Touch Zone Tricks

Those of you who style applications have basic button creation down to no-brainer status.  You set your attribute and tracking, draw your box, define a touch zone to match the box, and give it some instructions.  For most situations, this is all you need to do.  However, there are a few cases where the end result of those steps yields less than the perfect solution.  The good news is that EditPro has some nifty tools and tricks to let you get fancy when setting up your touch zones, and this tech tip lists a few of them.

First, let’s make sure we understand some concepts.  You probably already know that the box you draw on the screen and the touch zone you define are two separate entities, even though they appear as one to the end user.  What you may not know, is that the zone itself is actually two components; the touch zone, which is the area of the screen that you can touch and execute the instructions defined by that zone; and the highlight zone, which is the area of the screen that will change color when you touch the touch zone.  When you define the area for a new zone, it applies both to the touch zone and the highlight zone.  However you can adjust their size individually, as you will see in the following sections.
Expanding the Touch Zone

The most common reason for expanding the touch zone occurs when you have made a button that is too small to be easily touched.  Making the button bigger may ruin the aesthetics of the screen, but you can make just the touch zone bigger.  This tells TouchPro that if it detects a touch anywhere near the physical button to assume the user is touching it.

To expand a touch zone, first define it as you normally would.  You can then change it’s size by placing the cursor in the zone and selecting the Resize Touch option from the Zone submenu on the Tools pulldown menu, or by pressing F4, the shortcut key.  This anchors the top left corner of the zone and lets you adjust the bottom and right sides of the zone.  If you press Tab it switches the anchor point to the bottom right corner and lets you adjust the top and left sides of the zone.  Press Enter when done.
Shrinking the Highlight Zone

Shrinking the highlight zone can be a handy feature when the touch zone is very large.  A good example of where this might be needed would be a screen where the user can touch the screen anywhere when ready to continue.  This screen may consist of just one giant touch zone, but it would be ugly (not to mention blinding) to have the entire screen flash.  In a case like this it would be more tasteful to just have the words “Touch to Continue” highlight.

Shrinking the highlight zone is sort of the reverse of expanding the touch zone.  Basically, you can either draw a zone and expand the touch area, or draw a zone and shrink the highlight area.  To shrink the highlight area, place the cursor in the zone, and select the Highlight Region option from the Zone submenu on the Tools pulldown menu, or press F5, the shortcut key.  Sizing for the highlight region works the same as described in the previous section.
Invisible Zones

This trick always reminds me of the old haunted houses with the secret panel that led off to some unknown area of the house.  Just like in the movies, you have no clue that the zone even exists until you fall through it.  This can be used for a secret capability where even people watching you don’t know what you pushed.

To create an invisible zone, simply define the zone but don’t draw the button.  This is pretty invisible in itself but the zone will still highlight when you touch it and the station will still beep.  You can’t actually turn off the highlight, but you can set its attribute to be the same as the page background attribute.  To put it another way, if a zone flashes white text on grey (or is that gray) over a section of the screen that is already white text on grey (or gray), you won’t see it.  To set the highlight attribute and turn off the beep:

  1. In screenpainter, place the cursor over the zone.
  2. Press Ctrl – Enter to bring up the zone properties.
  3. Press Alt-A to jump to Highlight Attribute and press Enter to select it.
  4. Use your arrow keys to highlight the attribute that matches the screen and press Enter.
  5. Press Alt-N to set the beep to None.
  6. Press Escape to exit zone properties.

Untouchable Touch Zones

Why would you want to have a touch zone that you can’t touch?  Amazingly, there are times when this is exactly what is needed.  Example 1 – You want to be able to plug in a keyboard and press a secret key combination like Ctl-F9 to jump out of the program or bypass the Passcode window to go to the Manager Functions page.  However, you don’t want an employee to be able to touch the screen and have that happen.  Example 2 – You have a Mag Stripe Reader plugged into your keyboard port and you want to have an instruction chain that kicks in when the card is swiped.  But you don’t want an employee to touch the screen and trigger a bad swipe error message.

Both of these examples require a touch zone so that keyboard input can trigger an instruction chain.  Great, but how do you keep an employee from touching the zone.  The answer is that you hide it under another zone, kind of like sweeping it under the carpet.  Here’s how:

  1. First, make the zone that will be on top.
  2. Resize the top zone using the trick explained in Expanding the Touch Zone.  However in this case, reduce the size by moving the right edge to the left.
  3. Now make your untouchable zone in a part of the screen vacated by the zone you just shrunk.  Make it as defined in Invisible Zones.
  4. Go back to the first zone and resize it back to its original size, covering up the invisible zone.

Voila!  You have a zone that can be triggered by the keyboard but can’t be touched.  This works because when TouchPro detects touch in an area defined by two zones, it triggers the zone who’s top left corner is higher or farther to the left.  One word of warning: The scanner utility will report this as an overlapping zone to be fixed, but don’t be fooled, it will work perfectly.