Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced Monday that multitouch support and gesture-based interaction will arrive in Ubuntu 10.10, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. The feature will be tightly integrated in Unity, Ubuntu's new lightweight netbook environment.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has developed a software framework called uTouch that is intended to simplify gesture handling. The company's team of designers has published an early draft of a gesture guideline document that explains how multitouch capabilities will be used in Unity. It defines a common grammar of gestures and introduces concepts like chained gestures, which will allow users to convey gesture-based instructions to the software in a more expressive way.

Ubuntu's multitouch support relies on some of the recent improvements in the Linux kernel, the Xorg display server, and the Gtk+ toolkit. Red Hat's Peter Hutterer, author of the multitouch X Input Extension, has played a key role in bringing multitouch to the Linux platform. Canonical is contributing GPL-licensed libraries for application-level multitouch enablement and a coherent set of guidelines and concepts for building a consistent multitouch-enhanced user experience on the desktop.

Although the steps that have been taken so far to bring multitouch to Linux are impressive, there is still a lot more work to do before touch will be a first-class input mechanism for the platform. The standard applications that are included in the GNOME desktop environment are not particularly touch-friendly and will need some significant user interface refactoring. A modest effort is being made so that there will be some basic support in place for 10.10, but a lot more will be done during the subsequent development cycle. Shuttleworth hopes that third-party developers will step up and make it happen.

"In Maverick, quite a few Gtk applications will support gesture-based scrolling. We’ll enhance Evince to show some of the richer interactions that developers might want to add to their apps," Shuttleworth wrote in his blog. "The roadmap beyond 10.10 will flesh out the app developer API and provide system services related to gesture processing and touch. It would be awesome to have touch-aware versions of all the major apps—browser, email, file management, chat, photo management and media playback—for 11.04, but that depends on you!"

Hardware compatibility is also still a work in progress. Ubuntu's developers seem to be focused on high-end convertible notebook/tablet devices such as the Dell XT2 and HP tx2. In a mailing list post announcing the multitouch initiative, Canonical engineering manager Duncan McGreggor says that multitouch displays that are based on 3M or N-Trig hardware are expected to work properly in Ubuntu 10.10. According to Shuttleworth, the multitouch functionality will eventually be expanded to support a wider range of hardware, including laptop touchpads and devices like Apple's Magic Trackpad.

A timely touch

There is a lot of touch-centric activity in the software industry right now. It's worth noting that browser vendors are are starting to seriously explore the possibility of standardizing new Web APIs for multitouch interaction. That would make it possible for Web developers to deliver sophisticated gesture-interaction support in Web applications.

Mozilla's recent efforts to add multitouch support to Firefox have focused largely on Windows, because Linux didn't really have the necessary functionality in place yet. When Ubuntu 10.10 launches later this year, we could see Mozilla taking touch on Linux more seriously.

A growing number of device makers want to get into the tablet market, but they need to be able to deliver a strong touch-driven user experience in order to compete with Apple's impressive and increasingly popular iPad. Canonical's multitouch efforts could make Unity an appealing option for those companies.