great work
TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
101–110 of 156 posts
Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#102Earlier 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.
When I had an iPhone XS i could never understand how to predictably do a normal touch or a 3d touch, or where exactly the OS has different actions for one vs the other.
And I play games [1] using just my macbook pro's trackpad...
[1] For example, Minecraft works perfectly without a mouse. So does Path of Exile. First person shooters ofc don't.
Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
DIY projects can't be downloaded?
By "downloaded," I expect that you mean "Built, tested, and deployed." It's not an App Store app. It's basically a technology demo. Get Xcode, and build it and run it.
A .dmg or at least a CLI instruction would really help
Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#104Earlier 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…
Wait, I know this one. You give the barometer to the superintendent if he tells you the height of the building.
how about stacking the barometers ?
Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#105This reminds me of how, twenty years ago, I used the PowerBook’s hard drive vibration sensor to rig up a seismograph to measure construction noise: https://allthegooddomainsweretaken.justinmiller.io/2007/04/0...
I wrote that software, called SeisMac. Someone figured out the Apple-private API for the Sudden Motion Sensor that parks your laptop's hard drive if it detects free-fall. Working from that, I wrote a free app that used the API to show three-axis acceleration graphs. I was proudest of the calibration utility, which had you tip your laptop on its side (with properly rotated dialogs!), and then on its screen. People wou…
Awesome, the name rings a bell now! Thanks for that. Honestly didn't remember the software involved (nowadays, I'd mention it in the blog post).
Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe you had a hard time parsing his comment.
He is capable of pressing twice as hard as the feature required at maximum. The screen handles 2x the maximum without issues. Therefore, the glass is thick enough to handle half that pressure,as required by the feature.
It's a good argument.
Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#107Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
By "downloaded," I expect that you mean "Built, tested, and deployed." It's not an App Store app. It's basically a technology demo. Get Xcode, and build it and run it.
A .dmg or at least a CLI instruction would really help
You could always request that from the author. Since it's a Mac app, they could do that. Not so, if it were an iOS app.
It's a pretty basic SwiftUI app. They haven't really polished it, so I could see why they might not be interested in making it much more accessible. It's a tool for Mac geeks.
Speaking for myself, I have a whole bunch of packages, and almost every one has a test harness. Many of the test harnesses are "full-fat" iOS apps, so they can't be provided as releases, unless I create an App Store app for each one.
They need to be built and run. A couple are Mac apps, but the whole deal with them, is that they are test harnesses, so divorcing them from the IDE is sort of negating their purpose. They are meant to help other Apple developers to understand and use the packages the apps are associated with.
Re: TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Maybe you had a hard time parsing his comment. He is capable of pressing twice as hard as the feature required at maximum. The screen handles 2x the maximum without issues. Therefore, the glass is thick enough to handle half that pressure,as required by the feature. It's a good argument.
As far as I know, the pressure is measured around the edge of the screen. If the screen is thin enough, it could bend when pressed and the pressure applied to the center of the screen can’t be properly measured. I don’t think the problem with a too thin screen is the screen breaking when pressing it.