Do developers really need a touch screen?
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
Nope most devs don't need them. Well Iv'e gotten by so far with not needing one, even when working on TS based projects. However... Most Devs DO NEED them, or at least the stake holders and project managers need devs to have them... Well at least if the amount of Stake Holders/Clients and Business folk that stab their fingers on my monitor when trying to "show me stuff" are anything to go by anyway :-)
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
Developers don't even "need" a computer. They can handwrite code on notepads and have a typist enter it for them. :rolleyes: Anyone who's developing touch capable software* needs access to a touch screen that they can debug against for day to day work. Whether that's a discrete phone/tablet for dev use, a laptop with a touch screen, or a touch enabled monitor is a secondary concern. Unless your management is braindamaged, it should be whatever allows each dev to work most efficiently. A cheap phone/tablet/touch upgrade for a laptop only costs a few hours of dev time, so just get whatever lets them work fastest. It'll pay for itself. * This includes anyone who's writing web applications or consumer focused desktop apps. You may think someone would need to be :elephant:ing insane to reach up and swipe their laptop screen instead of using a mouse/touchpad; but a significant fraction of your userbase *does* do just that. Or at least a significant fraction of people who would be part of your userbase (and helping to pay your salary) if the crap you wrote wasn't borderline unusable on their touch enabled system. :doh:
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Tomz_KV wrote:
Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
Absolutely yes. I've been developing touch-screen apps since 2000, which obviously predates smartphones. I've used far too many phone apps that fail basic touch usability metrics: - Touch targets are too small - Targets are placed too closely together - Icons that indicate a target don't accurately delineate the target area - Text used as a touch target (finger obscures needed information, plus text is weak for positioning cues) - Target layout without regard to tasks I attribute a lot of this to the use of emulators and the mouse in place of testing on real devices with real fingers. I know a lot of app developers can't afford to buy several devices for testing purposes, but they could at least test on a representative of each class of device: small screen smartphone, large screen smartphone, small tablet (7"), large tablet (10"), laptop. For example: one of the apps I use on my phone every day requires that I rotate my index finger 90° in order to hit one target at the edge of the screen. A normal finger press does not work. A mouse is a high-precision pointing device. A finger is not.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
I attribute a lot of this to the use of emulators and the mouse in place of testing on real devices with real fingers. I know a lot of app developers can't afford to buy several devices for testing purposes, but they could at least test on a representative of each class of device: small screen smartphone, large screen smartphone, small tablet (7"), large tablet (10"), laptop.
I haven't done nywhere close to as much touch work as you have, but I fully agree. And lest any bean counters freak out, you don't need to buy one of each of the 5 classes of test device for every developer and tester; just enough that there's at least 1 per person working on it a time and at least 1 full set available to be shared around as needed so the testers can try all form factors and the devs can have access to a problematic form factor as needed to fix things.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Developers don't even "need" a computer. They can handwrite code on notepads and have a typist enter it for them. :rolleyes: Anyone who's developing touch capable software* needs access to a touch screen that they can debug against for day to day work. Whether that's a discrete phone/tablet for dev use, a laptop with a touch screen, or a touch enabled monitor is a secondary concern. Unless your management is braindamaged, it should be whatever allows each dev to work most efficiently. A cheap phone/tablet/touch upgrade for a laptop only costs a few hours of dev time, so just get whatever lets them work fastest. It'll pay for itself. * This includes anyone who's writing web applications or consumer focused desktop apps. You may think someone would need to be :elephant:ing insane to reach up and swipe their laptop screen instead of using a mouse/touchpad; but a significant fraction of your userbase *does* do just that. Or at least a significant fraction of people who would be part of your userbase (and helping to pay your salary) if the crap you wrote wasn't borderline unusable on their touch enabled system. :doh:
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
Testing code preproduction, you really should execute it on any platform that it is expected to launched from. Emulators are good getting close, but if you're attempting to validate the code against the platform you need to be running from the platform. As far as developing with a touch screen, I've not tried that (probably because I have no laptop or desktop with a touch screen). But, I would really like to do some coding on my iPad Pro. I've not found the tools to do this however, so I don't.
