iPhone and iPad App 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 29

Touches and Gestures

iOS devices differ from traditional non-mobile devices. Interaction is received from a touch or gesture, rather from a keyboard or mouse. The touch or gesture is a UIEvent and the UIApplication class manages these events. The events that are most common on iOS devices are touch events interacting with views.

A touch sequence begins as a finger or fingers are placed on the touch screen, and ends when the last finger is removed from the touch screen.

Single-fingered events can be a tap, touch, and hold, or the drag and swipe. Multiple-fingered events, for example, can be a pinch, commonly used to zoom in or out on a photo.

This lesson looks at the two techniques of touch event handling:

• Use of the phase methods: touchesBegin, touchesMoved, touchesCancelled, and touchesEnded.
• Use of the UIGestureRecognizer class.

Touch Events

A touch event is a UIEvent of the type UIEventTypeTouches. The touch itself is a UITouch object that contains the following information:

• locationInView: The touch coordinates
• previousLocationInView: Previous coordinates
• tapCount: Current tap count
• timestamp: Time of the last touch
• phase: The current touch phase

When a touch event occurs, it is placed on a queue that is distributed by the application to the window where the event was initiated. The event is then forwarded to a first responder. In most cases, the first responder is the view where the touch occurred.

If that view cannot handle the touch event, the event is then ...