Hi everybody,
I've been off doing a seaside project which really had me using Pharo more than doing anything new to develop for it. Now, I'm in the project where I get to do some more fun stuff on multi-touch interfaces in Pharo. It seems like Pharo has made major progress in that direction so I'd like to take advantage of this progress and also contribute to it. But, I'm a bit confused about the current state, whether it is usable for my project, and how I can contribute to it.
First, a little about the hardware I will be working with. At home (development), I have a Dell XPS27 running Ubuntu. It has native multi-touch capabilities. At work (deployment), I have a Mac Mini (OS X) hooked up to a 4k display and get multi-touch information through TUIO. In the past, I used a separate program to turn the Dell touch input into TUIO and then process it inside Pharo (pretty easy). It seems like I should use OSWindow support these days to deal with native input on the Dell and then modify my TUIO adaptor to create those events. Is that correct? If so, how do I get started on that? Do I need a special VM? Is the OSWindow code in Pharo5 or do I need other packages?
Last time around (~2 years ago), I started using Athens for rendering multi-touch graphics and it worked fairly well (great fast vector rendering). It seems like Athens has been put into Bloc, which is a framework to replace Morphic. OSWindow support also seems to be linked to Bloc. Is Bloc solid enough where I could use it to create an application? If it is fairly far along, I'd be happy to use it and contribute back to it. Again, is this just in Pharo5 or do I have to load different packages? Is there any documentation I can look at (code examples are fine)? I've already looked at the things I found on Google.
Anyway, I'd appreciate any advice on how to get up to speed and perhaps how I can contribute. At minimum, I have some existing multi-touch applications that I could share, thereby giving good demos of Pharo multi-touch capabilities.
Cheers,
Jeff
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