April 2008 Archives
Recently, as you may have noticed, I've gotten into working with multi-touch a lot. It's a common focus among modern HCI experts, and as many people would agree, it seems to be the direction we are heading in the field. While some would argue that the technology is far from mainstream, one group in particular is working towards fixing that in the best kind of way -- open source.
The Natural User Interface Group is a group of like-minded individuals working towards making multi-touch surfaces more mainstream. They've got a lot of open source software and step-by-step guides to making multi-touch surfaces, and getting software up and running with them. In addition, they've got a great IRC channel on freenode, #nuigroup where a lot of friendly and helpful people hang out answering questions and talking multi-touch. I stopped by after getting an comment on Photo Touch from one of their members, and ended up staying way later than I should have discussing multi-touch.
In addition, NUIG is a Google Summer of Code group this year, so I encourage anyone still looking for a group to submit an application to, to definitely check them out. One individual, who has been working on NUIG related things with regards to Cocoa is Bridger Maxwell. He and I talked at length about some more in depth multi-touch capabilities coming to Cocoa as apart of his proposal to the NUIG for this year's summer of code. Hopefully, he'll get accepted, and he and I can work together to bring some better support for Mac OS X, Cocoa specifically, in the open source multi-touch world. Like Bridger says on his blog, Cocoa provides a lot of great tools for data visualization and allows developers to create amazing looking graphics code with a fraction of the code of other platforms.
If you are interested in multi-touch, and the possibilities that are out there, you should definitely check this out. If these rumors are to be believed, we might all be writing multi-touch code much sooner than we think.
FCC to turn down Skype's mobile open access plea: "The FCC plans to dismiss a request from Skype that would require mobile operators to open their networks.
Skype? Wanting someone to be more open? Are you serious? Get back to me when you open your own software up to third parties, then you can go back to writing petitions for other people to open up their own.
(Via Macworld.)
