When
reviewing the G1 we found a lot to like, but a lot to dislike too. We knew that some of its shortcomings, like the
missing headphone jack, were sadly permanent (
free adapters notwithstanding), but hoped that it would just be a matter of time before some enterprising soul (with an enterprising compiler) would take care of another complaint: the lack of multi-touch. Lo and behold now is that time and Ryan Gardner is that coder, author of a little app that proves the inability of the G1 to accept a two-finger salute is not a hardware limitation. You can see for yourself in a video after the break, and once Ryan is done cleaning up his code he pledges to post that, too (don't forget those comments, man). Okay, so being able to cover your screen with red and yellow splotches isn't going to convert any spoiled iPhoners, but we're thinking the rest of you developers out there should be able to pick up this ball and run with it. So make with the running, already.
posted November 22nd 2008 10:55PM
Ok there has been a lot of discussion of whether this is true multi-touch or whether he's just emulating it.
from reading his blog it would suggest that the current G1 has the hardware for multitouch and that (for whatever reason) google commented some code out of the driver source in drivers/input/touchscreen/synaptics_i2c_rmi.c.
you can view the code here: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=kernel/msm.git;a=blob;f=drivers/input/touchscreen/synaptics_i2c_rmi.c;h=701f93308a1591a2f0554d2856565569c1f3bed4;hb=HEAD
what this guy did is uncomment the lines of code then look at the debug output and noted two fingers were being tracked.
the issue with his code is (from what i can tell) he wasn't sure on the best way to make this data available to applications... and that is the reason he has some hacked code that polls like crazy... he didn't find the best way :-p
his blog post about it http://www.ryebrye.com/blog/2008/11/17/proving-the-g1-screen-can-handle-multi-touch/
way to kill the 1337...
dammit.
here we go agan...
Seriously. Hasn't that dude learned that he should stop posting until this gets sorted out?
Those were all replies, too. That means a barrage of emails from Engadget :S
yeah I really appreciated the 63 mails I received :-) (good job the mail is small and i use threading - otherwise i might of actually been annoyed)
this guy is clearly faking the whole 'it's not me it's my computer'
a ban would do the job :-)
If Engadget's comment system ever did implement banning (which it doesn't, since it sucks so bad), I can think of worthier targets for the banhammer.
Besides, look at the rate of posting, there's no way a human could have done that. And the fact that some of his comments don't spam..
If you click on his account, it says he joined on November 18th and he already has 799 comments on engadget hahahahaha
This blogospammer guy just won himself the 2008 Engadget Best Blogger of the year award as he has managed to secure a whopping 1000+ posts within Nov.18 - Nov 23. Thats an achievement of a lifetime any1 here would never get.
On the other hand, I'm curious as to why kind of blogozombies are liable for this kind of infinite blogospamming....
who coined those words btw?
Yeah, he beat phanbouy in just a few articles. That's pretty amazing.
wow, talk about a combo breaker
I read the thread on my Storm, it took me 6 hours to scroll through the comments!