Digging deeper into Touch

Clarion developers don’t need to add any code to support touch input. The C9 Templates generate all the code needed to respond to touch gestures, so existing Apps just need a regenerate with C9 to become touch-enabled. But its easy for Clarion devs to add more specialized responses and touch “features” to their apps by working with these new additions to the RTL –

  • new event; EVENT:Pointer
  • new built-in function; POINTERDATA()
  • new SYSTEM property; PROP:PointerInterface

For more details on what the RTL exposes to your apps I refer you to this previous post.  If you don’t have the time to read it right now then I’d just like to point out this one excerpt:

They (Gartner) predict that Windows will grab 39 percent of the tablet market in 2016. You can be sure that you’ll have many users wanting to run your Clarion apps on their (Win8 Pro – x86 based) tablet. 

So roughly speaking they are predicting there will be about 5 million users on Windows tablets.  Even if they are off by a million or so, its inevitable that touch and tablets are in your future, and its a good bet that some of those tablet users will be your end users.

If those numbers catch your interest then you probably should download and build this example

The example shows how to use the interfaces contained in the touch.* source files (located in your .\libsrc folder).  It provides a nice look at some of the new features your apps can now support for an optimal “touch” experience (above and beyond the support the RTL provides automatically).

touchMode