Touch input not recognized on chrome in windows 8 hybrid devices

[harshavarma]

Hello,

I'm a long time user of reel and I encountered a couple of issues a few days back. One is the image flickering in firefox (#196), which is already reported.

The other one is the touch input (swipe) is ignored in chrome in devices that support both mouse and touch inputs (windows hybrids). It's actually the blink engine I think as both Opera and Chrome are not responding to touch where as Safari, Firefox and IE are working fine.

Reel just doesn't seem to respond to any touch gestures on chrome. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[pisi]

Currently touch events are bound only on devices with touch support, which is performed using simple user agent matching. So it is possible, that this doesn't work for your device and I have a suspicion the method employed won't work for these hybrids.

Please run http://test.vostrel.cz/jquery.reel-development/test on the device in question, allow it to finish and let me know when you did. Thanks.

[harshavarma]

Hi,

I ran the test suite on the device, there are a lot of errors in the chrome console about missing resources but somehow all the tests (1864) in the suite passed. I ran it in both Firefox and Chrome. The touch events are working fine in every browser except chrome ( & Opera) though.

Are there any touch specific tests that I can perform to give you more information? It is just that Chrome has the best performance out of all the browsers and It's sad that I can't use it right now.

[pisi]

Great. The missing resources don't matter. Sometimes it is even testing what happens when resource IS missing.

But, sadly, your test run didn't get recorded for some odd reason, so I will need you to:

1. Copy paste the user agent string you see in white on blue in the tests.
2. Execute $.reel.touchy in the console on the actual device - I'm guessing it will read false.

Thank you! Btw what is the actual device of yours?

[harshavarma]

The userAgent is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.76 Safari/537.36

And yes, $.reel.touchy returns false. The device I'm using is a Lenovo Thinkpad Helix. We deployed the app using reel on a PC which connects to a touchscreen monitor. It's basically a normal monitor with a panel overlay that adds the touch function. Chrome didn't recognize that touch input either while all other browsers did.

[pisi]

Um, ok, that's what I was afraid of - user agent detection won't cut it this time. Will rewrite the touch capability detection then ;) Stand by.

[harshavarma]

Appreciate the quick response. Let me know if you want me to do any more tests. Will be glad to help you in anyway I can.

[pisi]

Pls, verify for me that 'ontouchstart' in window returns true on the device. Thanks!

[harshavarma]

window.ontouchstart returned null.

[pisi]

That's actually excellent! :) , because null indicates unused yet available bind point. It would equal false otherwise.

[pisi]

@harshavarma Test the revised touch capability detection code in the gh-233-touchy branch please. It should be able to pick the device up as touch-enabled and hopefully there won't be any actual touch issues ;) Let me know.

[harshavarma]

I just tested the new branch and the touch support is great. However, on devices that support both mouse and touch, the mouse no longer works for reel. This is not a big issue but will be nice to have both working (all other browsers support both).

The other thing is, can you port this touch detection to a previous branch of reel (1.2). The images flicker in firefox (21+) as reported in #196. And the css workaround mentioned in that thread no longer works with this branch.

[pisi]

Oh, OK T_T Then I would have to bind them both somehow. I may end up porting it back, but it still is rather half-finished. I made advancements on the flicker issue, so @harshavarma please check that once again.

[pisi]

So am binding to touch and mouse events both at once now. On mouse only devices, the unknown touch events will be ignored. Touch only devices will pick up touch events only (and cancel eventual mouse events) and on hybrid devices, both should work, again with touch events taking precedence.

@harshavarma Looks promising, can't wait for you to test this! :)

gh-233-touchy branch

[pisi]

Unless there are objections, this is ready for release. Still would appreciate independent verification ;)

[pisi]

Released today as part of v1.3.0

[pisi]

@harshavarma an issue (#260, which I just fixed) arose as a consequence of the fix here. And since that fix was made in the general thereabouts of this fix, I would like you to re-test the code from [gh-260-touch-fix branch just in case. Thanks very much!

[harshavarma]

Hi @pisi, Sure, will let you know how it goes.

[harshavarma]

@pisi Just tested the code and can confirm it works well.

[pisi]

Awesome. Thanks!