In our TouchCORE project at the Software Engineering Lab at McGill University, we use MT4j (Multitouch for Java) for the multitouch-enabled user interface.

For a long time, we had the problem that we couldn’t run it on OSX using Java 7 and newer, because it is based on an older version of Processing (1.x), which in turn uses an old version of JOGL (Java Binding for the OpenGL API). That version is only compatible with the Java supplied by Apple. As we know, they stopped support with Java 6.

We grudgingly lived with this state for a long time, which meant that OSX users needed to download and use an old version of Java. Now, with the new release of Eclipse Mars, support for Java 6 was dropped, i.e., Java 7 or greater is required. We wanted to update to Mars, and since we use some Eclipse plugins, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), we needed to use at least Java 7.

This finally pushed us to update MT4j ourselves. With the help of the UltraCom project who did the same but added a ton of other stuff. Based on their commits we managed to update it on our copy (which already had some minor improvements) of MT4j’s last official release v0.98.

We put it up on GitHub so hopefully other people can benefit from it: https://github.com/mschoettle/mt4j