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TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

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Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#91

Post by anxman »

bri3d wrote: post #59
ivanjermakov wrote: post #58

> TrackWeight utilizes the Open Multi-Touch Support library by Takuto Nakamura to gain private access to all mouse and trackpad events on macOS. This library provides detailed touch data including pressure readings that are normally inaccessible to standard applications. How can something be available as a library but not as a native interface? Swift does not expose that API?

Mac OS has "Private Frameworks" - shared libraries that are used by the system but don't ship with headers by default. It's trivial to produce these headers from the libraries, and then make wrappers for them like OpenMultitouchSupport which is a wrapper for MultitouchSupport.framework.

But just to note, I believe you can't pass Gatekeeper/Notary if you use these APIs so it's not possible to sign the app

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#92

Post by yoz-y »

05 wrote: post #52
jmb99 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single most irritating killed feature from Apple. Redesign half of their UI to rely on 3D Touch to make sense, then get rid of 3D Touch without redesigning the UI. Previewing links, moving the cursor, interacting with items, they’re all “press and hold until haptic feedback” instead of “quickly press hard and get immediate feedback.” Easier to accidentally trigger, slower to trigger on purpose.

Hardware cost+extra weight (need to make the glass thicker to be able to handle extra force and not push on the display). Turns out nobody was really using it because discoverability sucked..

The discoverability sucked because Apple never rolled this out to all of the devices, themselves grossly under utilized the feature and eventually ghosted it.

It was by far the best cursor control paradigm on iOS. Now everything is long press which is slow and as error prone.

I’m all for proposing different paradigms as accessibility but 3dtouch was awesome.

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#93

Post by nemosaltat »

cryptoz wrote: post #61
benoau wrote: post #3

There used to be iPhone apps that did something similar - https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625340/iphone-6s-gravit...

You can use any phone with a barometer to make a scale. All iPhones since the 6, and all the Pixels, and Samsung flagships have one. You get a zip loc bag, blow some air into it, put your phone in running an app that shows the pressure in a big font (so you can see it through the ziploc). Then you put an object of known weight on it like a quarter (balanced carefully on top of the air-filled ziploc) and note the pres…

no affiliation whatsoever but the app PHYPHOX has access to basically all of your iPhone sensors and can show the information in real time and save it, even has the capability of running a local python server so you can access it from a web browser on the same network or tethered device.

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#94

Post by Nathan2055 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #86
cryptoz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use any phone with a barometer to make a scale. All iPhones since the 6, and all the Pixels, and Samsung flagships have one. You get a zip loc bag, blow some air into it, put your phone in running an app that shows the pressure in a big font (so you can see it through the ziploc). Then you put an object of known weight on it like a quarter (balanced carefully on top of the air-filled ziploc) and note the pres…

Dropbox shouldn’t exist either bc we have rsync ;)

The infamous Dropbox comment[0] actually didn't even cite rsync; it recommended getting a remote FTP account, using curlftpfs to mount it locally, and then using SVN or CVS to get versioning support.

The double irony of that comment is that pretty much all of those technologies listed are obsolete now while Dropbox is still going strong: FTP has been mostly replaced with SFTP and rsync due to its lack of encryption and difficult to manage network architecture, direct mounting of remote hosts still happens but it's more typical in my experience to have local copies of everything that are then synced up with the remote host to provide redundancy, and CVS and SVN have been pretty much completely replaced with Git outside of some specialist and legacy use cases.

The "evaluating new products" xkcd[1] is extremely relevant, as is the continued ultra-success of Apple: developing new technologies, and then turning around and marketing those technologies to people who aren't already in this field working on them are effectively two completely different business models.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 [1]: https://xkcd.com/1497/

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#95

Post by behnamoh »

bagels wrote: post #89
jmb99 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The single most irritating killed feature from Apple. Redesign half of their UI to rely on 3D Touch to make sense, then get rid of 3D Touch without redesigning the UI. Previewing links, moving the cursor, interacting with items, they’re all “press and hold until haptic feedback” instead of “quickly press hard and get immediate feedback.” Easier to accidentally trigger, slower to trigger on purpose.

I hated when my mother in law came to me for help using her iPhone. She had a hard time controlling and understanding 3d touch.

I don't like it when old people are the reason the rest of us can't have nice things. Some grandma in Nebraska can't use 3D touch and now the rest of the demographic of Apple's customers are deprived of it.

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#97

Post by wat10000 »

behnamoh wrote: post #95
bagels wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hated when my mother in law came to me for help using her iPhone. She had a hard time controlling and understanding 3d touch.

I don't like it when old people are the reason the rest of us can't have nice things. Some grandma in Nebraska can't use 3D touch and now the rest of the demographic of Apple's customers are deprived of it.

There was a principle of UI design that all UI actions should be discoverable, either with a visible button or a menu item in the menus at the top of the screen (or window on Windows). This is annoying for power users and frequently used actions, so those can also be made available with keyboard shortcuts or right-click actions or what have you, but they must always be optional. This allows power users to be power users without impacting usability for novices.

We've been losing this idea recently, especially in mobile UIs where there's a lot of functionality, not much space to put it in, and no equivalent of the menu bar.

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#98

Post by bigyikes »

svnt wrote: post #62
namdnay wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could a small piece of conductive foam or some cleverly layered tin foil+paper work? So put the object on the shim (which has a known or even negligeable weight)

No, you need roughly a small human's worth of ground mass for most capacitive touch sensors to register a touch.

Tape a wire to the trackpad and hold the wire?

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#99

Post by xsmasher »

cryptoz wrote: post #61
benoau wrote: post #3

There used to be iPhone apps that did something similar - https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625340/iphone-6s-gravit...

You can use any phone with a barometer to make a scale. All iPhones since the 6, and all the Pixels, and Samsung flagships have one. You get a zip loc bag, blow some air into it, put your phone in running an app that shows the pressure in a big font (so you can see it through the ziploc). Then you put an object of known weight on it like a quarter (balanced carefully on top of the air-filled ziploc) and note the pres…

Wait, I know this one. You give the barometer to the superintendent if he tells you the height of the building.

Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

#100

Post by echoangle »

jmb99 wrote: post #54
05 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware cost+extra weight (need to make the glass thicker to be able to handle extra force and not push on the display). Turns out nobody was really using it because discoverability sucked..

Hardware cost & weight, fine. Glass doesn't need to be thicker than it currently is (I can press on my 13 Pro's screen about twice as hard as was needed for 3D Touch's max depth, and no issues with the screen), and the last time I replaced a battery on a 12, the screen was just as thick as the XS. >Turns out nobody was really using it because discoverability sucked.. Sure, but then redesign the UI after removing 3D T…

> Glass doesn't need to be thicker than it currently is (I can press on my 13 Pro's screen about twice as hard as was needed for 3D Touch's max depth, and no issues with the screen)

I dont think this is a great argument. The glass maybe needs to be thicker so the sensors on the border can properly measure the pressure, not because the screen is close to shattering.

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