Mobile/Archive/Multitouch

Summary

Support a basic set of fairly standard multitouch gestures.

Current Status

• Android: Pinch and swipe landed
• Maemo: Pinch landed; swipe not implemented

Next Steps

• Find someone with access to multitouch hardware to implement swipe for Maemo/Qt.

Related Bugs

• bug 590246 - multitouch swipe gesture for Android
• bug 590565 - multitouch swipe gesture for Maemo

Team

• Project Lead: mbrubeck

Designs

Pinch to zoom

• Zooming should be centered around the point between the two pinching fingers.
• The zoom should be animated, while in progress, so that a user can tell when to stop.

Interaction with sidebars

One interaction behavior to get right is going to be what happens when a user pinch zooms out past 100% page width. At this point, conceptually, pinching more ought to bring sidebars into view. I'd like for them to pull in, partially, and snap back out elastically, like the grey area beyond page edges in mobile safari. This should (a) increase the sense of physicality of the interface and (b) improve discoverability of the side areas.

Other two-finger gestures

note mbrubeck pointed out that two-finger swiping conflicts with panning adjustments while pinch-zooming. This kind of course correction is, I think, MORE important than any of these listed gestural actions. Should we be investigating three-finger actions (hard on a small screen, but actually consistent with desktop gestures).

Update Some Android hardware does not support three-finger multitouch. This includes the Nexus One and many other HTC phones. We might need to restrict ourselves to one- and two-finger gestures.

• Two finger swipes (see note, above)
  • swipe down - go to top of page
  • swipe up - go to bottom of page
  • swipe right - go back a page
  • swipe left - go forward a page