Canonical has announced the release of uTouch 1.0, a multi-touch and gesture stack which will appear in Ubuntu 10.10. Working with the Linux kernel and X.org communities, Canonical has created a multi-touch gesture recogniser and gesture API. These components complete a stack which will allow developers to create applications that can respond to user gestures.

Canonical says it began work on this stack when working on Ubuntu 10.04 to get touch hardware for Dell, HP and Lenovo laptops and tablets supported and has been making use of the development cycle of 10.10 to create the gesture support. The next stages of the project will be integrating the gesture APIs with existing toolkits, creating touch support for legacy applications and developing new applications around gesture based integration. The company says this will be "an active area of interest over the next few releases up to 12.04 LTS", the planned April 2012 release of Ubuntu.

Canonical credited Stéphane Chatty at ENAC who leads multi-touch hardware support in the Linux kernel, Peter Hutterer at Red Hat who has defined multi-pointer X support and protocols and the GNOME community's Carlos Garnacho for his X and GTK multi-touch work. Canonical's UTouch code is licensed under the GPL3 and can be downloaded from the projects Launchpad pages.

(djwm)