The settings tab holds the global settings that relate to the general Commander functionality:
These settings are held in the UPDD settings file as described here and can also be set with the command line interface.
Some software configurations choose not have all the tabs shown in the settings dialog. This documents lists the full set of tabs and their settings.
General
Reset mouse cursor after a gesture ends
When enabled the mouse cursor is returned to its original position once the touch event is completed.
Reset keyboard focus after a gesture action ends
When enabled the keyboard focus is restored after the gesture is performed.
Mouse gesture actions triggered by non-tablet devices simulate tablet input
Tablet and pen device are processed differently to touch devices in that the incoming data is posted into the OS as a tablet like device. If you want a non-tablet device, such as a touch device, to emulate a tablet device, especially one with pressure data, this setting should be enabled.
Pressure calibration
This will only be shown once Commander has seen pressure data being sent from a device, normally a pen device or a touch device that supports pressure.
Lists the UPDD devices that support pressure to allow for the pressure range to be calibrated (may not be required). By default the range is set from zero to the maximum theoretical pressure value (i.e. the largest number that can represented by however many bits of data are allocated for the value in the touch data packet).
The calibration procedure tries to determine the actual maximum pressure value that the device will produce. This is often the same as the theoretical maximum pressure value but sometimes it's less. This pressure calibration is intended to be used in the situation where the actual maximum pressure value may be less than the theoretical maximum value.
Because the actual maximum pressure value is unknown you are requested to gradually press with more and more pressure. The pressure value will gradually increase until it hits the actual maximum and no longer increases and should consistently report the maximum pressure value for every frame. When the same pressure value is seen for a few seconds the maximum pressure value is recorded and calibration is completed. Knowing the upper limit allows our software to accurately rescale the pressure in a percentage range of 0% to 100%.
If pressure calibration does not complete it implies the device never reaches a steady maximum value and likely fluctuates at this point
Pressure will still work but be based on the theoretical range.
Show menu bar icon
Used to enable / disable the menu bar/system tray icon.
If the menu bar / system tray icon is disabled you can invoke the UPDD Commander program from /library/application support/updd. This will load the setting program if it is already running as a daemon process.
Since UPDD version 6.0.572 there is a shortcut to this location in the Application/Utilities folder.
Touch Behaviour
Gesture getection sensitivity
Sets the sensitivity of the gesture recognition. Gesture sensitivity determines how much movement must occur in general before UPDD Gestures has decided on which gesture is being performed. In general, more movement yields more accurate detection but will decrease responsiveness. If gestures are being miscalculated try improving the accuracy. If recognition is too slow set for more responsiveness.
Jitter correction during gesture detection
This setting, as described in the dialog, is used to filter out touch jitter that may cause problems during gesture detection.
Most modern day devices utilise their own smoothing algorithms and therefore co-ordinate filtering it is unlikely to be needed within either the driver or using this setting.
Touch gestures must have a minimum duration of:
Defines the minimum time a gesture must be performed
Reject gestures from touches that are too large (palm rejection)
UPDD V7 feature only. Some HID compatible touch devices pass contact width and height values so will only work for devices that support this feature. This can be used to reject touches that have an excessive width.
By default the value is set to 15 (mm) as held in the global setting upddcommander.applicationsettings.palm_rejection_threshold. This can be adjusted using the command:
upddutuils nodevice set upddcommander.applicationsettings.palm_rejection_threshold nn
Hide mouse cursor during touches
This setting indicates that the mouse cursor should be hidden during touches. The feature uses an undocumented API (presumably a feature not encouraged by Apple) to hide the cursor so there are no guarantees it works 100%.
The cursor is enabled as soon as the cursor is moved by something other than the touch screen, including a mouse or trackpad.
We have found that in some circumstances the cursor is made visible, such as switching apps or touching into flash movies or moving over the system dock, but to counteract this the cursor is periodically hidden if it is found to be visible. The periodic test to check the cursor is started when this feature is enabled, but it will only hide the cursor if it is supposed to be hidden, such that if it is being shown due to mouse/trackpad movement then the cursor will stay visible until the next time a touch begins.
Unfortunately, if an application constantly forces the cursor to be visible, such as if the cursor is over a flash movie, then the cursor will stay visible.
Touches wake up display
Indicates if touch can be used to wake up a dormant display. When enabled any touch on the display will wake it up.
Touch Gestures
If this tab is missing it is likely that global setting upddcommander.applicationsettings.hide_touch_gestures_settings is set to 1 in UPDD Console, General, Settings
There are a number of gesture settings whereby it makes sense to offer an option for the setting to be defined globally and apply the setting to all defined instances.
