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Chapter 9
Input and Sensors
Touch is clearly one of the most exciting means of interacting with a computer that has finally come of
age. Sure, we’ve had touch-sensitive devices for many years: I remember working with a touch-enabled
screen in my college days, which I have to admit is almost an embarrassingly long time ago now! In that
case, the touch sensor was a series of transparent wires embedded in a plastic sheet over the screen,
with an overall touch resolution of around 60 wide by 40 high…and, to really date myself, the monitor
itself was only a text terminal!
Fortunately, touch screens have progressed tremendously in recent years. They are responsive
enough for general purpose use (that is, you don’t have to stab them to register a point), are built into
high-resolution displays, are relatively inexpensive, and are capable of doing something more than
replicating the mouse—namely, supporting multitouch and sophisticated gestures.
Great touch interaction is thus now a fundamental feature of great apps, and designing for touch
means in many ways thinking through UI concerns anew. In your layout, for example, it means making
hit targets a size that’s suitable for a variety of fingers. In your content navigation, it means utilizing
direct gestures such as swipes and pinches rather than relying on only item selection and navigation
controls. Similarly, designing for touch means thinking though how gestures might enrich the user
experience—and also how to provide for discoverability and user feedback that has generally relied on
mouse-only events like hover.
All in all, approach your design as if touch was the only means of interaction that your users might
have. At the same time, it’s very important to remember that new methods of input seldom obsolete
existing ones. Sure, punch cards did eventually disappear, but the introduction of the mouse did not
obsolete keyboards. The availability of speech recognition or handwriting has obsoleted neither mouse
nor keyboard. I think the same is true for touch: it’s really a complementary input method that has its
own particular virtues but is unlikely to wholly supplant the others. As Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research
has said, “Every modality, including touch, is best for something and worst for something else.” I expect,
in time, we’ll see ourselves using keyboard, mouse, and touch together, just as we learned to integrate
the mouse in what was once a keyboard-only reality.
Windows is designed to work well with all forms of input—to work great with touch, to work great
with mice, to work great with keyboards, and, well, to just work great on diverse hardware! (And
Windows Store certification requires this for apps as well.) For this reason, Windows provides a unified
pointer-based input model wherein you can differentiate the different inputs if you really need to but
can otherwise treat them equally. You can also focus more on higher-level gestures as well, which can
arise from any input source, and not worry about raw pointer events at all. Indeed, the very fact that we
haven’t even brought this subject up until now, midway through this book, gives testimony to just how
natural it is to work with all kinds of pointer input without having to think about it: the controls and
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