Mac support for force click / touch

In early 2015 Apple introduced Force Touch functionality on trackpads on certain MacBooks with force click trackpads.  This allows pressure or force clicks on trackpads to interact with ‘force touch’ aware applications.

Starting with UPDD Gestures 2.1.3 for pressure-enabled touch devices we’ve added a setting for sending pressure data into OS X when performing 'Click and drag' actions, including limited, experimental support for force clicks.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to replicate this functionality with pressure enabled touch screens it has not been as successful as we had hoped.

As currently implemented this feature is both experimental and very limited. We haven’t been able to get it to work consistently on our mac systems and we are not sure why it is so temperamental but we suspect that many features simply do not work unless the Mac system has a force-touch trackpad, which, at the time of writing, means the newest models of MacBook and MacBook Pro.

However, even in our tests during development 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 windows

- 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.

In time we intend 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.