Simulating touch messages on desktop - what do the smart kids do?

[Scott Rossi]

Hi Ben:

Did you catch my recent post on using DropBox?  Maybe this approach can
help:
<http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/Using-DropBox-for-Faster-Mob
ile-Development-td4380386.html>

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, UX Design



Recently, Ben Rubinstein wrote:

> My view of why development in LiveCode is so rapid is a lot to do with
> avoiding the code/compile/test cycle (or at least making the middle bit
> unnoticeably rapid).  When applied to mobile development, I think that's huge
> - we can do most of our work in a desktop context (that is, in the IDE), only
> occasionally having to build out to simulator or device to test.  As soon as I
> run up against something where a change can only be tested on the device or
> simulator, my rate of progress drops to a crawl.
> 
> Unfortunately, the desktop engines, and hence the IDE, don't support touch
> messages. (And obviously even though many Mac and Windows machines now have
> multi-touch input devices, this is complications by the fact that on these
> machines, touches don't have a location on screen.  So I don't expect this to
> change soon.)
> 
> So when I write code responding to touchStart/End/Move/Release, I find I'm
> thrown back to the old world for testing, and I don't like it.
> 
> I tried simply adding mouseDown/Up/Move/Release handlers that called the
> corresponding touch handlers, but that didn't seem to be a complete solution
> (not exactly sure why not, but I did this to a stack that was working on iOS,
> and it went awry...).  And in any case, that would help for the simple case of
> a single touch at a time, but not for the more interesting ones involving
> multi-touch gestures, or overlapping touches.
> 
> So my question: what do the smart kids do to speed up their development in
> this case?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Ben