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
To me it has very little to do with how they would test their application but rather how they work. Developers are expensive resources and if a touch screen will allow a given developer to work faster or even just make them happier then it is worth it. Now with that said I would say it depends on whether they are working with a desktop or a laptop. I am always surprised when a developer uses a desktop but I know it still happens. To me on a desktop it is irrelevant but on a laptop it is useful. That is my 2 cents!
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
I cannot say for developers in general, but I do use my touch screen (laptop screen) during development occasionally. When I develop using Xamarin.Forms, I make sure I develop for handsets (iPhone, Android) and tablets (iPad, Android, and Windows/UWP). Even with emulators, I like to test the "look and feel" of my screens. At least then I can catch and fix the more obvious issues before finally getting on to testing with actual devices. If you need a touch screen, use it. If you don't need a touch screen now, but may likely need it in the future, at least have it. If you don't need a touch screen now or ever, don't get one.
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you developing something for a desktop with touch interface? If just developing for mobile devices, maybe touch screen not needed and emulation enough.
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Not until programming becomes as simple as pointing and clicking
The day may come sooner than we expect.
TOMZ_KV
Tomz_KV wrote:
Not until programming becomes as simple as pointing and clicking
The day may come sooner than we expect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah ... they've been saying that for years. True, there's a lot more that you can do with point-and-click than you used to but as soon as you have to customize the model, guess what, someone is going to have to write some code. -CM
If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur! - Red Adair
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Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Not until programming becomes as simple as pointing and clicking
The day may come sooner than we expect.
TOMZ_KV
We wrote a Touch Screen Plugin for Visual Studio Called "Codez Plz" It lists a bunch of code snippets. Swipe Left to NOT include it Swipe Right to paste it right in In our First demo, we build an entire application just by swiping. In our Second demo, we try to figure out why it's not working, by posting questions online: Swipe Left to post to StackOverflow Swipe Right to post to CodeProject It has been rated as AMAZINGLY TRIVIAL to get work done by uninformed users everywhere! :) :) :)
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
ABSOLUTELY. Intentional caps. Things that are trivial with a mouse "touching" an emulator fall down badly when trying to use a finger. Of course, my code runs from 3.5" to 15" touchscreens, so I have a few t-shirts about learning the hard way...
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
If you are developing a touch-centric application, it sure helps to have a touchscreen. In one project I developed a BI dashboard for a wall-mounted 1080p touchscreen monitor. It supported 10-point multi-touch using Google Chrome in kiosk mode. Having a touchscreen directly connected for debugging and js object/event review was critical.
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
No. Actually no human using a computer needs a touch screen. Using touch reminds me of the light pens used in the 1960's before the invention of the mouse. Hypertext Editing System. Using this "vector graphics intelligent terminal" was the same as emulating an iPhone X with Super Retina display on a 1028 x 768 screen.
More you see, the less you know.
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It is a trade off. One shouldn't fully trust the emulator. So for example one might suggest that QA should use the actual device. But the emulator might be 'almost' good enough that one could leave it up to QA to find the small number of problems. Not to mention that technically problems could come up on different versions of the device or different vendors. The solution to that is problematic for most places because it requires a lot of devices and a lot of testing. And that is simply impossible for a developer to do. At least one company does something like that as there was a story about it somewhere where there was a testing lab with something like 1000+ devices.
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Most touch applications are developed using an emulator. The "touch" test is generally conducted on a real phone or pad. Are there any good reasons that developers need a touch screen dev box?
TOMZ_KV
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If you are developing a touch-centric application, it sure helps to have a touchscreen. In one project I developed a BI dashboard for a wall-mounted 1080p touchscreen monitor. It supported 10-point multi-touch using Google Chrome in kiosk mode. Having a touchscreen directly connected for debugging and js object/event review was critical.
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Sounds like an awesome BI dashboard, did you use a framework or build your own? any tips would be appreciated!
The short story is that existing dashboard frameworks (that I could find) were geared toward providing the data presentation tooling, and we were looking for something that would primarily allow us to layout our data presentations of choice. So I built a container system that let us put any kind of web content from anywhere within a completely flexible layout. It ended up working across screen sizes of any kind and orientation even though it started as strictly a 1080p display. It was basically one big single page application using MaterializeCSS for navigation and styling. I used HighCharts, d3.js, plain-old HTML, and SVG for most of the data presentation.