MooTools Mobile: It’s Touching!
When the community asked the MooTools team to add basic mobile event listening to MooTools' Event class, we listened; today MooTools supports all touch and gesture events. What if we want more detailed mobile event listeners though, like swipe with direction, pinch, or touchhold events? That's where Christoph Pojer's excellent MooTools Mobile comes in. MooTools Mobile isn't a full mobile framework, but rather a set of utilities to make catering to mobile a bit more...touching. Let's have a look at the resources provided by MooTools Mobile!
As you've come to expect from members of the MooTools team, Christoph's new Touch-based event classes are compact and modular. Each class will be found within the Touch path.
Swipe
By using the Touch/Swipe resource, you can attain the direction of the swipe, as well as the start and end coordinates:
// Add the swipe event listener
anyElement.addEvent("swipe", function(event){
event.direction // "left" or "right"
event.start // {x: Number, y: Number} Swipe start position
event.end // {x: Number, y: Number} Swipe end position
});
// Configure minimal swipe distance and vertical swipe preferences
anyElement.store("swipe:distance", 30); // Default: 50
anyElement.store("swipe:cancelVertical", true); // Default: false
As you can see above, you may also configure minimum swipe distances and cancellation of vertical swipes.
Pinch
The Touch/Pinch resource allows you to listen for pinches, as well as configure the pinch threshold:
// Add a pinch event to anyElement
anyElement.addEvent("pinch", function(event){
event.pinch // "in" or "out"
});
// Store a custom threshold
anyElement.store("pinch:threshold", 0.3); // Default: 0.5; Amount of scaling to be done to fire the pinch event
The pinch threshold is stored within elements themselves so you may customize to fit any element.
Touchhold
The touchhold event is used throughout all mobile operating systems, so why not implement touchhold within the browser?
// Listen for touchhold on anyElement
anyElement.addEvent("touchhold", function(event){
// Event fires
});
Any element may store an optional delay before the touchhold event fires:
anyElement.store("touchhold:delay", 1000); // Default: 750
Maximum versatility with minimal code!
Browser Enhancements!
Besides providing these custom touch events, MooTools Mobile provides additional information within the Browser object via a Device property:
Browser.Device // Object added to Browser Browser.Device.name // ipad / iphone / ipod OR other Browser.Device.ipad // true if on ipad Browser.Device.iphone // true if on iphone Browser.Device.ipod // true if on ipod Browser.hasHighResolution // true on iPhone 4 Browser.isMobile // True on any platform that is not Windows / Linux / Mac
These properties give you further insight as to the device capabilities!
With mobile development booming for the foreseeable future, it's important to make sure your site is as mobile-friendly as possible. Christoph's mobile contribution is just the tiny helper developers may need to make their MooTools-powered web apps more mobile device-friendly. MooTools (Mobile) FTW!
Now I will be able to create a windows 8 like theme for wordpress :D
Something offtopic:
I remember your MooTools articles had tenths of replies some long time ago.
Something that’s rarely happens the last months.
Why?
I’m not cool anymore! :)
… or, with equal probability, the Internet wanderers have been eaten by a giant bunny rabbit with a laser on it’s forehead !
Keep up the good work, and remember : gesture-able interfaces will revolutionize the way we create content, from fingerpainting to downright coding.
MooTools seems to be losing some steam. I guess that might just be my personal perspective, but it seems to me that Dojo and jQuery are the biggest contenders for people’s loyalty. Personally I’ve always preferred jQuery. I’d love to get into Dojo more, but I haven’t created any larger web apps that really warranted it. All the examples on my JavaScript Blog either use no library or use jQuery.
I am very pleased w/ MooTools in mobile development but the arrival of iOS8 I experienced a big issue/problem.
Using PhoneGap and moobile.js for mobile application development and on iOS 8 buttons and other components tap event listeners are not working.
The setLabel function works, but the listener doesn’t fire when user taps on the button.
Here is a sample code that is not working on iOS8 (iPhone5)
this.view = Moobile.View.at('templates/main.html'); this.button = this.view.getChildComponent('test-button'); this.button.addEvent('tap', this.bound('testListener'));Everything works on iOS 7.
(Cordova 3.5.0 , moobile-0.2.1.js, latest mootools-core and mootools-more)
Thanks for your help!
We have fixed it.
This code caused the problem:
Class.refactor(Moobile.ScrollView, { options: { scroller: 'IScroll' } });(It fixes Android scrolling issue.)
We wrapped it with a condition for platform, and now tap event listener is correctly working.