Touch Orbiter

Touch Orbiter is a simple lite weight new way to build Orbiters for any type of Touch Driven device. It requires the minimum of resources from the target device and presents a very simple easy to understand codebase for anyone wishing to port Touch Orbiter to new hardware devices.

Touch Orbiter uses a new approach to building Orbiters for touch based devices that builds off many of the concepts embodied in the new Web Orbiter 2.0. Touch Orbiter is a lightweight simple application that runs on the target device that in turn communicates with a Proxy_Orbiter process running on the Core. The concept of using a Proxy_Orbiter process running on the Core to do all of the 'heavy-lifting' graphical processing is borrowed from Web Orbiter 2.0 & the JavaMO too. Touch Orbiter also uses the new Proxy_Orbiter released with Web Orbiter 2.0 that supports the 'ANYNEWS' flag to provide a mechanism for the Touch Orbiter to find out if any screen updates have occurred.

In use the Touch Orbiter is indistinguishable from implementations that use a full Orbiter eg Pad Orbiter or the Nokia Orbiter but by comparison is a very light simple application that needs far fewer resources on the target machine and is massively simpler to implement too. This simplicity makes it a very simple process to port Touch Orbiter to new devices because the application only has to be able to receive and display PNG's or JPEG's, interact with a touch screen and communicate over a socket with an instance of the Proxy_Orbiter running on the Core. The Proxy_Orbiter abstracts all the functions of a full Orbiter and hands back screens or updates to screens as and when necessary.