Skip to main content

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat bringing multi touch to Linux world


The Ubuntu 10.10 will get multitouch interface abilities, catching the Linux operating system up to Windows and Mac OS X in at least one domain.
"Every single major PC manufacturer has been asking for a touch story on Linux. This has been one of the major missing points for Linux in the PC ecosystem," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the company called Canonical that develops and supports Ubuntu. But multitouch support will arrive in the next version of Ubuntu, 10.10, aka Maverick Meerkat.
Adding multitouch isn't easy, particularly in the open-source world of Linux where many independent organizations and programmers are involved. Canonical programmers assembled multitouch work from different layers of Linux software, wrote gesture recognition support tools, and added an interface to make it easier for programmers to add multitouch support.
Some applications and actions shouldn't need any changes at all, Shuttleworth said. Those using GNOME's GTK and KDE's Qt interface elements, for example, should automatically benefit from some multitouch gestures, such as scrolling down through a list.
With a multitouch interface, a computing device can detect several simultaneous contact points with a trackpad or touch screen. They figure prominently on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac laptops, but the idea is now moving steadily into the mainstream as a way to interact in a more intuitive, physical way with a computer.
But just how intuitive is multitouch? Physical gestures are certainly less arcane than many computing commands--Photoshop's Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S to save a graphic for the Web, say, or Unix's "ls -al" to list all files in a directory--including hidden ones--including file size and other details.
Command-line interfaces are indeed an exercise in memorization. But at least with many apps, an array of menu commands or toolbar icons can let people discover what they might want to do or at least poke around. Multitouch commands, by comparison, can get be arbitrary and, potentially, very complicated.
One issue: there aren't many standards. Pinching to zoom out and spreading fingers to zoom in is pretty common and intuitive, but what should a three-finger swipe down do? On Firefox on Mac OS X, it moves to the bottom of a Web page, but on Safari, it does nothing. Who's to say who's right?
"If every single application picks up on different patterns for the user interface, then users are going to be mystified and not delighted" by multitouch interfaces, Shuttleworth said.
Another issue: what layer of the software stack is listening to what you're doing? Firefox is getting multitouch support, but when should the browser be gathering the multitouch input and delivering it to a Web application, and when should the operating system be gathering the input and taking appropriate actions on its own?
In Ubuntu's case, there will be some standards. One convention to be employed is that people will tell the computer what type of operation they want to perform by starting it with a particular number of finger touches--a number that can be changed mid-gesture as needed.
"If you started with two fingers, we know instantly that's going to the application. If it's initiated with three fingers, we interpret that as window management," Shuttleworth said. "We have a rich vocabulary to position windows, to minimize or maximize them, to place them efficiently, and they all start with a three-finger tap."
After the initial contact, more actions can be taken. "Rather than single, magic gestures, we're making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated sentences.' The basic gestures, or primitives, are like individual verbs, and stringing them together allows for richer interactions," Shuttleworth said in his blog post.
Confusion is a problem, but it's better for Linux to be able to participate now in multitouch development rather than after things settle down, Shuttleworth said.
"This is going to be an enormously rich area of research," he said. "I expect in five years' time gestures will be much better thought through and a standard in applications."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

SHORT CUT TO REMOVE PENDRIVE

Rather than clicking on the task bar and then safely removing the pendrive you can eaily do so creating a shortcut: The Steps are:- 1)Create shortcut on your desktop by right click and selecting new shortcut from the menu. 2)Type "RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" click next and then finish. shortcut is created and now you can assign a shortcut key to it. just right click on it and select properties-> Click on Shortcut Tab -> Assign a Shortcut key to it(it will take Ctrl+Alt by default)eg: if you press 1 shortcut will be Ctrl+Alt+1.

Decrapify / Debloat Windows 10 with a Powershell Script

Windows 10 is a decent OS from Microsoft after the disaster known as Windows 8 and 8.1. Although Windows is still better with no Modern UI crap, no ads, minimal telemetry, no Edge to bug you. But Windows 10 is a decent compromise if you want a stable OS with modern features like DirectX 12. Earlier OEMs used to bundle PCs and Laptops with crapware, with Windows 10, now Microsoft themselves bundle crapware. Welcome to Software as a Service (SaaS) model. On top of that we have OEM crapware on top of Microsoft crapware. As a result trying to Debloat or DeCrapify Windows 10 is getting absurd and as a system admin it is disheartening to see all that performance go to waste on the messed up attempt by Microsoft to do an Appstore and its apps. Fortunately a kind soul who goes by name  Sycne x has worked painstakingly to provide us a simple solution that works considerably well. Let's Begin To download the script visit  here , and click Clone or Download and Click Downl...

uTorrent and BitTorrent beta comes to Android, available on Google Play

Earlier this year, we heard reports that BitTorrent Inc., was working on an Android version of its popular uTorrent and BitTorrent client.  Fans of the uTorrent and BitTorrent torrent clients can now rejoice!, your  favorite  desktop torrent clients are now  available  on your mobile devices, because BitTorrent Inc. has launched a beta apps of uTorrent and BitTorrent clients for any mobile or tablet running Android OS. These are fully functional, standalone clients unlike the Remote apps that were available until now.   There are many torrent clients already available on Google Play, but most of them are have limited functionality and are ad-supported unless you have a paid version but both of these apps are currently free, with features like RSS feeds for serialized downloads , unlimited upload/download speed, and running and downloading over WiFi in background, currently there are no limits on download sizes either. Both  apps suppo...