Disclaimer:It's my first time developing an app that will be on a tablet style pc.
The app needs to allow a user to write notes with either a tablet pen or by touch. This must be a .net app and may be on either Windows XP and/or Windows 7. I am mainly tasked with capturing written notes from the user interface, but I am sure I will be working on other aspects of the app.
I have looked into Digital Ink and it seems the way to go, but I am unsure of how much support currently exists for windows 7 and how much support there is going to be for this technology in the future.
My questions:
Am I going in the right direction, and if not...is there something that would allow me to better accommodate this type of user input?
Does any one have other tips or good reference sites with good info on microsoft based touch and/or tablet stylus input.
If you plan on doing custom programming, you can check out the Windows Touch API for Windows 7.
Touch and Digital Ink both use C# and .NET framework, so I would imagine there is a considerable amount of support for Digital Ink in Windows 7.
Also, in the .NET framework, there's a Stylus class that tracks stylus coordinates in a text box, even if the stylus leaves the box and comes back in:
System.Windows.Input.Stylus
Hope this helps!
Microsoft also provides the RealTimeStylus API, see this tutorial.
Related
I'm developing a Windows 10 Universal app (UWP).
Is it possible to set application as TopMost (always on top)? Like WPF or Winforms (TopMost property).
Thanks
A feature called CompactOverlay mode was added in the Creators Update that supports this type of functionality. When an app window enters compact overlay mode it’ll be shown above other windows so it won’t get blocked. This allows users to continue to keep an eye on your app's content even when they are working with something else. The canonical example of an app taking advantage of this feature is a media player or a video chat app.
A blog post describing the feature can be found here
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/universal-windows-app-model/2017/02/11/compactoverlay-mode-aka-picture-in-picture/
Short answer is no, there is no way as of today to make the application modal.
There is a petition going around asking for this functionality, which was requested last December but given the amount of votes it got (35 at the time this answer was written), it doesn't look like it will be taken into consideration anytime soon.
As mentioned in the comments, this functionality would be PC only so even if it was added, my assumption would be that it wouldn't work outside of the PC mode (so no tablet, mobile or surface family device support).
It's not possible UWP apps have some restrictions compared with WPF of Win32 apps(classic apps).
With uwp apps you need enable some capabilities to do something special in your app as you can see in the link uwp apps need ask for permission or they can't access or modify files directly.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/mt270968.aspx
Best Regards
I'm developing a c# touch application for windows 8, desktop mode, and i'm unable to find the best approach to do it. My question is: Should I use the existent Windows 7 Touch API c# or there is a new multitouch c# API that can be used to develop windows 8 desktops apps?
I know that windows 8 have legacy support for the win7 touch api, just need some insight and feedback if still is the best and only way to do it.
Does anyone had a previous experience with this problem?
Edited: I found this article: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/touch-gestures , basically the UIElement exposes methods that enable touch manipulation. Maybe this is the way to go. Any thoughts?
Thank you.
Windows 8 API has a new API based on WM_POINTER message see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh454916(v=vs.85).aspx
Windows 7 API has some drawbacks, see http://the-witness.net/news/2012/10/wm_touch-is-totally-bananas/
WM_TOUCHxxx messages are not prone to this problem:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ce6d630a-b345-46ac-88ef-773704986d62/touch-responsiveness-issue-how-to-resolve-jagged-nonsmooth-lines?forum=winappswithcsharp
Both the WM_TOUCHxxx and WM_POINTERxxx message will be prone this this problem:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150709083602/https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/903760/wpf-touch-services-are-badly-broken
If your c# desktop application is using WPF, your only viable option is to implement your own TOUCHDEVICE that fixes these underlying issues, since it appears Microsoft has decided WPF touch is no longer important.
It depends on what actually are your needs in your app.
If you only want new fast ways to rotate and zoom objects, maybe the WPF Manipulation API is all you need.
If, however, you need to handle multiple fingers on your GUI independently, or in a custom way, you simply handle the usual OnTouchDown, OnTouchMove, and other events.
Please note that, however, multi-touch is only available from inside a single window. In other words: you can multi-touch two objects on the same window, but you won't be able to multi-touch two objects that reside on different windows. If you want multi-touch, multi-window funcionality, you need to:
Use .NET 4.7
Change some configuration in your WPF app
Having recently bought a Windows Phone I can say the one feature I sorely miss from my Android phone is Swype. This was a custom keyboard where you trace your finger over the keyboard to create words. Its very fast and basically I think its awesome.
