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Responding to user interaction (Windows Store apps using JavaScript and HTML)

Summary

How basic input and interaction functionality is provided for free
How to customize the user interaction experience for all devices and modes (touch keyboard, mouse wheel, pen eraser, and so on)
How the interaction patterns are shared across language frameworks (Windows Store apps using JavaScript, Windows Store apps using C++, C#, or Visual Basic, and Windows Store app using DirectX with C++)

In this article

Developer audience
Overview of the Windows 8 user interaction platform
Related topics

Customize how your Windows 8 app responds to user interactions for touch, touchpad, mouse, pen/stylus, and keyboard input devices, or use the built-in controls provided with the Windows 8 language frameworks.

Roadmap: See how this topic relate to others.

Roadmap for Windows Store apps using JavaScript
User interaction: Touch input... and beyond, highlighted in our App features, start to finish series

Some of the things we'll look at in this section, include:

Through guidelines, best practices, and examples, we show you how to take full advantage of the interaction capabilities of Windows 8 to build Windows Store apps with intuitive, engaging, and immersive user experiences.

Developer audience

We assume you are familiar with HTML, JavaScript, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

If JavaScript isn't your language

See these user interaction docs for other language frameworks:

Overview of the Windows 8 user interaction platform

Design your Windows 8 apps with touch interactions in mind. Touch input is supported by an increasingly large and varied number of devices, and touch interactions are a fundamental aspect of the Windows 8 experience.

Because touch is a primary mode of interaction for users of Windows 8, the platform is optimized for touch input to make your app responsive, accurate, and easy to use. And don't worry, tried and true input modes (such as mouse, pen, and keyboard) are fully supported and functionally consistent with touch (see Gestures, manipulations, and interactions). The speed, accuracy, and tactile feedback that traditional input modes provide are familiar and appealing to many users. These unique and distinctive interaction experiences have not been compromised.

Be creative with the design of the user interaction experience. Support the widest range of capabilities and preferences to appeal to the widest possible audience, and attract more customers to your app in the Windows Store.

From built-in controls to full customization, the user interaction platform for Windows Store apps is based on layers of functionality that progressively add flexibility and power.

Built-in controls

Take advantage of the built-in controls to provide a common user interaction experience based on the Windows 8 platform. This functionality works well for the majority of Windows Store apps.

The built-in controls are designed from the ground up to be touch-optimized, while providing consistent and engaging interaction experiences across all input modes. They support a comprehensive set of Windows 8 gestures: press and hold, tap, slide, swipe, pinch, stretch, turn. When you couple these with direct manipulations, such as pan, zoom, rotate, drag, and realistic inertia behavior, they enable a compelling and immersive interaction experience that follows Windows 8 best practices consistently across the Windows platform.

For more info on the control libraries, see Adding controls and content (Windows Store apps using JavaScript and HTML).

Views

Tweak the user interaction experience through the pan/scroll and zoom settings of your app views. An app view dictates how a user accesses and manipulates your app and its content. Views also provide Windows Store app behaviors such as inertia, content boundary bounce, and snap points.

Pan and scroll settings dictate how users navigate within a single view, when the content of the view doesn't fit within the viewport. A single view can be, for example, a page of a magazine or book, the folder structure of a computer, a library of documents, or a photo album.

Zoom settings apply to both optical zoom and the SemanticZoom control. Semantic Zoom is a touch-optimized technique for presenting and navigating large sets of related data or content within a single view. It works by using two distinct modes of classification, or zoom levels. This is analogous to panning and scrolling within a single view. Panning and scrolling can be used in conjunction with Semantic Zoom.

Use app views and the following CSS properties, Document Object Model (DOM) attributes, and DOM events to modify the pan/scroll and zoom behaviors. This can provide a smoother interaction experience than is possible through the handling of pointer and gesture events.

