14 DAY TRIAL // Gerry Carr posted last evening, October 14th, a very cool demonstration of the interaction between the new Unity shell and the uTouch gesture and multi-touch stack, on the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) Netbook Edition operating system.
Announced by Canonical on October 10th, the new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system for netbooks offers a new and innovative user interface, called Unity. But, not everyone knows that the Unity shell is fully touch-enabled!
As we've stated a couple of months ago, with Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) various GTK applications will receive gesture-based scrolling support, thanks to the uTouch gesture and multi-touch stack.
"One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them."
"But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library."
"This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more." - said Gerry Carr, Platform Marketing at Canonical, in the blog post.
At this moment, there are very few touch-enabled devices out there. However, Canonical decided to test the Unity - uTouch interaction on a Dell device. Here is the result...
For the new multi-touch technology, Canonical worked closely with the X.Org and Linux kernel communities, in order to add support for missing features or improve exiting drivers.
If you want to get involved, then you should know that Canonical's Multitouch code is published on Launchpad and it's released under the LGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses.
More features will be implemented in the next version, Ubuntu 11.04.