New Force Touch APIs will be available in Xcode

Mar 20, 2015 22:52 GMT  ·  By

Application developers who love to create software for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, should know that Apple will introduce new APIs in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.10.3 Yosemite update, bringing support for the Force Touch trackpad.

The new APIs (Application Programming Interface) will allow you to implement support for the Force Touch trackpad in your applications. In other words, you will be able to create apps for Mac OS X that support the Force Touch trackpad of the new MacBook computers.

Four Force Touch APIs will be available in Mac OS X 10.10.3

The Force Touch APIs will be included in Mac OS X 10.10.3 Yosemite via Xcode. For now, the following Force Touch APIs will be available in the upcoming Xcode and Mac OS X 10.10.3 software updates: Force click, Pressure sensitivity, Accelerators, and Drag and Drop. Xcode 6 will also include the Mac OS X 10.10.3 SDK (Software Development Kit).

The Accelerators API is the coolest, as it allows you to take advantage of the pressure sensitivity in the Force Touch trackpad to, for example, increase or decrease the fast-forward speed while watching a movie, simply by pressing harder or softer with your finger on the trackpad. With the Drag and Drop API, you can let your users react to a Force click gesture while dragging.

While the Force click API lets you add a shortcut in your app to access extra functionality, the Pressure sensitivity API allows developers to take advantage of the pressure-sensing capabilities of the Force Touch trackpad in creative apps, such as drawing or painting software.

The Force Touch trackpad is available in the new MacBook and MacBook Pro 13-inch 2015

For those of you who don’t know yet, the Force Touch trackpad was introduced in the new MacBook Retina 12-inch computer that was unveiled by Apple on March 9, during the Spring Forward event that took place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, USA. The refreshed MacBook Pro 13-inch Retina Early 2015 model also includes the Force Touch trackpad.