During their work on Multi-Point X, the devs dabbled with multi-touch (http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/?q=node/147), creating BlobEvents as an extension.

Blob events could be quite useful in harmattan, one such use case is listed here. Given the next device is probably about 2 years out, this hopefully gives some time to get a useful first implementation pushed/co-developed upstream to the X devs.

A conventional pencil has a writing end and an erasing end. The stylus just has a writing end... at the moment. To erase, you have to tell the app that your writing end is now an erasing end manually, though menus or buttons. Because the stylus has a point end and a long, thin line end, it is possible to differentiate between the point end and the line end. With BlobEvents, the sketch pad could notice that the user was using the line end of the stylus and automatically start erasing. So the user just flips the stylus around to write and erase--just like a real pencil.

I'm convinced you creative people here could come up with more ideas (e.g. being able to use a thumb to smudge). Post 'em here! What do you think of

Very interesting

I would love to see this in liqbase......

I was watching a lot of the videos of people playing with the N900. There is a propensity to flick upwards with the back of the finger nail, as well as to use the tip of the finger. This would be impossible on a capacitive display.

What you have highlighted would also be a problem on capacitive, and I think that multi-touch by varying the size of the touch area has a lot of possibilities.

eg finger point moves a Window, back of the finger nail flicks it away and closes the Window. This to me is quite intuitive, having grown up playing with marbles

Mike C

I suspect the main problem would be finding a multi-touch screen, or at least one which reports blob events.

Hmm, as far as I understood, this is why MPX is neat. It has been in development for quite some time now. Its also required for X11 to support multi touch, and I suppose for Maemo 6 as well.

www.stantum.com

MPX is merged in X Server 1.7.5 which got released a few days ago