I promise I'll get rid of the sig

[Jay Vaughan]

> I see this question a lot, and it seems to come from a perceptiom that
> microsoft couldn't possibly have seen touch coming.

Well, it is only fair .. look how they handled things like TWAIN and  
MIDI, and SCSI, for example ..

>  I don't know the
> technical details, but laptop touchpads have supported things like
> gestures for a while.

How do you get those gestures in your own app, through which API?

>  My guess (and only a guess) is the display has
> some kind of gesture sensing input driver and that if the OS doesn't
> support multitouch internally, this driver will translate to something
> the os does.

Its really this detail that interests me.

>
> If the os *does* support natively, then it is the apps that you need
> to worry about.  Most apps I plan to use on such a device (really, fl
> studio and vaz modular only) should mostly work, at least with single
> touches (gestures might confuse it).
>

Its not just gestures, but support for multiple independent,  
relatively-tracked cursor input points.  I don't know how Windows  
handles it, but for example on Plaszma (Creative Zii Egg) its done  
very well .. you get up to 10 different cursor positions, each one  
updating independently as long as the finger is down and so on ..  
these positions are tracked by the OS and events are sent according to  
motion input by the user.  Same with iPhoneOS, which also has the  
ability to do basic hysteresis with the accelerometers, so you get an  
event at the start of a shake, at the end of a shake, and so on ..

Does Windows post similar events?  I'm curious, honestly, I don't know  
how it works on Windows ..

;
--
Jay Vaughan