Anyway! There is no Swype on WP7... The reason for this I hear is because it is impossible to change the keyboard programmatically in Windows phone. I would like to know from the community if things have changed or are likely to change in this area, or if there are any workarounds to programmatically inject a custom keyboard into the UI to allow input with any text field.
Disclosure - if it becomes possible I would like to develop a swype like app, however it would likely be because I miss it so much rather than as a commercial project!
Best regards,
There is no way to officially create a new keyboard that functions outside of your app. So, if you plan to release this in the marketplace, then it's not currently possible. You might be able to create a homebrew app that does this, but I don't think it would be very easy to replace the standard keyboard system wide. Of course, even if you did manage the homebrew version, it definitely wouldn't be allowed on the Marketplace.
You're limited by what Microsoft allows you to alter and they don't allow you to alter the keyboard. Furthermore Swype is a patented and very advanced technology that would be a humongous project for a single developer to work one. It's a good idea as lots of people like Swype but WP7 isn't Android.
I have got a monitor with multitouch overlay on top of it. It works fine with Windows 7 but I want to write a multitouch application in C# for Windows XP which doesn't support touch feature out of the box. There is no documentation whatsoever and I emailed the manufacturer but never got a reply.
However the device works with Google Earth, which doesn't natively support multitouch, on Windows XP. So I think it generates many types of messages together i.e. WM_TOUCH for Windows 7, one for Google Earth COM API, and probably its own messages either in UDP or Windows message form. How can I trap all communications and learn the protocol?
OllyDbg is a very low-level debugger that allows you to see a lot of the messages going back and forth on the machine. I've seen it used to reverse-engineer a USB device driver's messages to figure out how to interact with an item.
I suspect that would be an excellent place to start. It should allow you to determine how the messages are being passed and, perhaps, start teasing apart their structure.
There are solutions like Tuio around that do not rely on Windows 7. Maybe a tuio (or alternative) implementation would make you life easier.
I've recently been developing on the Windows 7 platform for multitouch. I'm using UniTuio -- see http://xtuio.com You can look at my question I had to get it working. I'm also using a bridge for Windows 7 called Touch2TUIO, it seems to work quite well. If you need to make the mouse inactive see my question here: using windows 7 with unituio
I have to make an application that runs on both Windows (XP/Vista) and Windows Mobile. The graphics interface must be scalable (for different resolutions) and the controls must be custom (like the ones usually found on music apps).
SVG was my instant choice but the lack of support on Windows Mobile pretty much kill my time budget. I've tried to evaluate WMF and it seems the right answer but i don't really like it.
I was thinking about WPF/XAML but i don't know what are the differences between Windows and Windows Mobile.
The project must be in C# or C++ and it's a commercial project (thus no GPLed libraries).
What would be the best choice? What ma I overlooking?
WinForms has limited support for scaling:
http://sellsbrothers.com/writing/winformsAutoScaling.htm
You may also want to look at "anchor" and "docking":
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://articles.techrepublic%2ecom%2ecom/5100-10878_11-6165908.html
Combined together you should be able to create a UI that works for both desktop and mobile.
You can do scaling UI in .NET compact framework, like Erwin said with docking and achoring. In the windows mobile applications i have written i do normaly have to write some custom code that deals with things like Font scaling ( Touch founds might need bigger Font then system default if the text should be clickable).
I dont think your going to get it to scale picture correctly without code, i found some question releated that on this site. In my experience i write 99.9% of my code so it runs fine on both windows and windows mobile, but i do make a different UI for windows mobile.
If normaly write code in .NET 2.0 / .NET 2.0 Compact Framework, but if your you dont care about having to install .NET 3 then it should be better ( .NET 2 is wider spread out then .NET 3 )
Another option is the Qt library which is written in C++. It is LGPL which means that it can be used in commercial products without having to release your sources (except for changes to the library itself). If for some reason that isn't good enough they also sell commercial licenses.
It runs on Windows and Windows Mobile. As a bonus if you do a reasonable job of programming (and assuming everything else you're doing coding wise supports it) your application can also be run on Mac OSX, Linux and S60.
It has support for Scalable Vector Graphics, a Canvas with full widget support and a bunch of other nifty features as well! I'd suggest checking out the documentation and seeing if it has everything you need.
Silverlight?