There's no denying the excitement surrounding Apple's new iPad device, and there is now likely to be a veritable flood of touch interface devices entering the market in response to their success.

Apple has already sold over three millions iPads in less than three months. Several other vendors have announced intentions to enter the market with their own competing tablet / slate devices. The touch interface is a trend that is solidly establishing itself. The UIZE JavaScript Framework is addressing this hot new trend by providing the abstractions necessary to make life easier for application developers.

To kick off this effort, the Uize.Widget.Drag module has been enhanced to now support touch interface events.

Because many other widgets are already written to use the Uize.Widget.Drag widget class, the improvements in this class automatically confer touch support to the widgets that use this class in their implementation. Examples of this are the Uize.Widget.Resizer, Uize.Widget.Resizer.Marquee, Uize.Widget.Bar.Slider, Uize.Widget.ColorGrid.Draggable, Uize.Widget.Dialog, Uize.Widget.Drag.Move, and Uize.Widget.ImagePort.Draggable classes.

What this all means is that, with the new and improved Uize.Widget.Drag class, selection marquees, sliders, dialogs, image ports, etc. are all now draggable on the Apple iPad - and they still behave as before with mouse / trackpad control.

So, if you have an iPad, swing by the uize.com Web site and take a tour of the iPad examples (you'll find them under the examples menu). Or, if you're reading this page on your iPad (lucky you), then just follow the link below...

iPad Examples / Touch Examples

Benefits accrue from intelligent implementation, and the use of the Uize.Widget.Drag class is a prime example of this.

Because of the way that widgets use the Uize.Widget.Drag class to provide drag support, they automatically get the benefit of multi-touch drag. So, for example, in the Drag-to-move example, you can use multiple fingers / hands to drag up to five image thumbnails at a time - all in completely different directions! In the Different Marquee Modes example, you can drag multiple marquees around at the same time, or you can grab different resize handles on different marquees independently. And in the Color Picker example, you can change the values for the red, green, and blue color channels of text color, background color, and border color independently - and simultaneously!