Friday, January 22, 2010

Nexus One and multi touch - not available officially, but hacker make it available

The Google's Nexus One doesn't have multitouch right out of the box, as Andy Rubin (Andy Rubin on Wikipedia) explains at CES. This is not the only reason, as many suspect a non aggression pact between Google and Apple.

But as Android is an open source system, Cyanogen, a hacker from xda-developers just release a Multi touch browser for the Nexus

For the moment, the multitouch is just for the browser. But it works.

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Who wants multitouch for their N1 browser?

I just whipped this up, this will be in my upcoming ROM. The pinch-zoom helper code was written by Luke Hutchison.

WARNING: You may lose your bookmarks and browser settings by doing this.

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Read the full post, get the apk and the instruction to install it on your Nexus One

The key point to understand with the lack of official support for multitouch in Android, it's that it make developers develop applications without multitouch metaphor. So, when the multitouch will be officially supported by Android, the whole ecosystem will have to adapt in a big move to adopt multitouch behavior, gestures, metaphor, ... in the design of the applications. As times passes, the gap between the iPhone and Android system is going wider and wider, as iPhone already has multitouch but Android not. So, there will be a day where Google will have to take the risk to contend Apple on what seems to be an essential feature.

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