Design Team/Proposals/Touchscreen
< Design Team | Proposals
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.