Remember the old days of resistive screens and styluses? Before capacitive touchscreens were the norm, multi-touch input was just a pipe dream, as those resistive screens could only detect a single touch contact at a time. Not content to let old technology simply die, one of the coders at the XDA-Developers forums has put together a hack that allows for multi-touch input on resistive-screened Windows Mobile devices.

Before you get too excited, this is more of a tech demonstration than a usable program, but it shows there’s definitely potential for the technique. The implementation uses an on-screen keyboard to show how the trick works. Instead of first tapping shift, followed by a letter in order to enter it as upper-case, this software lets you hold down the shift key while tapping in a series of letters.

There are limitations galore, like the inability to detect more than two inputs at once, and the inability to press just any two on-screen buttons at once (this version doesn’t let you press two letters simultaneously, for example). Accuracy also goes down as the two points you’re touching become farther apart on the screen, though you can train the software to correct its mistakes.

You can download MulKeyTouch now to try it out for yourself. We certainly don’t expect resistive screens to make a big comeback, but it’s still nice to see someone breathing life into old tech.

Source: XDA-Developers