Apps Multi-touch should be renamed to double touch

[dakira]

As a developer, I tend to program first then research later. I was trying to implement a screen that would handle multiple user inputs. Basically map more than just one finger. I tried two things..

I had an Activity class that implemented OnTouchListener. Here I had two separate child views that added the Activity as their ontouch listeners. And then I had a print line that printed out the event.getPointerCount() and printed out the location of each of the pointers..

Downloaded it to the phone and tested it. I noticed that the pointers never grew greater than two. I even noticed if one finger was on one child and another finger on the other child view that the events only made it to the first child component. Next I tried to put separate listeners on each of the child components to see if that would work but it acted the same.

So, it seems that the android only supports a total of two user inputs when dealing with inputs from the user touching the screen.

Is this true? It seems from testing and research that this is the case.

Has anyone ran into this limitation. Any clever work arounds?

Thanks for you time and responses.

dk

 

[JamTheMan]

On which device were you testing this?

To my knowledge that "problem" is in the hardware and not in Android. Some phones just don't have screens that support more than dual-touch, which is probably a cost/benefit choice made by the manufacturer...

 

[dakira]

Right now, I am using the HTC Incredible. So, it is a hardware constraint. Which would make it hard to write a fool proof application that would work on all devices.

I need to think of another way to implement my idea or rethink my idea with these limitations on hardware.

thanks for the input,
dk

 

[dakira]

I wrote a sample app that tests the multi-touch features of your phone. It is very simple.. If you try it let me know what kind of results you get from it.

thanks,
dk

 

[JiMMaR]

I can confirm that this is wrong
I have this app called xpiano , it takes up to 5 touches at the same time
5 is the max though

on a Galaxy S


Edit: tried your app just now and got pointer count: 4

Spoiler

couldn't take a screenshot with my fingers on the screen though

 

[dakira]

Cool, on my HTC Incredible I never get a pointer count greater than two. Maybe it is something with my code but that is all I ever get. So a Galaxy S can handle more than two. Nice info.

Wish I could rename the thread since it is incorrect.

thanks,
dk

 

[jonbonazza]

It all depends on the touch screen the manufacturers include with the device. It could support anywhere from 2 concurrent touches, all the way up to 16 (which I believe is the current high).