As mentioned previously I’ve been working on getting Cantabile 3 working well with touch screen devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. Here’s a (very rough) demo video:
Getting touch support right is mostly an exercise in subtle details, but here’s the highlights of what’s changed:
- The on-screen keyboard now supports multi-touch so you can play multiple notes at once. It can also be made a lot bigger.
- The popups for sliders now appear above the slider instead of below so you can see it without your hand getting in the way. It’s also positioned so that your finger tracks at the correct location.
- The popups for knobs are now positioned to the left rather than below the knob (for the same reason).
- All controls now respond natively to touch events rather than relying on Window’s translation of touch events into mouse events. This gives a much snappier response for simple actions like button presses.
- Context menus can be shown with a tap and hold action and appear to the left for right handed users (see below).
- Scrollable areas can now be scrolled by grab and drag and also support flicking, velocity, deceleration and overscrolling.
- The touch areas for splitters and column resizing are much wider for touch so they can be easily grabbed with fat fingers.
- Some elements have been spaced a little further apart to make them easier to hit.
Some interactions like the popups for knobs and context menus appear to the left of where you touch — this is so right handed users can see the content without their hand getting in the way. For left-handed users there’s a Windows option to control this and Cantabile will respect this and shift content to the right instead. To find this option, click the Start button in Windows 8 and type “handedness”.
Finally, the quick controller now has an on-screen keypad and can be displayed by tapping in the status panel (this is only enabled touches, not mouse).
All of this is available now to licensed v2 users in build 3060.