More Free Multitouch Components
There is a growing list of components available to GestureWorks users on the Open Exhibits website. These open components are fully compatible with GestureWorks and can help speed up development time. The mask image viewer, panoramic viewer, and gigapixel viewer are completely unique: you won’t find other, open, multitouch enabled software components that do what these modules do.
Head over to Open Exhibits and register to download these free components or check out the videos showing them in action below.
Flash Runtimes, ActionScript, AIR and the Road Ahead
A new Adobe Flash White Paper has been released and it provides a very encouraging road map for future development and a commitment from Adobe to “meet the needs of developers over the next five to ten years.”
The White Paper acknowledges that “rich motion graphics will be deployed directly via the browser using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and other modern web technologies” but states that Flash runtimes are “particularly and uniquely suited for two primary use cases: creating and deploying rich, expressive games with console-quality graphics and deploying premium video.”
When it comes to gaming, Flash does have some huge advantages which are outlined in the paper:
- Near-universal reach on PCs via the Flash Player browser plug-in, and on mobile devices via Adobe AIR
- Ability to quickly add new features and make them available to the widest audience
- Fully hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D rendering support that provides console quality graphics
- Rich gaming developer ecosystem
- Robust, object-oriented programming language
- World-class creative and developer tooling including Adobe Flash® Builder®, Adobe Flash® Professional, Adobe
Photoshop®, and Adobe Illustrator®
Obviously, from our standpoint here at GestureWorks, we would add the ability to add extensible support for multitouch gestures and authoring support for multitouch and object-based applications to the list of advantages that Flash provides.
The white paper outlines Flash Player releases through the rest of the year. There are dozens of new features and improvements slated for this year. A few in that were are particularly excited about:
- Keyboard input support in full-screen mode
- Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content
- ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)
- Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand availability of
hardware accelerated content - Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS
- Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base
- Work on the ActionScript virtual machine
- Updates to the ActionScript language
- “Pepper” implementation of Flash Player provides a layer between the plug-in and browser that
abstracts away differences between browser and operating system implementations. (Flash running in Chrome!)
Again, the points above are a partial list. The big news here is a long-term commitment from Adobe to continue to improve and support ActionScript. You can read the entire Adobe Flash White Paper on the Adobe website.
21.5″ Touch Revolution Monitor and GestureWorks Pro Bundle Give Away
GestureWorks teamed up with Touch Revolution and gave away the TRū™ 21.5″ Multi-touch Desktop Monitor bundled with GestureWorks 3 Professional. TRū™ monitors use projected capacitive touch technology and have a great bezel-free design.
Ray H. from San Francisco won our drawing on April 15, 2012. Congratulations Ray!
You can purchase the bundle directly from the Touch Revolution online store.