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
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.