Iphone and iPod Touch Programming: Handling Touch Interactions and Events for Mobile Safari

by Richard Wagner

This Wrox Blox explains touch input events and illustrates how to detect an orientation change, capture two-finger scrolling inputs, and simulate a drag-and-drop action when designing applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Web developers designing applications for Mobile Safari, the browser on iPhone and iPod Touch, are able to easily incorporate touch input event handling without writing any code at all. However, while page flicking and scrolling are easy to implement, Mobile Safari does not provide a way to trap or override most touch interactions, nor does it allow developers full access to all DOM events. Perhaps the most important event handling constraint is that no events trigger until the user's finger leaves the touch screen. However, because developers are able to trap for viewport orientation changes, they do have full programmatic control over their application when the orientation changes between portrait and landscape modes. As a result, you can adjust CSS styling and positioning based on the current mode.

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26 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2007

About the author

Richard Wagner, the former chief architect of NetObjects ScriptBuilder and the primary author of the ECMAScript Components standard, is currently in charge of development tools at Nombas, Inc.