This avoids having to change these settings in all gesture definitions where they are defined if they are required to all be set to a particular setting. Individual instances of the setting can override the global setting.
When viewing an individual definition of one of the above gesture settings there will be an option to ignore the global setting and use the 'local' setting, as seen in this 'One Finger Tab' gesture associated with the Notification Center:
Debug log
This dialog also offers a diagnostics option to record a gesture as it is occurring and capture it to a debug file. There is a button to start/stop the recording of gestures being performed. The file is created on the desktop and named " updd_commander_diagnostics.txt". This is used for troubleshooting when gestures are reported as being mis-detected for a specific device and should be sent as part of the investigation to any gesture operational queries. Remember to stop recording once the gestures have been captured.
On-screen keyboard
MacOS offers a virtual onscreen keyboard and, since 10.13 a new Accessibility Keyboard plus there are a number of third party keyboards available.
Commander can be configured such that an on-screen keyboard is automatically invoked in certain circumstances. This applies to the user desktop.
Prior to MacOS 10.15 Catalina it was not possible to invoke the on-screen keyboard on the login screen. However, since MacOS 10.15 Catalina it's possible to enable accessibility features at login including the on-screen keyboard:
Touch can work on the Login screen if the driver (UPDD.app) is given Accessibility Permission.
Within the On-Screen Keyboard settings you can configure the keyboard to be displayed when a text input field has focus or restrict the usage to secure text fields only:
This feature caters for 3 different keyboards if they exist on the system, Keyboard viewer, Accessibility keyboard and Keyup.
Please note the following when using this feature:
| Keyboard |
Notes |
| Viewer |
The Keyboard viewer is available up to 10.14 but is a bit buggy in its operation. There is a bug where the keyboard will show and hide itself at arbitrary times and remains on the screen even though no input field is active and needs to be closed manually. Has been replaced with the Accessibility Keyboard in 10.15. |
| Accessibility |
The accessibility keyboard was introduced in 10.13.
In 10.13 invoking the keyboard works reliably.
In 10.14 does not work reliably unless you manually enable the Accessibility Keyboard in system preferences first (or alternatively disable system integrity protection in order to bypass Apple's restrictions!). Thereafter if the keyboard is closed using the "X" button then it will be disabled again.
10.15 does offer a slightly more convenient way of doing this: you can check the box in the Keyboard system preferences that reads "Show keyboard and emoji viewer in the menu bar". Thereafter you can just pick the "Show keyboard viewer" menu item in the icon that appears in the menu bar, rather than having to go into the Accessibility system preferences every time.
Important note: With UPDD Commander version 1.0.14 Commander automatically enables "Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar" and uses a different method to toggle the accessibility keyboard which in our test works consistently therefore bypassing the need to manually enabled this feature as described above for 10.15. |
| KeyUp |
KeyUp, from Irradiated Software, only works for US English keyboard layouts so it won't work for different language or keyboard layouts.
The KeyUp software must be located in the Application folder
|
These setting dictate when the on-screen keyboard is shown:
| Setting |
Meaning |
| Automatic show |
When enabled the on-screen keyboard is shown when a text field is focused. |
| Automatic hide |
When enabled the on-screen keyboard is hidden when no text fields are in focus. |
| Touch only |
When enabled, the on-screen keyboard will only appear if a text field becomes focused because was touched or teh touch device has recently been used (3 seconds **). The on-screen keyboard will not appear when only using the keyboard and mouse (unless it is within the 3 second touch threshold!) .
|
| Secure fields only |
When enabled the on-screen keyboard is only shown when a secure text field is focused. |
Notes:
- ** Touch thresold can be adjusted if required.
- It only works with applications that support OS X's accessibility features. At time of testing, two prominent examples of apps that don't support it are Chrome and Firefox. Fortunately it works great in Safari.
- Also, some older Qt apps (built with QT 5.1 or earlier) don't support OS X accessibility.
- Web apps, including apps built with Electron (e.g. Slack), do not support accessibility.
- KeyUp only support qwerty layouts. The native keyboards reflect the system keyboard layout. We have not found any virtual keyboards that can be independently set to different layouts.
Smart Magnifier
The number of actions can be used to invoke and control an onscreen
Smart Magnifier. This feature is particularly useful to touch and control small dialogs or sliders used within some applications.
These settings relate to the default shape, size and behaviour and options to close (apart from the gesture actions) the Smart Magnifer
This settings are covered in greater detail in the Smart Magnifier document.
TUIO
UPDD Commander can post touches via the TUIO protocol, thus performing the role of a TUIO Server and also be configured to receive touched from an external TUIO server to control touches/gestures on a selected monitor, thus acting as a TUIO Client application. These settings relate to these two modes of TUIO operation as described in the TUIO section.
