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IDEA: a software that makes normal windows apps more touch friendly.

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rjbull:
And just for the record, if you lost your stylus, you could use any old object that had a tip with the Palm. Not that it saved them from ending up on the scrapheap of technological history-dr_andus (September 25, 2014, 06:31 PM)
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I'm still using my Palm T3...  and if you want styli, take a look at Cult Pens stylus search
I thought there was a difference, though.  Aren't Palm screens resistive, which needs a stylus (though it does usually work with a finger), whereas mobile phone/tablet screens are capacitative, which expects fingers?

Nod5:
The problem when you are using windows in desktop mode with a touch interface, is basically the size of the touchable things.
-superboyac (September 25, 2014, 04:53 PM)
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Yes indeed!

Some suggestions:

1. tweak the high DPI scaling settings.
http://www.howtogeek.com/175664/how-to-make-the-windows-desktop-work-well-on-high-dpi-displays-and-fix-blurry-fonts/
http://www.howtogeek.com/184152/screenshot-tour-whats-new-in-windows-8.1-update-1/

2. Get Microsoft's Sysinternals application ZoomIt, set a hotkey for LiveZoom mode, make an autohotkey script to send that hotkey and finally make a shortcut to the script in the taskbar and on the desktop. Click the shortcut to toggle zoom on off. If you have any hardware buttons on the tablet (volume, lock mode, ...) that autohotkey can handle then consider triggering this toggle with them. It is easy to change volume in Win8 with touch through the charms bar anyway. Use this to zoom in and click on tiny things and then zoom back out. The autohotkey script could even be made to autozoom out after a few seconds to avoid having to click the shortcut again.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434

3. The above works ok I think but what is really missing is customizable gestures that can be tied to autohotkey. With that we could do almost anything. For example a triple finger swipe could zoom in/out. I've seen no solution for autohotkey for that. There are some post in the ahkscript forums talking about it but no developers there appears to be working on it. There is GamePlay from Gestureworks, https://gameplay.gestureworks.com/how-it-works , that I haven't tried. But they do custom buttons and only for specific applications/games AFAICT. If a few always on top buttons could be made to do the same operations on all windows í.e. toogle zoom in/out then that would be almost as good as custom gestures. I think there would be huge demand for a tool that simply delivers a few global swipe gestures that can trigger whatever code one wants.

EDIT:
I'm very glad you started this thread superboyac as it got me googling some more. I found TouchMe Gesture Studio http://www.yasharbahman.com/wp/touchme-gesture-studio/ (app in Win app store, free trial). It sets up global gesture hotkeys! Since it can make a gesture like three finger swipe send a keyboard sequence we can use it to trigger autohotkey hotkeys. Which means we can make gestures that do almost anything :) I'll try it some more and post back here if I run into any drawbacks.

EDIT2:
Ok, tried it some more and got to say: TouchMe is AWESOME! Microsoft should have paid the Minecraft money to the dev of this app instead :D

superboyac:
Nod5, you just gave me several ideas.  Thanks!
I have been using TouchMe.  I like it, but it seems to be limited in the gesture types.  That is, they have a whole lot of gestures, but it felt like most of the very specific things I wanted to do were not really there.  There were ways to get CLOSE, but not exactly.  I probably need to play around with it more, maybe it's more capable than I think.  Combining it with AHK sounds like it should be able to do basically anything.  So I'll have to give that a try.
After using the tablet for a while, the things I'm craving custom gestures for are things like shortcuts to use while in fullscreen mode.  So, when I'm reading, I usually do it in fullscreen mode, there are no toolbars or anything showing.  But if i want the keyboard or to look something up real quick, I have to exit fullscreen, and tap whatever button i need.  So I'd like gestures to replace those.  I started doing it with Touchme's two finger swipe options.  It was ok.  it started interfering with other programs' two finger touch things, so i changed it to three fingers.  But three fingers didn't feel so good.

still figuring it out.  I also would like to come up with alternatives for the taskbar.  I'm experimenting with LBC and truelaunchbar so far.

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