Enhancing Apps With Multi-touch

摘要

The interaction between computers and humans has reached new proportions, as is evident from the new forms of interaction that are emerging. Apart from standard input devices (like keyboards and mouse) an emerging technique to input information is via touchscreens. These can be further divided into two types: single touch and multi-touch. In a single touch device, information can be fed using a single instance of touch while multi touch allows for more than one touch simultaneously; this means one can use more than one finger to feed information or more than one user can input information. A multi-touch device has a touch screen and software that recognizes multiple simultaneous touches. As an example, just look at the'iPhone,' where Multi-touch is garnering a lot of attention. The future of this technology looks bright as more and more work is being done in this area. Microsoft is soon going to include Multi-touch functionality in its next version of Windows, 'Windows 7.'As the cost associated with multi-touch devices is decreasing, the need to develop applications that harness multi-touch functionality is also increasing. In this article, we shall develop a sample program that shows how easily one can develop a multi-touch application that can run on Windows Vista or XP.