Overlay Application for Legacy Software Touch Gesture Recognition
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Solution Overview
Problem
Legacy software applications often lack touch gesture recognition capabilities, particularly for common gestures like pinching, due to limited or no access to source code, making it economically unfeasible to modify them for compatibility with modern touch input features.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a system with a touch-sensitive display device, a processor, and a computer-readable medium that includes an overlay application and a converter plug-in to detect and convert touch gestures into data usable by the legacy application, allowing it to respond as if it natively recognizes the gestures without modifying the legacy application's source code.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If legacy applications are modified to add touch gesture recognition, then gesture recognition capability is improved, but development cost and complexity increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary overlay application that sits between the touch-sensitive device and the legacy application. This overlay application captures touch gestures, translates them into equivalent input commands, and forwards them to the legacy application through its existing API. This mediator approach adds gesture recognition capability without modifying the legacy application's source code, thus resolving the contradiction between improving adaptability and avoiding increased complexity.
2Adaptability or versatility
If source code access is obtained to modify legacy applications, then touch gesture recognition is achieved, but economic feasibility deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The overlay application serves as an intermediary that enables touch gesture recognition without requiring access to or modification of the legacy application's source code. By operating at the interface level through the existing API, this approach avoids the high costs associated with source code acquisition, modification, testing, and deployment, thereby maintaining economic feasibility while achieving the desired adaptability.
3Adaptability or versatility
If overlay application is implemented to intercept touch data, then gesture recognition is provided to legacy applications, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The overlay application creates a virtual copy of the touch input interface, intercepting touch data at the system level before it reaches the legacy application. This copying approach allows the overlay to translate gestures into equivalent traditional inputs without requiring deep integration with or modification of the legacy application's internal structure, thus adding gesture recognition capability while keeping the increase in system complexity manageable.
Data Source
AI summary
An architecture for providing a legacy software application with touch gesture recognition includes an overlay software application and a converter plug-in software application. The overlay application is configured to intercept and detect touch gestures and provide gesture information to the converter plug-in application. The converter plug-in application converts the detected gesture information into data that the legacy application can use. The converted data is provided to the legacy application via an API. The touch gesture recognition is essentially unnoticeable by the user as the overlay application is positioned over the legacy application and is effectively transparent.