presumedevice.js

It's true, you can't detect touch or mouse devices. But you can make assumptions.

About

This is a tiny* JavaScript utility that tries to presume whatever the user is interacting with a touch and/or a mouse device.

By now, we all know that we can't (still) truly detect touch devices. Why make assumptions, then? As designers, most of us love to fine-tune little details of our work, this utility can help us with those non-critical but equally-important UI improvements.

*: ~480B when compressed and gzipped.

Quick Demo

https://pinoceniccola.github.io/presumedevice.js/

How it works

The utility does two simple things:

1. Adds two CSS classes to the HTML element:

• presume-touch OR presume-no-touch AND
• presume-mouse OR presume-no-mouse

2. Fires a Custom Event that you can listen with:

window.addEventListener('onPresumeDevice', function(e){
    console.log(e.detail); // -> {presumeTouch : bool, presumeMouse: bool}
});

Works best with a touch-first strategy: This library waits for the very first user action, so you should really use it to detect mouse instead of touch, as the first will usually take zero time (no touch events) to just milliseconds (any mouse movement or scroll) to be detected.

Example

Let's say the idea is to add extra padding to buttons when users are interacting with touch devices. Using a touch-first strategy, in CSS you do this instead:

/* touch-first approach, style for touch devices first */
.buttons {padding:1rem 2rem}

/* if user is interacting with a mouse, decrease padding: */
.presume-mouse .buttons {padding:0.2rem 0.5rem}

Usage

Install via npm then require/import

npm i presumedevice-js

Or include the script the old-fashioned way:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/presumedevice-js/presumedevice.min.js"></script>

Or even just copy/paste the content of presumedevice.min.js into your project. It's really small.

Use Responsibly + Caveats

You should always design with both touch and mouse in mind. Also, always remember that Touch != Mobile Device, there are many different scenarios and the user can have both touch and a mouse.

Please, also consider that:

• You can't always presume everything at runtime, since this library waits for the very first user action. This means probabily a few milliseconds (mouse devices) or as long as users first touch their screens.
• Users with both mouse and touch capabilities (think laptops with touch screens) can switch anytime between mouse or touch. This library makes assumptions only on the very first action taken by the user.
• According this table, some very old third-party browsers for Android fire mouse events before touch events and this could lead to wrong assumptions and side effects.

License

© Pino Ceniccola - MIT License