What's the latest in touch screen programming?

Question

I want to code some applications to use touch screen gestures. What is the latest technology available?

What functionalities to APIs provide? Is it just the casual select and click functionality or are advanced gestures are also exposed through the API? Is it possible to extend the APIs to code my own gestures.

I can't arrange a touch screen device immediately. Is it possible to do some coding now and test my code using an on screen emulator with my mouse. Later for thorough testing i will get an actual touch screen device.

I am open to Linux and Windows platforms.

Also would like to explore both desktop (PC and laptops) and mobile platforms (smartphones) with greater stress on the former. Desktop because the computing power available is high and don't want to be bogged down with mobile related issues in the beginning.

Answer 1

Windows 7 Mulit-Touch has APIs for both touch and gestures. Gestures are extensible. (See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd371406(v=VS.85).aspx).

The Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=801907A7-B2DD-4E63-9FF3-8A2E63932A74&displaylang=en) gives you additional, multitouch enabled controls that were introduced with Microsoft Surface.

Finally, the CodePlex project "Multitouch Vista" allows you to simulate multitouch on a normal computer using 2 mice (http://multitouchvista.codeplex.com/). It takes a little fiddling to get to work, but it does work nicely under Winodws 7, 32bit and 64bit.

Hope this helps!