Trackpad Pinch to Zoom Gets Unresponsive

[A_B_C]

Hi there,

it’s been a while since I reported that after upgrading my system to macOS Ventura I have repeatedly experienced the problem that the Pinch-to-Zoom gesture gets randomly disabled on the internal trackpad of my MacBook Pro. All you can do is (a) either manually toggle the respective switch in System Settings off and then on again or (b) logging out of your user account and logging back in. It’s painful.

It seems that this is a widespread issue that does not only occur with Affinity Photo, but also with apps like Photoshop, Figma, Sketch or FontLab, even with the Preview app that ships with macOS. But it also happens in the Affinity Suite, and I would really like to know what causes that or what we could do to stop this really terrible bug. To be sure, I already sent a bug report to Apple, but such seems to fall on deaf ears.

So I wonder whether you have, as developers, a guess what could go wrong here? How do the Affinity apps intercept trackpad inputs? Where would I have to look, what would I have to monitor to see whether I could find a solution to this bug that doesn’t require (a) or (b) above?

I would be most grateful for any hint. 🙂

Alex

[MikeTO]

If pinch to zoom is unresponsive for you in apps from multiple vendors then it's not a problem with Affinity and you'd get better answers posting in the Apple Support community, there would be nothing Serif could do about this.

A quick google search for pinch to zoom and Ventura revealed lots of threads on Apple's Support community, reddit, and macrumors.

[A_B_C]

No offense, but have you read the threads you’re pointing at? Essentially, the only suggestions they have are (a) or (b) above – or filing a bug report with Apple. It’s not that kind of suggestions I have been asking for here.

My intention in starting this thread was the following: since all of the other relevant discussions on the internet are by application users only, not by application developers, I wanted to know whether a developer whose apps are affected by the very same bug could give me a hint how their app communicates with trackpad inputs.

I am interested in some technical information, since all other ways to deal with this bug are extremely painful and time-consuming. Imagine you are working on your laptop, and every twenty minutes or so, you cannot zoom into your document anymore without toggling a system setting or logging out of your user account. You will understand that, at some point, there arises an interest in hard, technical facts. 😉

[MikeTO]

I'm sorry that you're dealing with this bug and I empathize with you but there's nothing any Mac developer can do.

Here's how the pinch to zoom gesture works: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/touches_presses_and_gestures/handling_uikit_gestures/handling_pinch_gestures

Gestures are a type of event and as with other events, application can listen for them and then execute code when they are notified the event has occurred. Gestures are contiguous - they have a start and continue as the gesture continues - the bug in macOS is that the system isn't notifying apps that the gesture has started. Affinity doesn't even know you're using the trackpad.

You might want to try Pinch, a tiny app a developer created to fix the problem.

https://github.com/danqing/Pinch

Cheers

[A_B_C]

Hmm … I see. Thank you so much for taking the time and for sharing that link to the developer site, Mike. So unless Apple is doing something, nobody can, it seems. Unfortunately, the “killall dock” method doesn’t work on my system either. I had tested it before, but it just has no effect. Tonight I discovered another command that seems to work for some people. I will have to try it tomorrow.

pmset displaysleepnow; sleep 2; caffeinate -u -t 1

So weird that such a painful bug that affects so many laptop users isn’t addressed by Apple. But anyway, thanks for your help. 🙂

[Lissa Malloy]

I'm having this problem as well. Along with a few others... it has me wanting to downgrade the OS back to Monterey.