[Development] need to handle touch events rather than depending on mouse event synthesis

kenneth.r.christiansen at nokia.com kenneth.r.christiansen at nokia.com
Thu Mar 1 10:09:44 CET 2012


Wouldn't PointerArea make a bit more sense. MS have also introduced MSPointer in IE10[1] which represents a mouse, finger-touch or stylus. 

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/09/20/touch-input-for-ie10-and-metro-style-apps.aspx 

Kenneth
________________________________________
From: development-bounces+kenneth.r.christiansen=nokia.com at qt-project.org [development-bounces+kenneth.r.christiansen=nokia.com at qt-project.org] on behalf of Rodal Samuel (Nokia-MP/Oslo)
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 9:26 AM
To: development at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Development] need to handle touch events rather than depending on mouse event synthesis

On 02/29/2012 05:20 PM, ext Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> The proposal is this: I think we need to have a QML PointingArea element
> which looks just like MouseArea except that it handles both mouse events
> and single-touch events the same way.  Then we need to start using it
> instead of MouseArea in almost every case.  That way
> AA_SynthesizeMouseForUnhandledTouchEvents can eventually be set to false
> for some applications.

PointingArea sounds a bit strange at first, but maybe it's hard to find
a better name for it, at least I can't think of one.

> Some apps may eventually have a use for the distinction between mouse
> and touch, too. One reason I got interested again at this particular
> time is that I was thinking it would be nice if the KDE Konsole
> (terminal application) was flickable. But dragging with the left mouse
> button is the way that you select text, and that is also useful. So on
> my touchscreen laptop, I can select text by dragging, regardless whether
> I drag with a finger on the screen, with the touchpad, or with an
> external mouse; but with a finger on the screen, selecting text is not
> really what I expect. If Konsole handled both mouse events and touch
> events, it could do something appropriate for each of them, and there
> could be some useful multi-finger gestures too. This is just an example,
> and in fact it may already be possible to implement this use case
> without changes to Qt (except for the lack of support for XInput 2.2
> and/or direct support for the evdev driver on my laptop, which I'm also
> interested in looking at separately.)  But in a more complex case which
> has more widgets or Qt Quick elements, if touch events are being
> accepted at all, you need to have them understood everywhere.
>
> But we have the issue that the QML MouseArea component is in very
> widespread use. This is because QML started life on the desktop. There
> is already QQuickMultiPointTouchArea and QQuickPinchArea; so in
> applications which intend to be portable between touchscreen devices and
> conventional desktop usage, it should be OK to have overlapping touch
> areas and MouseAreas, and this will enable the app developer to
> customize the behavior depending on whether the user is interacting with
> a mouse or a finger. But naive components like any of the many Button
> implementations should not necessarily need to care.  They should be
> using the proposed PointingArea instead of MouseArea.
>
> Alternatively MouseArea could handle touch events itself, but then
> pretty soon we will start thinking the name sounds rather dated.  It
> wouldn't even surprise me if people stop using mice in a decade or so;
> whereas we will probably always have some kind of "pointing device",
> thus the need for a generic name which won't be obsolete later.  And, we
> still need a mouse-only Area which can be used in combination with the
> touch-only Areas so that it's possible to make a cross-platform UI.

I agree with your argument that changing MouseArea to handle touch
events might not be a good idea after all, as applications might want to
still handle touch and mouse input slightly differently by putting both
a MouseArea and a TouchArea covering the same region.

> In summary the consequences of mouse event synthesis present some real
> problems, and I think we need to get the device-agnostic PointingArea
> into Qt5 ASAP.

Agreed, the synthesizing of mouse events has been nice to enable
existing applications to still work on touch devices, but it's not an
ideal solution in the long run.

--
Samuel

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