the next step on the desktop

[Marco Martin]

On Tuesday 01 February 2011, Dario Freddi wrote:
> Aaron, thanks for putting this to attention. I want to add some other
> points which are relevant to me and I think fit well into this context.
> Sorry for not replying to other points, but I see a lot of enthusiasm,
> which is awesome, but also translates to: too much text :D
> 
> However, preamble: these days I'm using Mac OS for some tasks, and while I
> am proud about missing a LOT of stuff from KDE, and think KDE is overall
> better, I have found myself missing some small things in Mac OS.
> 
> The very first one is: multitouch gestures on the touchpad. In Mac OS,
> using a four-finger swipe triggers present window or show desktop,
> depending on the direction of the swipe. This is a TOTAL game changer in
> usability imo, as you are able to access windows or desktop through a
> single gesture. I think this would be a great target and rather simple to
> implement, given that the underlying architecture is ready - maybe
> somebody else can comment on that.

It (as usual) all depends fro the hardware support i fear :/

I know  QTouchEvents and the higher level gestures in Qt are supported on osx 
wit their touchpads.
no idea under linux tough (i would guess no, since the multitouch framework 
directly reads from the event device of exactly the touchscreen panel it's in 
the lenovos, that also, support only two input points)
It will migrate to XI2 tough, so should become less hacky.

also, the mac touchpads i think are quite different from the usual synaptic in 
the other laptops, there is some gesture support i think, but dunno how much 
access there is to this stuff.

Aanyways, i think everybody that has any kind of device where qt supports 
qtouchevents should play with them as much as they can, so when the underlying 
stack becomes less a tragedy, those things should start to work for everybody. 

Cheers,
Marco Martin