Did 12.04 just add multi-touch gesture support mid-release?

Posted by adempewolff on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by adempewolff
Published on 2012-09-17T12:49:15Z Indexed on 2012/09/18 15:54 UTC
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I was reviewing the updates I was about to download today and I

  1. noticed that a lot of them had to do with gesture support,

  2. noticed that many of these were new installs rather than upgrades.

Has 12.04 just added multi-touch gesture support mid-release? If so, what are the capabilities that this adds? Which applications already support these capabilities and can I expect others to add support in the near future?

Here are the packages that were installed:

Install: libframe6:amd64 (2.2.4-0ubuntu0.12.04.1), libgeis1:amd64 (2.2.9.2-0ubuntu1), libgrail5:amd64 (3.0.6-0ubuntu0.12.04.01, automatic)

And here are those that were upgraded (also including many with touch support):

Upgrade: libgrip0:amd64 (0.3.4-0ubuntu2~ubuntu12.04.1, 0.3.5-0ubuntu1~12.04.1), eog:amd64 (3.4.2-0ubuntu1, 3.4.2-0ubuntu1.1), ginn:amd64 (0.2.4-0ubuntu1, 0.2.4.1-0ubuntu1)

Of which the descriptions for the new installs are,

libgeis1:

Gesture engine interface support
 A common API for clients of a systemwide gesture recognition and propagation
 engine.

libframe6:

Touch Frame Library
 This library handles the buildup and synchronization of a set of simultaneous
 touches. The library is input agnostic, with bindings for mtdev, frame and
 XI2.1.

libgrail5:

Gesture Recognition And Instantiation Library
 This library consists of an interface and tools for handling gesture
 recognition and gesture instantiation. Applications can use the grail callbacks
 to receive gesture primitives and raw input events from the underlying kernel
 device.

And the descriptions for the upgraded packages are,

ligrip0:

provides multitouch gestures to GTK+ apps

 Libgrip hooks gesture recognition into GTK+ applications.

ginn:

Gesture Injector: No-GEIS, No-Toolkits

 A daemon with jinn-like wish-granting capabilities: it gives applications the
 ability to support a subset of multi-touch gestures without having to integrate
 GEIS or multi-touch GTK/Qt libs.

Adding in a ton of new libraries and upgrading the existing components makes me wonder if 12.04 is meant to start natively supporting gestures other than two finger scroll in the near future. I expected these capabilities to be introduced soon but I thought that they would only be rolled out in a new release, not as upgrades for an existing release.

Anyone have any info about this?

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