Scott Guthrie just announced at Mix09 support for multitouch in Silverlight 3. The Silverlight 3 beta is available here, but no idea if the feature is enabled here.
So many things for a Tablet enthusiast to check out and/or read about today! Sketchflow in Expression 3 Blend. Multi-touch in Silverlight 3 beta. What’s real now? What’s available to play with now? I’m downloading apps now. I’ll give the stuff and try and list what I find in a bit.
Updated: Nope. No Sketchflow in Expression 3 Blend. Anyone know if it’s actually in the build but turned off? This is really something I think a lot of people would like to play around with.
Now, to look for signs of multi-touch in Silverlight 3. Was this another down the road nod or is it real? Digging…
Microsoft isn’t the only one working on multi-touch. Adobe is too. In this video Julie Meridian and Tim Kukulski of Adobe demo their research efforts into Flash and multi-touch. No idea if this is going to be integrated into their product line, but this looks extremely promising.
As an aside: Scott Guthrie on a Community Mix09 chat just confirmed that the Silverlight team is working on webcam, microphone, and printing support, but it didn’t make it into the Silverlight 3 beta cut because it’s taking more time. They will release an interim update later that supports them.
Update: Tim Heuer of Microsoft has an excellent write up on the new features in Silverlight 3. The list is quite extensive: out of browser execution, new connection APIs, perspective, pixel operations, and on and on. Clearly the Silverlight team is doing a wonderful job of forging ahead.
Interestingly, Tim makes no mention of multi-touch, so I’m beginning to wonder exactly what was shown and said yesterday about multi-touch in Silverlight. Was it something that you can do on a Windows 7 machine, but it’s not really supported otherwise? I installed the Silverlight 3 beta on a Windows 7 Dell Latitude XT and I haven’t found any hooks for multi-touch yet nor any documentation or the word multi-touch or multitouch or touch anywhere in the local or online documentation.
Now from the Tweets it sounds like something is supported. Hopefully someone at Mix09 can give us a better understanding of what’s supported in Silverlight 3 and what’s not when it comes to multi-touch. In the meantime, it’s email time to see if I can scrape up some info.
Update #2: It appears there’s a reason that I can’t find mention of multi-touch in the Silverlight 3 beta: According to sources, it’s a feature yet to come. I wondered if I was missing something :-). Now I can get back to watching the recorded video of the Silverlight 3 session at Mix09.