Force Touch features are not supported in UPDD Commander and this article explains why.
In early 2015 Apple introduced Force Touch functionality on trackpads on certain MacBooks.
This allows pressure or force clicks on trackpads to interact with ‘force touch’ aware applications.
Some touch screens support ‘pressure’ so we experimented (in 2015) with pressure related functionality.
The aim of supporting pressure in gestures was twofold;
- Utilise this functionality within gestures
To satisfy this requirement we experimented with Force Click, Press and Drag gestures and a new action “move mouse cursor”.
This allowed for press and drag gestures to move the mouse cursor with no pen down and then produce pen down and / or drag on pressure. MinPressure and MaxPressure settings were used to define the lower and upper pressure limits generated by the device and the press threshold was calculated from these values. This worked well albeit we were unsure of its 'real world' usefulness when using touch.
- Post the pressure data into the Mac system so as to interface with ‘force touch’ aware applications via touch in the same way you can with a force track pad. Unfortunately this proved to be more difficult than expected in that some of the touch functionality built around increased pressure could be made to work whilst that associated with clicks didn’t work as documented below.
We also thought that the “force click” feature as well as the "force press" and "force drag" gestures could benefit from auditory or visual feedback when a force gesture or force click was triggered.
Force Touch functions would only be available to pressure capable touch screens.
Observed issues with Force Touch
Sending pressure data into OS X when performing 'Click and drag' actions, including limited, experimental support for force clicks was not as successful as we had hoped.
We were not able to get it to work consistently on our mac systems and we were not sure why it is so temperamental but we suspect that many features simply do not work unless the Mac system has a real force-touch trackpad.
However, even in our tests with a force touch trackpad Mac most of the force click specific features did not work when the pressure data was posted into the system by our gesture interface.
Here's a list of the things we saw working during our tests on a Mac running Gestures that had a force touch track pad. Some of this text is copied from Apple's website:
- QuickTime and iMovie: You can vary the pressure you use on fast-forward and rewind buttons. This will accelerate the speed at which you fast forward or rewind.
- Map zooming: Press harder on a zoom button to accelerate as you zoom in and out of a map.
- Photo arrowing: When you arrow through Photos in an Album or a Moment, you can apply additional pressure to go faster.
- Spring loading: force click various UI elements while dragging a file to activate / open them, such as folders in the Finder or background window
- Any 3rd party app that supports force click or responds to changing levels of pressure should work
The following seems to work even without a force touch trackpad, though we can't say exactly why it works for this feature and not any of the others:
- Dock: Force click an app icon in the Dock to access App Exposé. This shows you all open windows for that app.
Before we consider adding this support into UPDD Commander we need to revisit this feature to see if we can make it work more consistently and support more force click and force touch aware applications and system functions.