Windows Phone 7 Gesture Recognizer Distinguishes 12 Different Types of Gestures

With the occasion of the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 release at the end of July, we've posted about five gestures described in the brochure as being supported by the upcoming mobile platform from Microsoft. These were tap, double tap, pan, flick and touch and hold. At the time we've got a comment wondering whether multi touch pivot/rotate existed and we can have our answer below.

Turns out there's a free code floating around written for Windows Phone 7 and acting as a gesture recognizer. For the more tech oriented out there, "you can use the gesture recognizer standalone in code and attach to a UI element or you can also use the behavior + trigger. The behavior attaches the gesture recognizer to a UI element and then you can add triggers for specific gesture events like Tap, DoubleTap, etc".

Turns out the list of gestures recognized has 12 entries, opposed to those we extracted from the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7. Find them below:

- Tap
- DoubleTap
- TapAndHold
- PressAndTap
- TwoFingerTap
- TwoFingerDoubleTap
- TwoFingerTapAndHold
- Shape
- Pan
- Flick
- Scale
- Rotate
While tap, double tap, tap and hold, pan and flick are known to us, we have a list of seven new gestures, out of which four (PressAndTap, TwoFingerTap, TwoFingerDoubleTap and TwoFingerTapAndHold) seem to be involving two fingers. While the last three of them are pretty self explanatory, PressAndTap seems to be triggered by touching and holding an element with one finger while the second finger does another tap. This could be as well used for a pivot or rotation action inside a Pictures application for instance. While recognizing only circle, rectangle, pigtail, check and question mark shapes, we can also imagine this being used in scenarios which imply text input. Check out the video demonstration for the Gesture Recognizer below:



For the complete code, please check the original source.

(Via: Clarity Consulting and @trydis)