Now that iPhone 2.0 is out I started playing around with some of the new web features, and soon found that I had created the prototypical virtual light table that’s an essential demo for any new multitouch technology.

It’s about 100 lines of JavaScript. It grabs the 10 latest photos from Flickr’s “interesting photos” API and randomly places them on the screen for you to play with:

This is great if you have an iPhone with the 2.0 software, but desktop browsers should get some multitouch love too. So I started writing a little bridge that fakes multitouch events in desktop browsers. It’s far from complete, but it’s just good enough to get the virtual light table demo working.

So go ahead and load it up in the new iPhone MobileSafari or Safari 3.1+ / WebKit nightly (requires CSS transforms):

http://tlrobinson.net/iphone/lighttable/

In desktop browsers it uses the previous clicked location as a second “touch”, so you can click a photo then click and drag another spot on the photo to resize and rotate (notice the yellow dot).

For a good overview of touch events and gestures, check out this SitePen blog post and Apple’s documentation.

Here’s the source for the fake multitouch bridge:

http://tlrobinson.net/iphone/lighttable/multitouch-fake.js.

Clearly the reverse of this bridge would be even more useful, since iPhone only sends mouse events under specific conditions. The mousedown, mouseup, and mousemove events could be emulated using the touch equivalents to make certain web apps work on the iPhone without much additional work. Of course you would need to either cancel the default actions (i.e. panning and zooming) on touch events, or have some way to manage the interactions between them.