J.F. Rick wrote:
As we move from mouse-keyboard devices to touch-based ones, it would be nice if we could unify touch development across the different Pharo platforms (iOS, Android, Windows 8, Linux, etc.), so that we can start to build touch-aware widgets and frameworks. Currently, there's a lot of interest but no unified movement. For instance, I've got a very nice multi-touch 27" computer that I run in Linux. I develop the applications in Pharo but I currently use a hack to get the touch events: I use OSProcess to start the mtdev2tuio application that takes touch input and sends it via TUIO. I then use a UDP socket to read the events on Pharo. If I am to share my work, I need to get beyond the hack. I (or rather Igor as I watched) investigated the possibility of using NativeBoost calls to do the same, but it would not work since mtdev2tuio has to run as superuser, meaning Pharo would have to run as superuser. We came to the conclusion that this must be a VM-level change.
I'm not a VM hacker but would like to reach the people who maintain the linux and windows VM to see if this might not be a reasonable addition to the standard VM. There does seem to be standard support for touch events in XFree86, so it shouldn't be too large a change on Linux. I assume that Windows 8 similarly makes touch events available. Is this the right place to ask or is there another mailing list (e.g., the cog-vm)? The place to ask is [vm-dev] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-dev
Cheers,
Jeff
-- Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D. http://www.je77.com/ Skype ID: jochenrick