Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 9. Touch Input

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding the user experience guidelines for touch, layout, and gestures

• Handling touch events

• Working with multi-touch

It seems that everywhere you look, people are talking about the advantages of multi-touch input. Every device from desktop computers running Windows 7, to Surface computing, through to Windows Phone is including support to detect one or more finger presses on the screen. Windows Mobile has long had support for single touch and gestures, but it has been held back through the use of resistive screens that were optimized to allow precise input with a stylus. Windows Phone moves away from requiring the use of a stylus, to supporting the ability to detect up to four simultaneous touch points.

Moving from a single mouse or stylus point to multiple touches enables a wide range of gestures and natural user interface (UI) designs to be implemented. The guidance from Microsoft around the Metro experience provides a great starting point on how to handle different touch inputs from a simple tap all the way through to flicks and other gestures. In this chapter, you will learn how to process both single- and multi-touch input events, and how you can couple this to your user interface to control navigation and increase interactivity.

USER EXPERIENCE

Since the release of the iPhone, it has become evident that users want to be able to use their fingers to do the walking. Rather than having to reach for a stylus to tap at a barely legible ...