Topic: a way to make click detection work better

So how fluidly click detection works I think has huge effect on the feel of the Chumby UI. I'm guessing that there's a layer hooked up to the touch sensor, and it has some thresholds to figure out what's a click and what's not. If something is a click, it posts some sort of click(x,y) event, and that finds its way into the Flash layer. Ok fine, that's the standard way to do it.

However, on my Chumby at least, the click detection is pretty iffy. I often have to click a few times to get things to go through. Maybe it's my unit, or I'm doing it wrong, or my fingers are fat.

Anyway, here's the idea:

In the flash layer, in some cases, you *know* where the buttons are (or you could have extra markup addable by the author that encodes it). Use that information at the hardware filtering level! Use a lower threshold if the potential-click is near a known button, and consider counting the click even if it's outside the formal button bounds. This is certainly an abstraction layer violation, but the click detection is such a huge part of the Chumby user experience, making it fluid and effortlessly responsive is a huge win. This strategy would need a lot of tuning and UI testing, but it builds off the basic advantage that most of the widgets have a very small number of buttons. Also, with this fuzzy-hit type logic, the buttons could use up fewer oh-so-scarce pixels, while remaining clickable by a larger virtual area. Of course for random click-not-on-a-button you can use the current thresholding. It would also be interesting to use all the quiet time to build a per-unit noise profile for the touch sensor on each unit, and feed that into the thresholds.

Cheers,

Nick

Re: a way to make click detection work better

nparlante wrote:

So how fluidly click detection works I think has huge effect on the feel of the Chumby UI.

...

However, on my Chumby at least, the click detection is pretty iffy. I often have to click a few times to get things to go through. Maybe it's my unit, or I'm doing it wrong, or my fingers are fat.

I'm having a similar experience.

I think it may have something to do with finger tip  size.  I find things work better if I use something as a stylus instead of my finger tip.

If there were a setting to accomodate those of us with bigger fingers, that'd be nice.

Re: a way to make click detection work better

I agree that some fuzziness would, for example, totally mess up the keyboard. But it can automatically be smart for that case -- the heuristic can take account of the placement of the clickable elements, and only kick in for the (I suspect common) case where there's a button floating out there with nothing clickable around it.

Cheers,

Nick