T-Mobile G1 multi-touch demonstrated in video

[Ryan Gardner]

Originally Posted by inphu510n

Yep. Either the program isn't optimized or the hardware isn't quite fast enough to track both fingers accurately. Looking at how it traced, it is possible to implement something fairly reliable for pinch/expand actions. Though, I wouldn't count on this making it into any functionality released by Google for this device.

It's most certainly that the program isn't optimized. Not only is the program not optimized, the method of grabbing the data itself is a complete hack. I'm really busy with my day job this week, but later on I will post the source code and document everything - I will put at least one basic optimization in place (currently, it is regexing every time it polls that device - which is unnecessary since I can spit the data out in a format that i can just use .split(" ") and get the same result - but I was lazy at 2:00AM and didn't want to recompile my kernel for my phone then)

It's unlikely that Google / T-mobile will ever push out an update to this device that includes official multitouch support, but it's entirely reasonable that multitouch support can be built into the android platform and that such support can be enabled very easily by developers for the G1 with a custom firmware.

The question of how to best implement support for multitouch in the android platform must be addressed - if Google doesn't have a multitouch device in the pipepline it might not be a top priority for them, but as a community we can work with them to get support properly put into the platform so that any future official device will be easy to implement, and any G1 owners who want to run custom builds could get multitouch support as soon as the stuff is in place.

As far as patents and such are concerned, let the lawyers deal with that.