Introduction

Update: Swipe Detector project is now called swipe.

Some time ago, I needed to detect moment when user is swiping finger on the screen horizontally (from left to right or opposite) or when user swiped horizontally. I’ve decided to spend some time for analyzing [onTouch(MotionEvent event)](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.OnTouchListener.html#onTouch(android.view.View, android.view.MotionEvent)) and dispatchTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) method. We can read more about differences between triggering onTouch eventes on StackOverflow thread. Method like onTouch(MotionEvent event) allows to trigger any touch event, but it doesn’t allow to detect type of that event. Android API has GestureDetector class, which allows to detect long press and double tap events. There is also GestureDetector.OnGestureListener interface, which has the following methods:

  • onDown(MotionEvent e)
  • onFling(MotionEvent e1, MotionEvent e2, float velocityX, float velocityY)
  • onLongPress(MotionEvent e)
  • onScroll(MotionEvent e1, MotionEvent e2, float distanceX, float distanceY)
  • onShowPress(MotionEvent e)
  • onSingleTapUp(MotionEvent e)

There is also GestureDetector.SimpleOnGestureListener class implementing GestureDetector.OnGestureListener and GestureDetector.OnDoubleTapListener interface. I also found an interesting project extending Android API called better-gesture-detector.

Detecting swipe gesture

swiped_right

Unfortunately, all of these solutions doesn’t allow to detect swipe gestures (swipe left, right, up and down). That’s why I’ve decided to create my own project, which allows to detect, whether user is currently swiping in a specific direction or if user already swiped. We can implement SwipeListener interface and do whatever we want, when desired event occurs. Check out SwipeDetector project on GitHub. If you want to see how swipe events are detected, browse source of SwipeDetector class. If you want to see exemplary usage of this class, check out SwipeDetectorActivity. SwipeDetector.SwipeListener interface allows to implement the following methods:

  • onSwipingLeft(MotionEvent e)
  • onSwipedLeft(MotionEvent e)
  • onSwipingRight(MotionEvent e)
  • onSwipedRight(MotionEvent e)
  • onSwipingUp(MotionEvent e)
  • onSwipedUp(MotionEvent e)
  • onSwipingDown(MotionEvent e)
  • onSwipedDown(MotionEvent e)

Moreover, we can take a look on a similar project called better-gesture-detector, which recognizes more types of gestures and also can be useful. That’s it. I hope, it will be useful in your projects as well.