Friday 17 April 2009

Mixtikl on iPhone - dealing with chubby fingers

We're taking our time to get the iPhone version of Mixtikl "just right".

After playing around with Mixtikl on a real device, it became obvious that the general inaccuracy that you get with touch-only devices using chubby fingers :) meant that the Mixtikl skin needed to be "chunkier". This is as opposed to pointer-controllable devices like most Windows Mobile PDAs, where you can have a UI that supports smaller elements that can be selected accurately with a pointer device.

We've come up with a nice solution to this problem, and in the interim have been extending the underlying .partikl file format to take better advantage of local sample files (in Ogg and DLS format) used in the Tiklpaks. All will become clear when we release the next version of Mixtikl!

These changes are combined with other user-interface tweaks, which we think make a great deal of difference to the usability of Mixtikl across all our platforms.

We can't wait to release this new version ... but won't rush it. :)

Pete

4 comments:

ashley said...

As ever, can't wait to see how you've done it. I'm sure it'll be excellent.

Pete Cole said...

Thanks Ashley! This has been a very long road, but we're getting there ... slowly but surely! :)

Under the hood, this is going to be one of the most complex pieces of software available for iPhone, though we're making it as easy as possible to use for anybody who wants to play with music and sounds. Quite some challenge...!

ashley said...

I'm especially interested to see how you manage the Partikl interface, as parts of that I imagine are especially 'non-chubby fingers" friendly.

Pete Cole said...

Hi Ashley,

The key for this is to use buttons on the toolbar, that allow for finer control where the gadget in question has been given the focus. :)

I guess if I had an infinite amount of time, there are snazzier ways to deal with this, but it seems to work OK!

Pete