API surface	CSS Properties	DOM Attributes	DOM Events
-ms-touch-action specifies whether a given region can be manipulated through panning or zooming.
Panning/Scrolling	-ms-overflow-style -ms-scroll-chaining -ms-scroll-limit -ms-scroll-limit-x-max -ms-scroll-limit-x-min -ms-scroll-limit-y-max -ms-scroll-limit-y-min -ms-scroll-rails -ms-scroll-snap-points-x -ms-scroll-snap-points-y -ms-scroll-snap-type -ms-scroll-snap-x -ms-scroll-snap-y -ms-scroll-translation	scroll scrollHeight scrollLeft scrollTop scrollWidth	onscroll
Zooming	-ms-content-zoom-chaining -ms-content-zooming -ms-content-zoom-limit -ms-content-zoom-limit-max -ms-content-zoom-limit-min -ms-content-zoom-snap -ms-content-zoom-snap-points -ms-content-zoom-snap-type	msContentZoomFactor	onmscontentzoom
Both			onmsmanipulationstatechanged

For more info on app views, see Defining layouts and views.

For more info on zooming, see Guidelines for optical zoom and resizing or Guidelines for Semantic Zoom.

For more info on panning/scrolling, see Guidelines for panning.

DOM pointer and gesture events

A pointer is a generic input type with a unified event mechanism. It exposes basic info, such as screen position, on the active input source, which can be touch, touchpad, mouse, or pen. Gestures range from simple, static interactions like tapping to more complicated manipulations like zooming, panning, and rotating. For more details, see Gestures, manipulations, and interactions.

Note

Static gesture events are triggered after an interaction is complete. Manipulation gesture events indicate an ongoing interaction. Manipulation gesture events start firing when the user touches the element and continue until the user lifts their finger, or the manipulation is canceled.

Access to the pointer and gesture events enables you to use the Windows 8 Touch interaction design language for:

Games
Custom controls and feedback visuals
Custom interactions

Take advantage of the built-in gesture recognition provided through these DOM gesture events:

Type	DOM gesture events
General events	onmsmanipulationstatechanged
Pointer events	onmsgotpointercapture onmslostpointercapture onmspointercancel onmspointerdown onmspointerhover onmspointermove onmspointerout onmspointerover onmspointerup
Static gesture events	onmsgesturehold onmsgesturetap
Manipulation gesture events	onmsgesturechange onmsgestureend onmsgesturestart onmsinertiastart

For more info on handling pointer and gesture events, see Quickstart: Pointer handling and Quickstart: Basic DOM gesture handling.

Customize the user experience

Fully customize and control your app's interaction experience through the Windows Store app APIs. With these APIs you can enable custom user interactions, and handle additional configuration options and hardware capabilities such as mouse devices with a right button, wheel button, tilt wheel, or X buttons and pen devices with barrel buttons and eraser tips.

Most interaction APIs are provided by the Windows.UI.Core, Windows.UI.Input, and Windows.UI.Input.Inking types, with input device data exposed through Windows.Devices.Input.

You'll find the GestureRecognizer, PointerPoint, and PointerPointProperties classes to be useful for dealing with gestures and manipulations.

Before you provide customized interaction experiences through new or modified gestures and manipulations, consider the following:

Does an existing gesture provide the experience your app requires? Don't provide a custom gesture to zoom or pan when you can simply adapt your app to support or interpret an existing gesture.
Does the custom gesture warrant the potential inconsistency across apps?
Does the gesture require specific hardware support, such as number of contacts?
Is there a control (such as SemanticZoom) that provides the interaction experience you need? If a control can intrinsically handle user input, is a custom gesture or manipulation required at all?
Does your custom gesture or manipulation result in a smooth and natural interaction experience?
Does the interaction experience make sense? If the interaction depends on such things as the number of contacts, velocity, time (not recommended), and inertia, ensure that these constraints and dependencies are consistent and discoverable. For example, how users interpret fast and slow can directly affect the functionality of your app and the users' satisfaction with the experience.
Is the gesture or manipulation affected by the physical abilities of your user? Is it accessible?
Will an app bar command or some other UI command suffice?

In short, create custom gestures and manipulations only if there is a clear, well-defined requirement and no basic gesture can support your scenario.

For more info on custom interactions, see Quickstart: Static gestures and Quickstart: Manipulation gestures.