Part of ensuring that GestureWorks continues to evolve as a rich development environment is the release of the gesture library as open source. Since gestural interfaces are such a new development, there is a strong need to keep part of the framework open and editable. The gesture library contains our ActionScript code for each gesture and touch event possible in GestureWorks, as well as example gesture code to give developers a template for writing their own gestures. Anyone is free to create their own gesture and touch events and distribute them to others, in the hope of facilitating complex and interesting multitouch development in Flash as well as promoting an open community of practice.
We’ve also released our individual gesture illustrations for download to aid developers in writing easily understandable documentation for each program they create, and as a resource for anyone who needs clear graphical representation of multitouch gestures as the number of gestures possible in multitouch environments continues to grow.
The gesture library is licensed under FreeBSD and our gesture illustrations have been released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
Since Adobe announced support for multitouch back in November, there has quite a bit of confusion surrounding Flash multitouch support. Recently, we downloaded an example from Adobe’s site to try out the built-in support for ourselves.
Adobe unveiled some multitouch examples using the built-in support found in the beta releases of Adobe AIR 2 and Flash 10.1 Adobe MAX back in November. A YouTube video of the presentation from Adobe MAX shows the limitations of the multitouch currently found in Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.
There is no support for multiple simultaneous gestures. In other words, you can scale or rotate, but you can’t scale and rotate at the same time. Support for “drag” is limited to a one-finger drag (using a mouse event). The Adobe Max examples show simple, single gestures and a lot of single-finger dragging.
Adobe’s limited incarnation of multitouch may work for simple applications using dual-touch systems, but it seems entirely inadequate for complex applications, multiuser apps, or for development on the growing list of multitouch devices supporting more than two points.
Here’s a video comparison that we developed using the example found on the Adobe website. It directly compares Adobe’s upcoming built-in support to that of our Gestureworks multitouch framework for Flash (available today).
We feel this video clearly demonstrates the significant differences between Adobe’s built-in support and the multitouch support provided via Gestureworks. You can try the Adobe example yourself at the Adobe’s Developer Connection and get a Trial Version of Gestureworks, and download the example apps (.zip 343K) we used in our video to see for yourself. You might also want to see the Multitouch + NUI blog which brought up concerns about Adobe’s implementation back in November.
We’ve just launched a redesign of our portfolio site and blog. The site aggregates content from our Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube sites, embedding it in our new website. For now, we’ve added simple links to our Facebook and Linked In pages. We may expand our integration with these sites in the future. Along with extending our reach into these social networking platforms, the site is easier to maintain and update.
The site is powered by WordPress. While this is hardly revolutionary, having WordPress work as our de facto content management system gives us a flexible platform for our Web presence. Our portfolio and products are custom “pages” in WordPress. The WordPress plug-ins Tweet Blender and Flickr Feed Gallery display tweets and photo thumbnails on the front page.
The portfolio itself contains descriptions for 14 projects. We’ve gone with a new editorial style for presenting project descriptions along with an improved layout. Each project description contains links to either YouTube videos or Flickr photos (or screen shots). We use Adobe Flash to integrate these media items into each portfolio piece. “Custom fields” in WordPress are used as hooks to connect to remote content and control the layout.
Five of the descriptions in the portfolio are for new projects we’ve worked on this fall and winter. These projects all involve either multitouch and/or multiuser technology. The new projects are:
