The way the iPhone uses the touchscreen to enable zooming in and out and scrolling and so forth is very cool, and I was wondering if there is anything available for Windows Mobile that provides a similar user experience.
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The way the iPhone uses the touchscreen to enable zooming in and out and scrolling and so forth is very cool, and I was wondering if there is anything available for Windows Mobile that provides a similar user experience.
The zoom in/out is an artifact of the multi-touch hardware. A Pocket PC uses a resistive touch panel, which provides only a single contact point (touching 2 places gives the average of the two, not two points), so WinMo hardware simply won’t support it. I’ve seen a hack that emulated the behavior, but it was just that – a hack, and it was more frustrating than useful.
The other large problem is that CE, and therefore WinMo, doesn’t have the concept of the mouse being in 2 places at once, which makes something like multitouch require an upper-layer translator to handle the hardware and send out messages to apps listening for these double points. It’s certainly possible, but it would be OEM dependent in any WinMo device out today.
Scrolling and gestures aren’t new, so there’s definitely been work there by several tird parties. I don’t have any links offhand, but I’ve certainly seen apps that used a similar look and feel. Typically it will be implemented in a List, ListView or Grid type control that hooks mouse messages and translates them into gestures for the underlying control.