Rapid Android Development

Chapter 2Working with the Touch Screen Display

Now that we’ve completed our first Android app, let’s explore a device feature that has become particularly popular with mobile phones and tablets—multitouch. Virtually all Android devices ship today with a capacitive touch screen panel. It’s a device we’ve gotten so accustomed to that we hardly “see” it as the hardware sensor that it is.

User interaction (UI) with Android touch screens differs somewhat from that of a mouse on a traditional computer display. First of all, we don’t have one omnipresent mouse pointer for interacting with UI elements via rollovers, clicks, right-clicks, and double-clicks. In fact, we don’t have a rollover or a physical “click” on the touch screen panel at all, hence ...