Thread: Zoom Player
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Old 27th October 2014, 23:14   #2  |  Link
Blight
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Israel
Posts: 1,005
I have been doing more and more work trying to polish elements of the user interface to make everything work better on tablets. For reference, I am play testing on an Asus Transformer Book T100 10" tablet.

By default, windows enables a few usability features that are very un-tablet like. For example, if you click the screen and hold for 1-2 second, it will perform a right-click event. This may be useful for handling legacy apps, but it's far from perfect when trying to design an app specifically for tablet use, it causes issues when trying to use a scroll bar in Zoom Player's fullscreen navigation interfaces. Luckily, I managed to find a method to prevent windows from enabling this feature on a per-window basis and disabled it for the fullscreen navigation windows.

But then, there's a second issue. I expected that the touch screen would essentially work like clicking with the mouse, however, that's not the case. When you touch a touch based input device (tablet), the running application does not get any mouse event, unlike with the mouse where you get an event that tells you when a mouse button is down. What happens instead is that only when you let go of the screen does it trigger a mouse down event, instantly followed by a moues up event.

For those of you still following me here, what that behavior does is make scrolling far less reactive. Only when you move the finger does the mouse event get sent, this means scrolling is a lot more sluggish and slippery than it should be. I believe I found a solution for this behavior as well, but the fix is complex, requiring a testing period, so it will available in beta builds post v9.5.

It's a shame Microsoft is not making things a bit easier for developers in this regard.
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Yaron Gur
Zoom Player . Lead Developer
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