UPDD Commander is available in MacOS and Windows (and hopefully one day also Linux).
Please note, by default UPDD Commander is part of all macOS driver software and is launched automatically. For UPDD V6 Windows builds, it is not included unless requested. It is, however, part of UPDD V7 builds but not invoked automatically.
With MacOS pointer device and gesture support is predominantly processed by Apple Trackpads and Magic Mice and the OS and applications are written for these type of device interfaces where the gesture input is remote from the desktop and the applications and relative to the system pointer.
With Windows, gesture support is predominantly via touch screens, so applications can be written to handle both gesture support and absolute positional touch data.
UPDD Commander receives all touches from the UPDD touch driver, determines the 1,2,3,4,5 finger gesture being performed, invokes the action (if any) that is associated with the gesture and then, if/where appropriate, will post touch data into the OS for further processing.
Under macOS, Commander will post mouse and gesture events into the OS. Whereas under Windows only mouse and positional touch data is posted into the OS as Windows will using its own gesture engine to calculate the gesture being performed
Windows supports both multi-touch touch screens and multi-touch trackpads that have separate gesture processing.
Under macOS, for multi-touch touch screens to work, UPDD Commander has to be loaded. This is not the case for Windows, as the UPDD driver will handle standard multi-touch support and therefore native Windows multi-touch features will be invoked without UPDD Commander being loaded.
It is for this reason that, in most cases, UPDD Commander does not run by default in Windows installations and needs to be manually set to do so from the UPDD Application folder:
UPDDV6: c:\program files (x86)\UPDD
UPDDV7: c:\program files\UPDD
Once loaded, it can be set to run at startup:
Commander is only required on Windows for the following reasons:
- To support UPDD Client applications that utilise the UPDD GestureAPI
- To support TUIO client applications that require the TUIO server built into UPDD Commander
- To support gestures not catered for by native touch gestures and actions (such as those that mimic the Win 10 touchpad gestures)
- To invoke the touch keyboard via a gesture (only tested in Windows 10)
Summary of differences with Windows implementation :
- Gesture action 'Pass Touches to Windows' can be used to pass touch data directly to Windows to be processed by Windows native touch processing
- Click gesture actions, such as Click, Click and drag, etc will post mouse events to Windows
In this example, One Finger Tap will be processed as a native HID touch and the One Finger Press will be posted as a Mouse event
- An 'All Touches option' can be set against an application so that all touches performed on the application are simply passed to Windows
- Limited number of actions that can be performed
- No support for application UI elements (subsection of an application's UI)
- Option to only handle touches for broadcasting to TUIO clients, leaving the driver to handle standard touch processing
