Design Team/Proposals/Touchscreen

	This page has been marked as important but in need of updating as of May 2016. See all dated pages There may be relevant discussion on the talk page.

Touchscreen Support

Feature description	Keyboard only hardware	Keyboard and touchscreen hardware	Touchscreen only hardware
Cursor	show always	show if trackpad used, hide if screen touched	hide always
Virtual keyboard	not required, but useful for accessibility needs	useful in ebook mode	essential, needs to appear automatically when a text field is selected (with optional ability to expose/hide for compatibility)
Cursor hover hints/palettes	accessible	accessible when using trackpad	accessible only if activated by 'right click' (touch & hold)
Keyboard shortcuts	accessible	accessible when using keyboard	not available (must rely on visual icons, HW buttons, or touch gestures)
Frame	accessible	accessible when using keyboard & trackpad	needs a touch gesture (swipe in/out from any edge) and/or new button (top left frame corner most likely), same old issues regarding discoverability of the Frame.... No physical home button on XO-3.0 hardware.
Buttons & context menu size/spacing	OK	nice to have them optimized to be touchable	size/spacing of buttons and menus needs to be optimised for finger sized interaction
hpane/vpane separator theme	OK	nice to have them optimized to be touchable	size menus needs to be optimised for finger sized interaction
Screen resolution	n/a	n/a	XO-3.0 is 1024x768, continue to make sure the Sugar shell, and activities are designed to scale well
Keyboard shortcut hints	continue to add hints	continue to add hints	hide keyboard hints from touch only UI
Scrolling a zoomed paint/drawing view	n/a	two finger drag to pan/scroll canvas	two finger drag to pan/scroll canvas, essential
Home favourite activity icons			need to increase icon layout size/spacing (larger targets, further apart)
blank	...	...	...

Other

[CSA: adding here some issues which aren't in the above table, not sure how they fit in]

Keyboard hints

show different keyboards for numeric, URL, or free-text input. (For example, TurtleArt wouldn't show the full keyboard when it just needs you to enter a number.)

Hover palettes

might need to be offset more from finger location to be useable on touchscreen (so that the finger doesn't cover up the palette when it pops up)

Drag to scroll

I prototyped this with "drag from top" / "drag from bottom" to scroll, it wasn't so bad. Simply mapping two-finger scroll to mouse scroll buttons gets you pretty far, although there are some focus issues to deal with -- it should first focus the element under the scroll start location, and *then* send it mouse scroll wheel events

Slide to switch zoom levels

just requires binding F12,F13 etc to "zoom out" and "zoom in", so olpc-kbdshim can emit the proper function key instead of trying to remember what zoom level it is in.

Uniform support for "mouseover" events

perhaps "swiping down" from a button will reveal its mouseover tool tips, for example. This is a bit of a hack, but it might make all the existing sugar activities which rely on mouseover more usable.