Are there any decent user interface components for touch screen web applications?

Question

For various reasons, the web application will be the best project option I'm working on, but the user interface is bothering me. There will be many choices and options that can be processed by checklists, combo fields, etc ... and to a lesser extent there will be some free text fields. Nevertheless, I am concerned about the convenience of using standard components, because users will have to access the application from touch computers that will be mounted on the wall in a production environment (i.e., they will be very dirty and poorly maintained).

Answer 1

We are currently launching an application that is exactly the same as you describe. There are a number of problems that you will encounter.

At some point you will probably need a soft keyboard. We did not find a worthy third party, but they are not too difficult to write.

If you want to implement any keypress button that writes text to another control, you should be able to call the SetStyle () method to make sure that the focus does not change. We found that the Janus button buttons do not allow us to make this change, so we returned to the standard winforms button.

I have not seen any existing component libraries specifically designed for touch screens. We used a combination of standard winforms controls and Janus user interface components.

If I started playing again, I would start with WPF. This is such a huge improvement over Winforms that it would be an easy choice for me.

If you are really stuck with this in a web browser, I would consider Silverlight as a viable option. Personally, I will never touch HTML for an application where fast data writing is important.

Do not forget about entering the barcode, sooner or later someone will tell you that they want to do input with the scanner.

Answer 2

As the bar translates to click, you can probably use mostly standard components, possibly complemented by javascript. I. e., It should be easy to implement the onClick event for each label that toggles the corresponding checkbox.

I would be more worried about typing. Print a touch screen (especially for wall mounting).

Answer 3

I am currently working on a touch screen web application and keep wondering when I will have to put in a soft keyboard. The modules that are currently being developed deal only with the functions of entering and entering / sending orders, and the client wants to limit any input from the operator of the call center. So there is no data yet.

However, I was looking for a keyboard for the touch screen. Darryl, where would you advise me to start if I had to write one?

Good luck to both of you!

Answer 4

You might want to take a look at Baobab Health 's open source touchscreen . This is a good job converting an html form to interact with a touch screen using only javascript. The documentation is a little covered, but it can be at least a good starting point.