Modifying applications to support single-tap

Symbian^3 enhances the touch interaction by providing support for single-tap.

S60 5th Edition introduced touch support feature with double-tap to maintain binary and source code compatibility with the existing S60 3.x applications. The UI was focus driven, with the first tap for object selection (the corresponding event forwarded to the application) and the second tap for activation.

Symbian^3 enhances the touch support with single tap for achieving better usability and development of platform and 3rd party applications. The supporting UI is based on direct manipulation and is not focus driven, which means that a single-tap on the device selects and activates an event. This change modifies the touch behavior of certain UI components as listed below:

By default, none of the menu items are highlighted.
Item specific options are displayed in stylus menus rather than in options menus.
The side toolbar is hidden in the landscape layout view except in specific applications like the message viewer and editor.

It is highly recommended that you migrate your applications to single-tap to complement the platform UI behavior. However, if you do not migrate your applications to single-tap, they work the same way as in S60 5th Edition (touch support with double-tap).

Note: The UI components can be used in hybrid devices for both touch and non-touch events. For details, see Designing application UIs for touch and non-touch devices.

Include the EAknTouchCompatible and EAknSingleClickCompatible flags in your application's UI (CAknAppUi ) constructor.
For example,
```
void CFileBrowseBaseView::ConstructL() //Called from framework (CEikDocument)
{
  ...
    BaseConstructL(EAknEnableSkin | EAknEnableMSK | EAknTouchCompatible | EAknSingleClickCompatible);
  ...
}
```
The EAknTouchCompatible flag enables touch functionality. The EAknSingleClickCompatible flag enables single-click functionality on the Symbian device.

The following illustrations show how applications behave before and after the single-tap changes are made:

Figure 1. Double-tap enabled: By default, UI component is highlighted.

Figure 2. Single-tap enabled: By default, no UI component is highlighted.
Hide item-specific commands from the application's menus, submenus and toolbars. Item-specific commands are functions that are specific to an item. For example, Edit is an item-specific command for an existing contact in the Phone book.
As a result, all item-specific options are hidden in menus, submenus and toolbars and are displayed in the stylus popup menus.
Activate items in a list on single-tap.
Disable stylus popup menu in AVKON lists.
Disable hardware key shortcuts.

Hiding item-specific commands in menus
The item-specific commands and item-action commands in options menu must be flagged with the EEikMenuItemSpecific and EEikMenuItemAction flags introduced in Symbian^3. This enables the UI framework to hide them in the options menu and display them only in the stylus pop-up menu. The touch down and hold action opens the stylus pop-up menu. Touch down and release performs an action.
Hiding item-specific commands in submenus
This document describes the changes required to your application's code for hiding item-specific commands in submenus.
Removing item-specific commands from the toolbar
This document describes the changes required to your code to remove the item-specific commands from the toolbar.
Activating items in a list
This document describes the code changes required to activate items in a list on single-tap.
Disabling stylus popup menus in AVKON lists
This document describes how to disable stylus popup menus in AVKON lists.
Disabling hardware key shortcuts
This document describes how to disable hardware key shortcuts when none of the items in a list are highlighted.

Parent topic: Porting applications from S60 5th Edition to Symbian^3