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’ and starting with gesture version 2.1.3 pressure related functionality has been added.
The aim of supporting pressure in gestures was twofold,
- Utilise this functionality within gestures
To satisfy this requirement we have added Force Press and Force drag gestures and a new action “move mouse cursor”.
This allows for press and drag gestures to move the mouse cursor with no pen down and then produce pen down and / or drag on pressure.
The UPDD settings MinPressure and MaxPressure are used to define the lower and upper pressure limits generated by the device and the press threshold is calculated from these values.
Gestures 2.1.3 added a button to the settings window that calibrates pressure for pressure-enabled devices, including tablets.
- 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 here.
Currently missing from our “force click” feature as well as the "force press" and "force drag" gestures is auditory feedback. At some point soon we intend to add the option for there being a clicking noise when a force gesture or force click is triggered.
Force Touch functions are only available to pressure capable touch screens supported by the UPDD driver.