Since Adobe announced support for multitouch back in November, there has quite a bit of confusion surrounding Flash multitouch support. Recently, we downloaded an example from Adobe’s site to try out the built-in support for ourselves.

Adobe unveiled some multitouch examples using the built-in support found in the beta releases of Adobe AIR 2 and Flash 10.1 Adobe MAX back in November. A YouTube video of the presentation from Adobe MAX shows the limitations of the multitouch currently found in Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.

There is no support for multiple simultaneous gestures.  In other words, you can scale or rotate, but you can’t scale and rotate at the same time. Support for “drag” is limited to a one-finger drag (using a mouse event). The Adobe Max examples show simple, single gestures and a lot of single-finger dragging.

Adobe’s limited incarnation of multitouch may work for simple applications using dual-touch systems, but it seems entirely inadequate for complex applications, multiuser apps, or for development on the growing list of multitouch devices supporting more than two points.

Here’s a video comparison that we developed using the example found on the Adobe website. It directly compares Adobe’s upcoming built-in support to that of our Gestureworks multitouch framework for Flash (available today).

We feel this video clearly demonstrates the significant differences between Adobe’s built-in support and the multitouch support provided via Gestureworks. You can try the Adobe example yourself at the Adobe’s Developer Connection and get a Trial Version of Gestureworks, and download the example apps (.zip 343K) we used in our video to see for yourself. You might also want to see the Multitouch + NUI blog which brought up concerns about Adobe’s implementation back in November.

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