Android Multitouch Tutorial

August 5, 2010

Having wrestled with the somewhat cryptic documentation for incorporating multitouch in Android applications, I’ve finally managed to get my head around it enough to post a basic tutorial. A possible starting place is to read Making Sense of Multitouch on the Android developer blog. Also worthwhile looking at is a detailed log of mouse events. This tutorial is aimed primarily at those already familiar with the basic workings of the Android SDK.

The first thing I would suggest doing is creating a simple class to track mouse movements for a particular touch:

public class TouchStream {
	private int x, y, id;
	public TouchStream(int x, int y, int id){
		this.x = x;
		this.y = y;
		this.id = id;
	}
// Usual getters and setters after here
}

to do is to extend a class of type View (which handles touch events). This way you can override the onTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev) method to process input.

Tags: 
• android
• programming
• tutorial