Overview

This is the old wiki page for this project. Please see current status at Multitouch

Sprint lead: Felipe (felipc)
Sprinters: felipc, rs, jmathies
ETA: 2 weeks

Description

Identify roadmap for multitouch work

• Identify what already works and what does not
• Make sure there is consistency in the touch behavior
• Make sure it's usable
• do ground work to be able to move forward with the touch input and future experimentations
• fix top 3 problems

Goals / Use Cases

In this sprint we'll work on identifying which are the current major problems on the multitouch feature that mostly degrades the usability and multitouch experience. We are investigating the main use cases of touch interactions and checking if they are consistent accross the browser/OS, if they provide a good experience, etc.
Also we'll keep doing the ground work to fix the current bugs to make sure the touch works. Felipe is using the touch tablet daily to `fell the pain` on browsing the web using a touch interface.

Non Goals

Eventually after we get the basics running we will want to think on other areas such as:

• how can we provide a way to customize the touch experience and/or using it beyond the basic click/scroll usage
• what are some changes we can do on the theme and UI thinking on a touch experience (instead of the traditional mouse/keyboard experience)
• how can addons/webpages make use of this new technology; how can it be standardized

Design & Bugs

User Talk:Felipc
Tracking Bug
bug 488715 [Core] - Windows 7 Touch/Pen Input Support Tracking Bug [Win]

bug 494281 FIXED [Core] - Touch panning no longer works as of 5/20/2009 [Win]
bug 501440 FIXED [Core] - Support selecting text in touch enabled devices [Win]
bug 492152 FIXED [Core] - Scrollable menus should support panning [Win]
bug 503042 FIXED [Core] - Implement a way to detect a touch enabled device [Win]
bug 503889 FIXED [Core] - Investigate usable sizes and target areas for touch interactions [Win]
bug 503541 FIXED [Core] - Fine grained control of gesture registration on widgets [Win]
bug 503888 FIXED [Core] - <tree> pan is buggy with panning feedback enabled [Win] - fixed by the patch in bug 503541
bug 504913 FIXED [Core] - Don't display feedback when a scrollbar isn't present [Win] - fixed by the patch in bug 503541

Parity Bugs Remaining

bug 488717 [Firefox] - Implement a smarter form of toggle zoom for touch tablets[Win]
bug 511019 [Core] - Tooltips are not displayed when moving the pointer using touch [Win]
bug 511236 [Core] - Create a transition effect for back/forward gestures [Win]

Results

Things achieved during the sprint:

• Implemented a CSS pseudo-selector triggered when running on a touch enabled device
• Analyzed dimensions of most commonly used UI elements. Changes were made (using the CSS selector) on size and spacing of some elements, based on guidelines for touch UIs ( https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UMEGuide/DesigningForFingerUIs )
• Checked many current scrollable elements in Firefox to know which were working or not
• Created a simple patch that fixed panning on scrollable menus
• Created a bigger patch that allows better control of gesture registration and thus fixes menus, trees and is base for future customization
  • though the recent landings on native widget removal breaks some features of the patch which will have to be re-analyzed
• started working on some customization mockups

Moving forward

First batch of customization mockups

week ending 8/7

• Finished the cool patch, now waiting on review (bug 503541 [Core] - Fine grained control of gesture registration on widgets [Win])
• Blog post about customization mockups
• Reading win7 docs for getting touch raw data
• Expose this as content events to DOM: new MozTouchEvent already being sent and received by HTML page (bug 508906 [DOM Events] - Experimental support for Touch events)

new week (week ending 8/14)

• two css patches landed with the sr+ on the css selector patch
• the "multitouch" patch (bug 503541): worked on it, got r+ from smaug and roc, landed!
• built 5 simple demos using the multitouch events
• brainstormed with smaug about touch events; wrote details of the current implementation (+ questions) of the events on the wiki to get comment and feedback