Musical 1.3 – Multitouch Drums!!! (sort of)
I’ve just released an update for Musical with a much requested feature: multitouch drums! This is currently an experimental beta and requires that you have a rooted G1 with a hacked JesusFreke build (v1.4 and up). If you don’t know what this means, then you won’t be able to use the multitouch. When I say “experimental”, I don’t mean it can cause any damage or anything, it just isn’t yet up to my standards (visually and feature-wise). You may have noticed that the title of the post includes “sort of”. That is because there are three major caveats of the G1′s screen (which was not intended for multitouch):
- It only supports 2 fingers (hardware limitation)
- You have to try and keep your fingers as far apart as possible. When your fingers are very close, the screen tends to treat them as one large finger.
- Adding another vertical layer (creating a grid/table), would not work, because the multitouch information only provides the radius and not the actual points (so you could no longer tell what was being pressed)
This is my first foray into multitouch on Android, so I would really like to hear feedback from users. If it seems like enough people are interested and have their G1 rooted, I will consider adding some more multitouch features (although the piano, because of the caveats I mentioned, won’t work).