FastClick redux

A year ago this August Assanka open-sourced FastClick, a polyfill for native-like tapping in touch apps. A lot’s changed since then: we were acquired by the Financial Times, becoming FT Labs, outgrew our old office, moved and welcomed some more developers into the lab.

Our new projects required us to support more mobile platforms besides iOS and Android, including PlayBook OS and Windows 8, as well as new mobile browsers like Firefox for Android and Chrome for Android and iOS. And new employees brought new ideas, which they enthusiastically introduced to projects like FastClick.

So I’m happy to report that FastClick’s been growing with us. The code has been redesigned to make it leaner and simpler. We’ve broadened our platform support and made a few bug fixes and workarounds for browser oddities. Rowan has improved touch accuracy when pages are being scrolled and Matt produced some fancy maths to make the boundary for touch movements mimic the shape of a fingertip.

Oh, and FastClick is now on GitHub, which is where you’ll find all the new documentation and examples. We want to broaden its support even further and we’re sure there are more obscure bugs that we haven’t encountered yet, so please go ahead and file issues, fork and make pull requests.