How to disable multitouch?

Question

My app has several buttons which trigger different events. The user should NOT be able to hold down several buttons. Anyhow, holding down several buttons crashes the app.

And so, I'm trying to disable multi-touch in my app.

I've unchecked 'Multiple Touch' in all the xib files, and as far as I can work out, the properties 'multipleTouchEnabled' and 'exclusiveTouch' control whether the view uses multitouch. So in my applicationDidFinishLaunching I've put this:

self.mainViewController.view.multipleTouchEnabled=NO;
self.mainViewController.view.exclusiveTouch =YES;

And in each of my view controllers I've put this in the viewDidLoad

self.view.multipleTouchEnabled=NO;
self.view.exclusiveTouch=YES;

However, it still accepts multiple touches. I could do something like disable other buttons after getting a touch down event, but this would be an ugly hack. Surely there is a way to properly disable multi-touch?

Answer 1

Based on neoevoke's answer, only improving it a bit so that it also checks subviews' children, I created this function and added it to my utils file:

// Set exclusive touch to all children

+ (void)setExclusiveTouchToChildrenOf:(NSArray *)subviews
{
    for (UIView *v in subviews) {
        [self setExclusiveTouchToChildrenOf:v.subviews];
        if ([v isKindOfClass:[UIButton class]]) {
            UIButton *btn = (UIButton *)v;
            [btn setExclusiveTouch:YES];
        }
    }
}

Then, a simple call to:

[Utils setExclusiveTouchToChildrenOf:self.view.subviews];

... will do the trick.

Answer 2

This is quite often issue being reported by our testers. One of the approach that I'm using sometimes, although it should be used consciously, is to create category for UIView, like this one:

@implementation UIView (ExclusiveTouch)

- (BOOL)isExclusiveTouch
{
    return YES;
}

Answer 3

Disable all the buttons on view in "Touch Down" event and enable them in "Touch Up Inside" event.

for example

- (void) handleTouchDown {
    for (UIButton *btn in views) {
        btn.enable = NO;
    }
}

- (void) handleTouchUpInside {
    for (UIButton *btn in views) {
        btn.enable = Yes;
    }
    ------
    ------
}

Answer 4

To disable multitouch in SWIFT:

You need first to have an outlet of every button and afterwards just set the exclusive touch to true.Therefore in you viewDidLoad() would have:

yourButton.exclusiveTouch = true.

// not really necessary but you could also add:

self.view.multipleTouchEnabled = false

Answer 5

If you want only one button to respond to touches at a time, you need to set exclusiveTouch for that button, rather than for the parent view. Alternatively, you could disable the other buttons when a button gets the "Touch Down" event.

---

Here's an example of the latter, which worked better in my testing. Setting exclusiveTouch for the buttons kind-of worked, but led to some interesting problems when you moved your finger off the edge of a button, rather than just clicking it.

You need to have outlets in your controller hooked up to each button, and have the "Touch Down", "Touch Up Inside", and "Touch Up Outside" events hooked to the proper methods in your controller.

#import "multibuttonsViewController.h"

@implementation multibuttonsViewController

// hook this up to "Touch Down" for each button
- (IBAction) pressed: (id) sender
{
    if (sender == one)
    {
        two.enabled = false;
        three.enabled = false;
        [label setText: @"One"]; // or whatever you want to do
    }
    else if (sender == two)
    {
        one.enabled = false;
        three.enabled = false;
        [label setText: @"Two"];  // or whatever you want to do
    }
    else
    {
        one.enabled = false;
        two.enabled = false;
        [label setText: @"Three"];  // or whatever you want to do
    }
}

// hook this up to "Touch Up Inside" and "Touch Up Outside"
- (IBAction) released: (id) sender
{
    one.enabled = true;
    two.enabled = true;
    three.enabled = true;
}

@end

Answer 6

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];

    for(UIView* v in self.view.subviews)
    {
        if([v isKindOfClass:[UIButton class]])
        {
            UIButton* btn = (UIButton*)v;
            [btn setExclusiveTouch:YES];
        }
    }
}

This code is tested and working perfectly for me.there is no app crash when pressing more than one button at a time.