Closing Windows Forms on a Touchscreen

Question

Our clients have fat fingers, and so do we. We take touchscreen netbooks apart to insert them into our custom hardware, and I write a software interface that shows up on the touchscreen. The problem is that it has about a 3/4" bezel over the screen, which means hitting that little red "X" becomes a challenge, especially considering reduced capacitive ability on the edges and corners.

Is there a way to make this standard close button larger? Of course in the application I can always make really nice 80x80 buttons that are perfectly usable, but there seems to be no way to override the default frame of the form. We have tried enabling Large Fonts and all the built-in accessibility features, but nothing seems to make it large enough to hit successfully.

Simply adding a toolbar button is also not much of an option. We prefer to utilize the standard look and feel of a normal Windows application.

Alternatively, should we be looking at making some sort of "kiosk mode" where we simply go fullscreen and do nothing involving the taskbar or title bar? How difficult is this to accomplish, if so?

Answer 1

Well, since you're setting up the hardware, I presume you're able to configure preinstalled software, including Windows. Can't you just go into Display Settings and make the title bar larger, so that the close button grows accordingly?

See MS Article about distributing windows themes: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310514

Answer 2

Getting a large close button is fairly easy to do. It is hidden well since Vista, in Win7 it is Control Panel + Personalization + Window Color, Advanced appearance settings, Item = Caption buttons, change the Size. You probably won't like this much though, you'll get a rather large caption bar, lots of waste screen real estate.

Tackling this from the other end: your request is unusual. Most anybody that sets up a touch screen app wants to know how to prevent the user from closing the window. Windows Forms makes it too easy to design a bunch of forms and switch between them. That isn't much of a user interface on a regular desktop, especially not here. You can design your forms as user controls as well and switch them in and out of the main window as the user navigates through the UI. Not unlike, say, Microsoft Outlook. You can even turn your existing form into a control. Set its TopLevel property to False, FormBorderStyle to None, Visible to true.