Touch Programming

This weekend I started more programming for my multitouch table. And by that I guess I was more trying to fully understand how it is done. See the really bad part about all of this is the lack of real documentation. 

I am part of a forum and wiki for multitouch stuff, but until I started it no one had even documented a hello world application for it. It’s written in AS3 (action script 3), but it is not normal. There are 13 steps to get it to work with the table that you must do for each new project. But on one told anyone this.

I had to dissect a program and find out how and why it worked. Took me a long time because some of the stuff was anything but logical/ comprehendible. Simply copying the code would not work. The code used classes with no documentation, and when building them, you even have to make sure things are saved in the correct folders. But no one ever said this. For the first week I was just writing my code over another program because when I started from scratch it would not work, but my same code overwriting a working program worked fine.

Well it pissed me off to the point I made the absolute simplest program for it. It makes red circles where you touch. It was my hello world. I then made a wiki article on the entire process.

Well that was all fine, but in the simple programs I made, the code really only understood single touch. After you touched it made a circle and forgot you where even touching it. Sure it worked with multi touches at the same time, but only like clicking really quickly in different places works with a mouse.

But there was a paint program that did remember. You can use multi fingers to draw separate lines at the same time. So it was tracking and keeping track of your fingers. I wanted to simplify this as well, and wanted to understand it.

I took out everything I could and got it down to about a third the code it was. It was really nice to get it working. And really great that it is something I understand now. This should allow me to make better apps later on, but even more so, allow others to make great apps we can all use.

Im not sure why documentation is so important to me, but I know even less why good documentation is such a lost world to most people.

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