Mittwoch, 29. Juli 2009

Emulating multi-touch using two tablets

Kaj Grönholm's post about multi-touch motivated me to implement my previous idea of using two tablets to emulate multi-touch input (which should allow for 2 "real" multi-touch cursors). So, I quickly hacked together a modified version of the SimpleSimulator from TUIO_CPP and loaded it on a N800 and a N810. The result works quite well: (link to the video)

Again, the multitouch version of NumptyPhysics uses two cursors for dragging and three cursors for deleting, which works nicely on a multitouch table. Oh, and if you crank up the volume on that video, you will hear the sounds that we have added to NumptyPhysics recently in order to give some audible feedback about the user actions. Stay tuned for more in a few days.

Mittwoch, 15. Juli 2009

gPodder: Waiting for the "final" Fremantle SDK

The summer season is finally here after a bunch of exams. Time to think about how to spend a part of my free time working on some open source projects that have been on the back-burner for some weeks now.

Since my last post, the thing about Qt has been announced, and the Fremantle SDK beta 2 has been published. Last time I tailored gPodder to run on Fremantle, everything worked in the SDK, but reportedly not on the devices - it's very difficult for developers to really test and develop for Fremantle with different versions in both the SDK and on the device (it works fine in the SDK!).

So, instead of spending time on the Fremantle version that might not be really worth it after all, I decided to improve the core of gPodder and make it work fast and reliable on both Desktop computers and N8x0 devices. When the final version of the SDK is released, I can always re-evaluate and get the code running in a few days, depending on how much has changed in comparison to the beta SDK.

Even though I'm not actively working on gPodder for Fremantle, keep reporting bugs so that I know what to start working on when I decide to continue development on it in case the first "stable" version of the SDK is released or a device is announced. Again, the time will be better spent working on improving gPodder for both the N800 and N810 until that happens.