The new MacBook has been out for a couple of weeks, and OS X apps are starting to take advantage of its Force Touch trackpad.
Pixelmator, a popular photo editor and Photoshop alternative on the Mac, is an early example of how third-party developers are utilizing Force Touch. The app recently added support for the pressure sensitive trackpad along with a number of other improvements.
Integrating with Apple’s Force Touch technology, which mimics the physical press of the trackpad without any moving parts, was pretty easy for the team behind Pixelmator. “The API is very well built and we just had to decide what we want it to do,” Pixelmator co-founder Saulius Dailide told Cult of Mac. “We made some slight changes in our painting engine in order for pressure sensitivity to work nicely.”
On the latest MacBook, Pixelmator users can now adjust the stroke of the paint brush with the pressure of their finger. It’s not as detailed as most professional drawing tools out there, but it’s certainly a big step towards having more control.
Pixelmator now integrates with the new Photos app in OS X, and the Repair tool can “wipe away unwanted elements from your photos up to five times faster.” There are several other additions in this latest update, all of which can be found in the Mac App Store.
As one of the first Mac apps to add support for Force Touch, Dailide and his team are “very happy” with how the new trackpad works. But they “can’t wait to take even more advantage of it,” like the ability to feel the results of the trackpad presses by accessing Apple’s Taptic Engine.
