Let’s talk about Touch on Windows Mobile 6.5

Marcus Perryman’s just posted part 2 of his Windows Mobile 6.5 Touch API article. This time he goes a little bit deeper into how the physics engine handles users interaction and updates the framerate and talks about the new WAGI (Windows Auto Gesture Interface).

WindowAutoGesture Interface (WAGI) provides configurable gesture handling for individual windows taking away the complexity of dealing directly with the gesture messages and the physics engine. WAGI is implemented as part of the window manager and handles the pan and scroll gestures on the windows behalf, creating and driving the Physics Engine as appropriate. WAGI then instructs the application where to draw content through custom animation messages.

The window remains responsible for drawing its content and updating its scrollbar in response to animation commands from WAGI. The WAGI API was originally designed to go the extra step and take control of content drawing and scrollbars as well but there wasn’t time in the schedule to implement this for 6.5.

Reading all this made me think about the Zune HD UI and give me the feeling that the Zune team may have implemented their own Gesture APIs given how far along they are compared to the Window Mobile Team. The Zune HD which support scrolling/pan/tap gestures, multi-touch pinch/zoom etc is basically finished while the WinMo Team is still getting around the WM6.5 SDK/DTK. The question is: Who is the biggest contributor to Windows Mobile 7, the Zune team or Windows Mobile Team ? Will applications developed using the WinMo 6.5 Gesture API work on Windows Mobile 7? Is there three Gestures API, one for Windows 7/Surface, one for Zune and one for Windows Mobile? Lots of unanswered questions unfortunately.

You can read part 1here and part 2 here