Touch screen

Hi,

Is software that operates on a touchscreen display developed differently to software that does not?

Does the display deal with this or does the developer have to write code to allow the user interface to be used via touch screen display?

Thank you

As far as I know the programmer normally does not have to write code that allows for touchscreen usage. The touchscreen would actually work as the computers mouse, so you'd just handle the mouse clicks etc.

I do not know how it works with multi-touch devices though.

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Originally Posted by Atheist

As far as I know the programmer normally does not have to write code that allows for touchscreen usage. The touchscreen would actually work as the computers mouse, so you'd just handle the mouse clicks etc.

I do not know how it works with multi-touch devices though.

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Great, I thought that I might have to write code to interface with the device driver for the display.

If you are doing basic touch screen actions then you are fine. If you want to do things like image manipulations and the like, then you will be looking at an app like MS Surface.

While the language is the same, the design considerations are considerably different. Developing for a touch screen is something like developing for a very fast, very large, PDA. You never want the user typing ANYTHING, which means much more consideration on how to use graphical elements, how to size graphical elements (for fat fingers), and the odd fact that the mouse never hovers or moves.

That last one can have interesting results. I wrote a program where a button ran away from the mouse. Deployed on a touch screen, the program was pointless (because the interface was just Click, rather than Point and Click).

Side note: WPF in .NET 4 includes touch screen classes/methods :D

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Conti...ouchWPF4Beta1/