Apple Pencil Support

[robertherber]

It would be great if support was added for Apple Pencil. I imagine basic support could be easily added through just reporting back the UITouch.TouchType of the touch. This would allow for discerning between finger and pencil touches (and so trigger separate actions).

[wcandillon]

In React Native Skia, we are encouraging people to use gesture-handler whenever possible. With a Skia Canvas, knowing the touch type information seems to be quite relevant.

[laffan]

Adding my support for this feature. Knowing whether the touch is a finger or stylus would be immediately valuable to several of my projects.

[rksangani]

@laffan have you added the support for apple pencil?

[m-bert]

Hi @robertherber! I know it's been a while, but the time has come! Support for stylus and pointerType has been recently added.

You can find it in these PRs:

• [iOS] Stylus support #3113
• [Android] Stylus support #3111
• [Web] Stylus support  #3107
• Add pointerType to event #2760

And read about it in docs:

• stylusData
• pointerType

[robertherber]

@m-bert Amazing news! Although I don't have a use case for it right now I'm looking forward to the opportunity to try this out, truly an enabling feature! 🙂👍

[NiuGuohui]

@m-bert Why is stylusData only present in pan and hover events? When clicking with a pencil, no more data can be obtained.

[m-bert]

Hi @NiuGuohui! We've decided that Pan and Hover would benefit the most from this change. Could you share with us a use-case where you use different handler?

[NiuGuohui]

Hi @NiuGuohui! We've decided that Pan and Hover would benefit the most from this change. Could you share with us a use-case where you use different handler?

I have a scenario here: I am implementing a drawing program where only a pencil can be used for drawing. However, if the user only clicks with the pen (expecting to draw a point), we cannot receive pen data because the Pan event cannot be triggered.

[m-bert]

@NiuGuohui Okay, i see. I think that setting minDistance to 0 will help. Could you check that?

[NiuGuohui]

@NiuGuohui Okay, i see. I think that setting minDistance to 0 will help. Could you check that?

Thank you very much!This method really works effectively!

[agathe]

In addition to the stylus data that we get in Pan and Hover events, is there a way to get the stylus button press data during those gestures (pan gesture while the stylus button is pressed)?
I see that the stylus button information is used in parts of the code base, but is it exposed in some fashion through the API?

[m-bert]

HI @agathe! As far as I can see, stylus button is used only in ScaleGestureDetector on android so currently there's no way to access this information.

I'll look into it 😄