Is there a way to capture the amount of screen that is making contact with the users? I assume there is since this finger painting app shows the ipad responding to only the pixels that the user makes contact with.
Thanks so much in advance for your help!
to get the exact area you may have to roll your own but you can get uievents pretty easily and then do some magic from there. Basically impliment/override touchesBegan, touchesEnded, touchesMoved on the UIView in question and put in your custom code there.
Looking at the video maybe the amount of touches in the UIEvent set might correspond to the "pressure" of the touch, then again maybe not.
What if you laid down a series of successively smaller square uiviews wherever the user touched then if the touches "spilled" into the larger uiviews behind the smaller front ones than you could conjecture that the touch pressure was harder. Something to try I guess. Good luck.
I don't think Apple provides APIs for the size of the touch, or as @nickthedude said (I think) any kind of way to measure pressure. Basically, you need to implement your own algorithm/policy for determining line thickness/opacity/other effects. I believe a common way to do this is to measure the amount of time spent for the stroke, and work from there. For instance, if the user moved more quickly, you might want a thinner line segment. Apple really should just provide a canvas view of some kind. Best of luck!
The size of the touch is abstracted away by the framework, and UITouches only contain calculated (“best estimated”) points instead of the raw, actual areas that were touched. I would guess that the “pressure” was calculated from the duration and the direction of the touch.
In a nutshell, there is no public API to get the contact area.