Wednesday 12 September 2012

Android SDL 2 gesture tester app

I've written and uploaded a simple free app to the play store, which allows someone to create a selection of gestures, and then to draw and see how well they get matched (or indeed, if the right ones even get matched).


In an ideal world, I'd be able to use this to author things like the Google maps pinch to scale in and out, or swipes to go from one page to the next.  Unfortunately, while simple letter shapes like N, Z, C, W and more match perfectly fine, the functional gestures like pinch to scale and swipe to switch get confused and don't seem to reliably distinguish between the direction of the actual gesture.

Hopefully I'll get feedback from the mailing list, and it'll be something I am doing wrong.  Otherwise there's a load more work in my future to use the Android Java-level gestures.

EDIT (19/06/2013): Published source code of latest released version.

5 comments:

  1. Hi there,

    I had the opportunity to try out your little SDL Gesture Test App on several of my devices and I was impressed at how fluid the whole thing was.

    I have been experimenting with android and SDL for the past few month and I never came close to anything that neat. I love the way you render the text, it looks really neat on my tablet and on my phone.

    Is there any way to have a look at the source or have some tips on how you're doing this ?

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    Replies
    1. It is a basic application using libtcod. All my libtcod changes to compile on Android are publically available (see forks of the libtcod project on bitbucket), if not already merged into the main branch. The font is a standard one that comes with libtcod, and you can pretty much get your program working on Windows, MacOS or Linux, and just cross-compile and it will just work.

      I can publish the gesture source code, but will require time to do so, because the only internet connection I have access to readily, is costly mobile tethering.

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    2. Source code has been published at: https://bitbucket.org/rmtew/sdl2-gesture-tester

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    3. Thanks a lot for the link, that's exactly what I was looking for.
      You should probably update the link displayed on the Google Play page to point to this page.

      Thanks for your time and for these precious infos !

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