I’ve gotten quite a few inquiries over the years asking when Flash Player would support multitouch inputs. The answer: right now! Here’s a quick video demo:
For more info on multitouch, hardware decoding, etc., check out these interviews with the FP engineers. [Via]
Is it just me or is multi touch on Windows 7 very laggy?
I have now tried at least 5 different multi touch systems running Windows 7 but all of them exhibited a lot of lag… especially if you compare it to how responsive the multi-touch on iPhone is.
Tom, The lag in that case is actually due to the touchsmart hardware. (I wrote that demo in the video) There are some quirks with the specific model that was used in the demo, but overall, it works very well.
[Thanks for the info, Andrew. I was wondering about that myself. –J.]
only on windows and devices. No multitouch trackpad on mac os x for you!
Although the more polite crashing of flash in 10.1 will be an odd change from the current “you didn’t really want to use your browser anyway” behavior. It’s not making it more stable so you aren’t diving at the computer to install flash blockers, but it’s a change.
i’m rather bummed about the fact that GPU support for Flash won’t support Nvidia 8800 GPUs. I guess I need a new video card,huh? My current one can run PhysX as a co-processor. Maybe Adobe apps could support this so we could throw Pshop pallets around in a 3-D space and watch them bounce off the “walls” of the desktop.
Do you get many inquiries about why Flash Player is so goddamn awful on Macs?
Actually, It does support multitouch on the macbook track pads. I personally don’t use a mac, but have definitely seen it working on others’ machines… I think it requres a macbook pro with the latest OSX release. There are 2 multi-touch paradigms that are supported: indirect and direct. Direct being that you touch the screen directly, and indirect, where there are mulitple inputs on a trackpad, not on the screen. In either case, the API is exactly the same. It is just slightly different from the UX perspective.
That’s a nice demo.
But when are they going to give a demo showing that Flash Player doesn’t crash, doesn’t burn up my CPU, doesn’t fail to iinstall half the time, and other *useful* things?
More proof that multitouch is a bunch of empty hype. This demo was even worse than the two or three years of zooming and rotating we’ve already tolerated.
The gestures demonstrated here don’t even make sense. The “spreading” movement causes a completely different UI to appear when it’s used. Why is that better than simply clicking on a tab or other “reveal” control?
And, like many multitouch proposals, this one requires waving your arms all over a big-ass screen. Who wants to do that all day?
It’s time to admit that multitouch was a boondoggle and MOVE ON. Talk about tiresome.
It is a start but as Adobe’s own documentation states, “Applications can listen for multi-touch events, or gesture events (not both at the same time). ”
In other words, you can pinch to zoom, or you can rotate, but you can’t zoom and rotate. Along with limiting the interface options, this makes multiuser applications impossible. You might want to check out GestureWorks to develop true multitouch applications.