Image by John Bristowe via Flickr
I have been playing with multi-touch development for a while, both on Windows 7 with my 2740p and on the Microsoft Surface table (version 1, not the new one).
I have consistently had challenges using WPF4 multi-touch events on the 2740p, or using the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta, and now with the newly released Surface 2 SDK.
With any of these tools, I have challenges getting the software to recognize touch events, and even more trouble getting the software to recognize 2 simultaneous touch points (the 2740p supports 2 touch points). A second touch point always cancels the first touch point.
What is funny (to me, anyway) is that the samples included with the machine in the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 work just fine on the 2740p. This indicates that it is something in the managed drivers used with WPF that is not working.
I am fairly certain that this is a driver issue. I had it working at one point after a lot of hacking and installing drivers different from the default updates. I guess an update somewhere (Windows Update, or HP Tools) has overwritten the driver I had setup to make it work.
Can I fix the drivers to make this work again? Absolutely! But that is not the point here.
This should just work!
How am I as a software developer, or as an ISV, supposed to recommend this platform to my customers, or build applications for it, when even getting it to run on different machines requires significant hacking of drivers?
If Microsoft wants to stop being seen as a joke in the multi-touch and/or tablet market, they really better find a way to get their shit together on this.
FredSpace 