Multitouch in Precise Pangolin 12.04
March 16, 2012 – 6:09 pmWith the release of 12.04 coming up I finally get to look closer at the multitouch capabilities that Chase and his team are providing.
While it was somewhat painful to enable the Magic Trackpad which I had acquired for this purpose (“…honey, this is for work…”) on my laptop (pre-beta1 status), hooking it up with my up to date desktop (as of 2012-03-16) was as easy as pie. Simply activate BT, discover devices, turn on the Trackpad (unpair it from it’s previous connection) and the BT wizard comes up – quite nifty.
Everything works as expected, well, almost everything…
It wasn’t quite intuitive having to use a 3 finger tap to get a right button click and it also took me a while to figure using 2 fingers for a middle button click (even though Chase has probably explained all this 53 times to me). It might be nice to have some explanation as part of the config module similar to what OS X does. Will have to get in touch with one of our designers to see if we can improve here.
The mouse/touchpad control center module let’s you set acceleration and sensitivity and how you want to use scrolling (edge or 2-finger). I noticed however that acceleration/sensitivity settings change little and also the scrolling options seem to be inconsistent (I already got 2 finger scrolling even though it’s disabled). I will have to follow up with the GTK guys on Monday and probably file a few bugs.
Daniel is currently busy fixing the Unity gestures for 12.04, I am excited to see how these work.
All in all I am really impressed by the slick design of the Apple Trackpad – it basically is 2 batteries with the touch sensor in a very appealing case.
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