I just had the opportunity to take a video of my multitouch table with my software in action. Both hardware and software were built for my bachelor’s thesis which I handed in in march. The software that you see at the end is written in Python with PyMT, using the VTK library.

Medical Multitouch from Christopher Denter on Vimeo.

Reading through a planet? Click here!

For more information, see the video description. PS: Although it supports all platforms, it currently runs on ubuntu. :-)

Let me know what you think!

Many things happened in the last few weeks. I just want to quickly outline them in case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing.

PyMT Spelling

Starting with PyMT 0.5 (to be released in August), we added support for spelling correction and word suggestions. This is based on my GSoC work. The code has been polished and integrated into the master branch, which will soon lead to the 0.5 release. I’m also currently working on a text input widget that indicates incorrectly spelled words as you type (just as OpenOffice would). This much is working. In a next step, I plan to add a feature that lets you select from a list of suggestions for the word that you just tapped.

WipeToType

One of the tasks of my GSoC proposal is the implementation of a Swype-like keyboard. What this means is that you just wipe over the keys that make up the word you want to type and it automatically determines which word you intended to enter. It is clearly far beyond the scope of a single, multitouch-oriented GSoC proposal to implement something as clever as a Swype clone (especially since this also requires A LOT of backend code for the intelligence). However, something remotely similar and usable should be doable and is what I’m looking for. A while back I started something like this and quickly sketched a modified version of the virtual keyboard.

This still needs much more love, but keeping in mind that I did this in a really short amount of time I think I can say that we’re getting somewhere.

FITG in Lille

Thomas, Mathieu and I have had the chance to meet in Lille at the FITG conference and present PyMT in a talk and several workshops. This was a great opportunity and in fact, it was the biggest real-life meeting of core developers and users so far.

The conference itself was a great success, both for the organizers and us. We had many people come to us and ask questions concerning PyMT and Movid. After our talk (which I think was well-received) we decided to give an additional workshop so that people interested could play with PyMT and get help from us. The room was pretty crowded and people were standing. The workshop presented a basic PyMT overview and first steps in a ‘hello world’ fashion (At least I think that’s what Mathieu was talking about. He spoke french and Thomas and I were answering questions or translating things in English). In the evening we gathered all the people that were still at the conference and went to a nice little restaurant to chat.

The next day we gave two more workshops. The idea to do the first one came up while we had breakfast. We decided to implement a simple version of the game at linerider.com with PyMT. When we arrived an hour later, we just picked a python 2D physics library that was easy to install and started live and from scratch, without any actual code having been written (or even thought about) beforehand. Luckily it all turned out well. After almost exactly one hour (in which Mathieu helped people in the audience, Thomas pointed to and explaining stuff at the projection and I coded and talked) we had finished what we were looking for in just 60 lines of unoptimized python code. The last workshop was about advanced OpenGL. Mathieu presented some of his insights that he had gathered while optimizing PyMT’s performance (great advances have been done here, by the way).

I stayed four days in total and it was absolutely worth it. Lille is a wonderful city and the conference was fantastic. The venue itself was just mind-blowing to begin with. We had a lot of fun together and obviously worked on PyMT as well. It’s even more fun if we’re in the same room! Sincere thanks to everyone involved in making these days as awesome as they were!

Reworked TextArea

For our talk in Lille, we used a very nice presentation tool (PreseMT) which is, obviously, written with PyMT. While using it for my own bachelor’s colloquium (I’m officially a Bachelor of Science now, by the way) I noticed that entering text suffered from severe limitations of the text input widget. Given that I had no multitouch-capable device around to enter text, I did it all with my hardware keyboard. I added to PyMT’s TextArea widget the ability to resize automatically depending on the text that was entered (which is what you want in PreseMT). Furthermore, the widget now properly reacts to several special keys like the arrow keys, home, end, del, pgup and pgdown.

Portable PyMT

It is no secret that installing PyMT on OSX is a major pain. This is not our fault, though. The problem simply is that installing almost anything in non-app format involves a non-trivial compilation process using MacPorts and the like. Unfortunately, one of our dependencies (gstreamer) is not easily installed this way.

Since we really don’t want our users to go through all of this, we decided to distribute portable versions of PyMT for OSX, Linux and Windows. I did the OSX version and hope to be able to finish it soon so that it can be reviewed. With it, you just download a zip file, unzip it and go. It contains everything that is needed to run PyMT.

In the course of this, I also fixed the compilation of our OpenGL-dependant cython modules for OSX.

Conclusion

Hopefully you will see a wonderful PyMT release next month. We’ve added many new features, improvements and fixed a lot of bugs. Some of my GSoC work will also go into it. In terms of GSoC, I will finish the aforementioned spelling-aware text input widget. I also intend to improve the quality of the results of the WipeToType keyboard and implement the things left on my GSoC proposal.