[Luke Hutchison] has come up with a rather clever hack to get multitouch support on the G1. He wrote a patch against the Synaptics touchscreen driver. When two fingers are placed, the driver reports the x/y of the midpoint as well as a radius for the size field. If only one finger is used, the size is reported as zero. The nice thing about this approach is that it’s backwards compatible; the additional data will be ignored by present apps. Unfortunately, Google’s Android team states that if multitouch is ever added, it would determine private fingers as well as definitely not utilizing this method.
[via ABN]
[photo: tnkgrl]