Ubuntu gets multi-touch
Ubuntu’s next release will include support for multi-touch input. This follows the release of uTouch 1.0 by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.
Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth announced the release of uTouch on his blog this week, saying that the new touch technology would be included in the Maverick Meerkat (10.10) release scheduled for October: “I’m delighted that the first cut of Canonical’s UTouch framework has landed in Maverick and will be there for its release on 10.10.10.”
uTouch is a multi-touch framework that makes it possible to include touch and gesture controls to all aspects of the Ubuntu desktop, from the kernel through to desktop applications.
Shuttleworth said that Canonical was currently targeting the Dell XT2 as a development environment so users with one of those machines could already get the benefit of multi-touch if they used the pre-release versions of Maverick.
Shuttleworth said, however, that uTouch was designed to be more than just touch input. He said the design team had been “developing a ‘touch language’ which goes beyond the work that we’ve seen elsewhere. Rather than single, magic gestures, we’re making it possible for basic gestures to be chained, or composed, into more sophisticated ‘sentences’.”
The growing popularity of mobile devices such as the tablet PCs, netbooks and smartbooks is making touch input highly desirable. Ubuntu already has a customised netbook version of its desktop OS available and by adding multi-touch support is hoping to make further inroads into the ultra-portable market.
Canonical’s multi-touch support brings Linux in line with other major OS makers including Apple and Microsoft.
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