True Multitouch Authoring for Flash & Flex True Multitouch Authoring for Flash & Flex

GestureWorks provides the most comprehensive development environment for creating multitouch enabled applications with Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex. Our company, Ideum, originally developed GestureWorks to speed development of our own multitouch projects and installations.

With built-in support for multiple simultaneous gestures, GestureWorks goes far beyond the limited single gesture support found in the Flash Player 10.1 prerelease.1 Along with ease of authoring, GestureWorks provides many features and functions that Flash’s native API does not:

  • multitouch support for Adobe Flex
  • an open source gesture library with many built-in gestures
  • continuous transitional gesturing (e.g. smoothly switch from one gesture to another mid-gesture)
  • concurrent gesturing (e.g. multiple simultaneous gestures may be performed on the same object)
  • a method for tracking the change in position of the points
  • a mechanism to determine point clustering, orientation, point/cluster history, and whether a cluster of points should be treated as a hand rather than as discrete points
  • selection algorithms for gesture determination
  • application settings that allow developers to specify how the SDK receives touch event data, without having to change the project’s existing code base
  • elegant degradation from multitouch to dual-touch to non-multitouch-enabled systems

The GestureWorks development approach is similar to that of Adobe Flex, making it easy to create custom applications by extending a single GestureWorks object. For example, the code below is all that’s required to make an object scalable (with a multitouch gesture) in ActionScript:

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var element:Touchsprite = new Touchsprite();

private function onSCale(event:GestureEvent):void {
    trace("GESTURE: Scale!");
  element.scaleX += event.value;
  element.scaleY += event.value;
}

element.addEventListener(GestureEvent.GESTURE_SCALE, onScale);

RequirementsRequirements and Specifications

Adobe PDFGestureWorks Software Specifications (Updated: 04-22-10, 512kb PDF).
GestureWorks for Flash and Flex is available for single seat, or site use.

  • Flash CS4 or CS5 (beta). See the Adobe Flash site [ http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/systemreqs/ ] for complete system requirements and more information.
and/or
  • Adobe Flash Builder 4. See the Adobe Flash Builder site [ http://www.adobe.com/products/flashbuilder/ ] for complete system requirements and more information.

1 See: Multitouch + NUI blog and the AIR 2 Developer FAQ on the Adobe Labs site for more details.