Touchscreen MacOS

MacOSX and iOS
1

Hi
I’m experiencing issues with touch devices connected to Mac.
The touch screens work fine inside the OS, and for dragging the native juce windows but inside Juce UI there are issues.
It seem to be related to how Juce/mac handles mouse down/up.
The issues relate primarily to clicking and dragging.

Things that work with touchdevice:
Clicking buttons
Dragging sliders
Clicking/selecting combobox
And other similar functions.

Things that do not work:
Drag/drop
Selecting text
Any functions where you are dragging.

On the touchscreens I have tested with a Mac, holding the finger on the screen creates repeating mouse down/up calls in Juce.

The issue is not present with the same touch devices on PC, and not in non-juce apps on the mac

Is this a known issue?

2

The issue is that macOS does not know touch devices so from the point of view of JUCE it is a mouse that behaves strangely. In my app, I have added an option to force all mouses to be considered as touch devices. I’m patching JUCE this way:

#if JUCE_MOUSE_MAY_BE_TOUCH_DEVICE
bool MouseInputSource::isMouse() const noexcept {
  return (getType() == MouseInputSource::InputSourceType::mouse) && !reportAllInputSourcesAsTouchDevices();
}
bool MouseInputSource::isTouch() const noexcept
{
  return (getType() == MouseInputSource::InputSourceType::touch) || reportAllInputSourcesAsTouchDevices();
}
bool MouseInputSource::isPen() const noexcept
{
  return (getType() == MouseInputSource::InputSourceType::pen) && !reportAllInputSourcesAsTouchDevices();
}
#else
bool MouseInputSource::isMouse() const noexcept                                 { return (getType() == MouseInputSource::InputSourceType::mouse); }
bool MouseInputSource::isTouch() const noexcept                                 { return (getType() == MouseInputSource::InputSourceType::touch); }
bool MouseInputSource::isPen() const noexcept                                   { return (getType() == MouseInputSource::InputSourceType::pen); }
#endif // JUCE_MOUSE_MAY_BE_TOUCH_DEVICE

with this static function added in MouseInputSource so that I can dynamically change the behaviour:

#if JUCE_MOUSE_MAY_BE_TOUCH_DEVICE
    static bool &reportAllInputSourcesAsTouchDevices() {
        static bool b = false; return b;
    }
#endif //JUCE_MOUSE_MAY_BE_TOUCH_DEVICE

This way it works also for users using a touchscreen on a remote linux host via VNC, or others situations where the information about the nature of the mouse input is lost.

3

Hi
Thank you so much for the reply, and I’m sorry for not getting back to you sooner.
I will test this out and see if it resolves the issue.
I’m not sure I understand what the drawback is with this.
It seems like something that Juce should handle out of the box.

4

This issue seems related to JUCE’s handling of touch events on macOS, particularly for dragging and selecting. It’s not present on PC or non-JUCE macOS apps. Consider updating JUCE or customizing event handling.