Touch Screen Libraries

[jdh9862]

Can anyone point me to a free library of controls built for touch screens. By which I mean normal controls, like JTextField, adapted to be easy to use on a small touch screen device. For example if you were to enter a JTextField an on-screen keyboard would appear.

[KevinWorkman]

Isn't a touchscreen pretty much a mouse input? So wouldn't you just want to use standard MouseListeners and whatnot?

[JosAH]

Isn't a touchscreen pretty much a mouse input? So wouldn't you just want to use standard MouseListeners and whatnot?

Not really, a finger can't 'hover over' the screen, i.e. a finger is there or it isn't. If it touches the screen you can implement a 'mouse moved' event. More expensive devices might 'see' a finger when it doesn't really touch the screen. Multiple finger detection is even more expensive.

kind regards,

Jos

[KevinWorkman]

Not really, a finger can't 'hover over' the screen, i.e. a finger is there or it isn't. If it touches the screen you can implement a 'mouse moved' event. More expensive devices might 'see' a finger when it doesn't really touch the screen. Multiple finger detection is even more expensive.

kind regards,

Jos

Hmm, fair enough. But as far as a basic touch screen input device and Java, aren't standard MouseEvents a good place to start?

[Tolls]

What does Android use?

[JosAH]

Hmm, fair enough. But as far as a basic touch screen input device and Java, aren't standard MouseEvents a good place to start?

Yep (I know those things because I've been there, done that ;-) but don't expect any mouse move events when the finger doesn't touch the screen; also there is no real mouse click event, there's only a finger touch, finger raised and finger moved event (if the coordinates have changed since the generation of the last event, and the finger hadn't left the screen).

kind regards,

Jos

[KevinWorkman]

Yeah, I wouldn't expect any events when the screen isn't being touched. But for the basics (which I think the OP is going for), even relying on mouse motion events might be good enough.

I also guess I'd expect more modern touch screens to differentiate better between a mouse motion event and a mouse clicked event. I'd be curious about what Android does as well.

[Tolls]

It has its own Touch class and MotionEvent.
It also has a gesture package.

I'd forgotten I'd actually looked at some of this earlier this year...:)

ETA: And the events seem to come through here.