What does FastClick do?

Update Nov 2016: FastClick is no longer needed on modern browsers. It is only needed for iOS Home Screen apps.

AppStudio 3.0.9 added a new feature: FastClick. It will make your app feel faster and more responsive when running on a mobile device. Here’s the reason: mobile devices have a built in 200 to 500ms delay from the time you tap until the onclick() function in your app gets fired. FastClick gets rid of that delay. Here’s what is going on…

On the desktop, an onclick() function is called immediately. Transfer the same app to a mobile device, and the clicks will appear to be a bit slow. The delay, about half a second, is barely noticeable consciously, but the app will appear a bit unresponsive or even sluggish. The solution has been to also have an ontouch() function which responds instantly. That’s a bit cumbersome to program.

The issue is complex. If you would like an in depth discussion or would just like your eyeballs to glaze over, read this from Google.

Recently, we put FastClick from FTLabs to the test with AppStudio. We were pleased to discover it solves the problem.

We just added the library to the files we include with each app. It takes care of the rest automatically. You don’t need to make any changes to your app: it just works.

If you need to disable it, set FastClick in Project Properties to false.

To disable it for just a particular control, add ‘needsclick’ to the class property of the control.