discussion about touch events

[Pavel Safrata]

Hi Assaf,
this was discussed during during the multi-touch API design phase. I 
completely understand what you are saying, yet it has no 
straightforward/automatic solution you may have imagined. First, we 
can't pick "whatever falls into the circle" - imagine there are two 
buttons next to each other, do we want to activate both of them? No, 
each event has to have a single target. Moreover, everybody can easily 
comprehend the idea of the imprecise touch on a button, but from FX 
point of view there is a bunch of nodes (not every application uses just 
controls) and each of the application's nodes needs to be pickable.

At that time, if I remember correctly, there was a preliminary agreement 
that the way around this might be giving the control to the user's hands 
in a form of an API that would for instance make a node pickable on a 
certain distance from it. So user could tell to a button "enlarge your 
bounds about 10 pixels in each direction and pick on those bounds", 
which would then behave as if the button had a transparent border around 
it (perhaps applying only to touch events / synthesized mouse events). 
Of course controls could use this API to implement a reasonable default 
behavior, but user still needs to have the option to create an 
unobtrusive ImageView-background with an event-greedy ImageView-button 
on it.

Regards,
Pavel

On 11.11.2013 11:51, Assaf Yavnai wrote:
> Hi Guys,
>
> I hope that I'm right about this, but it seems that touch events in 
> glass are translated (and reported) as a single point events (x & y) 
> without an area, like pointer events.
> AFAIK, the controls response for touch events same as mouse events 
> (using the same pickers) and as a result a button press, for example, 
> will only triggered if the x & y of the touch event is within the 
> control area.
>
> This means that small controls, or even quite large controls (like 
> buttons with text) will often get missed because the 'strict' node 
> picking, although from a UX point of view it is strange as the user 
> clearly pressed on a node (the finger was clearly above it) but 
> nothing happens...
>
> With current implementation its hard to use small features in 
> controls, like scrollbars in lists, and it almost impossible to 
> implement something like 'screen navigator' (the series of small dots 
> in the bottom of a smart phones screen which allow you to jump 
> directly to a 'far away' screen)
>
> To illustrate it consider the bellow low resolution sketch, where the 
> "+" is the actual x,y reported, the ellipse is the finger touch area 
> and the rectangle is the node.
> With current implementation this type of tap will not trigger the node 
> handlers
>
>                 __
>               /     \
>              /       \
>        ___/ __+_ \___    in this scenario the 'button' will not get 
> pressed
>        |    \         /    |
>        |___\ ___ / __ |
>               \___/
>
> If your smart phone support it, turn on the touch debugging options in 
> settings and see that each point translate to a quite large circle and 
> what ever fall in it, or reasonably close to it, get picked.
>
> I want to start a discussion to understand if my perspective is 
> accurate and to understand what can be done, if any, for the coming 
> release or the next one.
>
> We might use recently opened RT-34136 
> <https://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-34136> for logging this, or 
> open a new JIRA for it
>
> Thanks,
> Assaf