Touch screen

I think there are some opportunities to make use of a touchscreen easier. That is you only have SELECT (by touching the screen) but no ADJUST or MENU buttons.

For example killing off a task in the task manager – needs MENU (to bring up a menu with ‘Quit’ on it) but SELECT at this location does nothing useful and could (perhaps conditionally) do so. Applications can add a ‘MENU >>’ button in a few places to bring up a menu with a SELECT click.

A pop-up keyboard would be useful to type into writeable icons but (obviously) you can’t click to select letters [as there’s no keyboard] as the menu disappears on a click outside it. It would be nice for a Save dialogue box (showing a writeable file name) to persist while you click keys on a pop-up keyboard.

Does this make sense?

Long tap could be interpreted as Menu?

The keyboard ought to be doable. It will need the touch screen driver to be aware of the presence of the on-screen keyboard and within the area of the keyboard, provide X,Y coordinates directly to the keyboard app but provide no Select clicks, as that’s what makes the menus and dialogues go away.

I seem to remember long, long ago (and I’m very old!) something which put up a picture of a mouse which could be “clicked” on to perform mouse functions.

The touchscreen can “Click” – so that might be a solution!

A “mouse button simulation” on the iconbar might work.

Does this make sense?

I’ve had a glass or two as well!

The ‘touch screen driver’ may not exist. I use an 800×480 HDMI touch screen which presents itself as an absolute coordinate USB mouse. No driver required either for screen or mouse.

Long tap could be interpreted as Menu?

I’ve certainly considered this in the past. The other issue is that the existing menus are mouse-optimised and can be difficult to touch accurately with a finger. Presumably the Toolbox could be modified to space the menu items further apart when the menu is invoked from touch, but there are a lot of non-Toolbox apps out there (I’ve never looked at one but am I correct in my belief that the app controls the spacing?)

am I correct in my belief that the app controls the spacing?

Yes, my application !SignalBox does this to display a sub-menu showing headcodes with text (it needs to close up the spacing to make the half sprites abut):

I use an 800×480 HDMI touch screen which presents itself as an absolute coordinate USB mouse.

Would that be the Adafruit resistive touch that I have? I “solved” the problem of no Menu and Adjust by adding a set of buttons. They are interfaced through USB using the chip from an extremely cheap (£1.50 incl) mouse. With the Zero this does require a hub, of course.