phone, perhaps the dev won't get rich, but so what. We don't need more rich folks, we need more people doing what they love making a decent income.

Re:Hardware support is still weak

[turbidostato]

"Show me ANY Linux where I can take a mix of totally random hardware thrown together and hand my 67 year old clueless dad the disc and have him install it PERFECTLY, without a SINGLE fuckup or hardware issue, and then we'll talk."

Show me FIRST the Windows where I can take a mix of totally random hardware thrown together and hand my 67 year old clueless dad the disc and have him install it PERFECTLY, without a SINGLE fuckup or hardware issue.

Re:Hardware support is still weak

[jedidiah]

Vendor specific nonsense that ignores the standard interfaces across all operating systems (MacOS included) does squat to encourage adoption of Linux. If anything, lack of this sort of nonsense for Linux is actually a considerable net gain. Incidentally, Linux has been using the "MacOS printing system" since before Apple was.

If it were up to HP, I wouldn't be able to use my all-in-one as a network printer under Linux either.