Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

yes we all know that lol. it's not about capacitive, it's about pinch zoom here.

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

@roger_27: Fair point, and I should have clarified. What I was meaning is that the standard "4-wire" resistive touch panels found on most devices out there are not natively able to support multitouch. To my knowledge, that is the type that the N900 is using. You are entirely right, however, that it isn't impossible based on the sensing technology itself.

@maxximuscool: I'm sure people at Nokia know about it, and I'm also quite sure the technique isn't new. I haven't kept up with the auto-rotate issue, but that's completely different. Auto-rotation is a design decision relating to software, which could be disabled or enabled for plenty of good reasons on either side. "Fake-multitouch", as in this example, is a workaround for the actual hardware, and workarounds - pretty much by definition - aren't things you ship by choice. Besides, unlike auto-rotation, it's something that each application would have to implement itself, rather than (mostly) a property of the graphical subsystem of the OS. There's nothing stopping you or others from adding support for this to your apps, but I think I can safely say that Nokia won't be shipping it, and I don't think they should, either. It would just lead to problems, and probably look bad on their part. For one thing, currently the importance of multitouch when buying a phone is just preference; imagine if suddenly it was a choice between "multitouch" and "multitouch emulation" -- no matter how you spin it, it would come off as inferior, rather than just preference. That's aside from all the technical and support issues.

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

yeah it's belivable with what you said above. but i think developer can choose to implementing it in their application. i really hope some talented developers out there would find a way to integrating it into the OS wide one day. That's the whole point of OpenSource right? to share the ideas whether it's going to work or not.

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

Oh, I agree that it would be cool. As for Open Source, you're right, but I was trying to point out that Nokia, as a company, probably won't; someone else might be able to do it, but then you have two problems: 1) If Nokia doesn't support it, then it won't ship on the N900 officially, limiting exposure. 2) If they don't support it, then someone else has to, which can be a lot of work. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%2...#Free_software for a better explanation)

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

FAKE MULTITOUCH.

can someone just make a image viewer app and integrate fake multitouch???

Seen apps here and there with fake multitouch examples but no one has finished it

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

I mean that holding one finger in place is also valid on the iphone for their pinch zoom. Pinching both fingers is only natural for those who have used an iphone and are trained to think the apple way.

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

this is the first time i'm reading that reesistive screens can support real multitouch?!
if thats so, how come there are no devices with resistive screen that do multitouch like devices with capacitive screens?

when you push on 2 positions on a resistive screen, your effective pushed position is right between those 2 points. like its creating an average value of all points pushed.

also, holding one finger down to activate zoom and then pan up/down to zoom has already been done by samsung (look for samsung jet)

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

because there are only working prototypes, mass produced ones aren't yet available.

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

Unfortunately, that seems to be a lot of people, at least in my experience. Almost everyone I show my N900 to expects it to be a capacitive screen, even if they don't know it's called that - I can tell from how they try to use it. As soon as I say that it's "different than the iPhone", and give them the one-sentence dumbed-down explanation of the difference in technologies, they get it almost right away. For that matter, look at all the comments here on t.m.o. and elsewhere, saying that the touch panel "stinks" solely because it's not what they're used to (e.g. the iPhone). I'm not saying that this is a valid design reason not to use this feature, but just that people's expectations seem to be pretty specific in this area; for a lot of people, the iPhone was where they first saw multi-touch, and their whole concept of the technology is based on it.
I'm not arguing with you, but I thought I should point that out, as silly as it is.

Re: N900 Pinch Zoom Work around
 

:) i saw this post last night and it made me smile.
maxximus, you are right - keep up with your investigations and see what comes of them.

i did this kind of multitouch stuff a while back in liqbase and in the library its now integrated into every mouse event.

however, its not working quite as well as the other normal mouse events, theres some outside boundary cases (relating to pressure differentials between fingers) where the object under finger responds erratically and so I haven't pushed it.
i have however attempted to use it in various places and will continue to do so.

glad you are doing it in qt :)

here is a vid from my prototype on the n810
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJWvvn_cePM

btw, you can do rotation effects better because of the way you get a beam of points between your fingers.