What's new in Gatecaster.

• A way out of the setup assistant. It's full-screen and borderless, so the only exits were completing every step or quitting from the menu bar. There's a close button now, and Esc works. Anything you skip is still reachable from the menu bar afterwards.
• Check for Updates in About, beside the version number — where you look when you wonder whether you're current.

Gatecaster is downloadable. This first release is deliberately the driver and nothing else — the part that is finished, tested, and verifiable in thirty seconds: plug in a panel and touch works.

• The full touch driver — pointer, tap, drag, right-click, behavioural palm rejection, two-finger scroll with momentum, and native pinch-zoom and rotate.
• The complete Touch API, including kiosk input suppression. Free and ungated.
• Four-corner calibration and per-display mapping, persisted by display UUID so it survives reboots and reconnects.
• Automatic updates via a signed feed — every download is verified against a key compiled into the app you already have.
• Signed and notarized, installed by dragging to Applications.

Free, with no licensing of any kind — no key to enter, no paywall, nothing to activate.

Still to come: the Deck, the on-screen keyboard, the virtual trackpad, the floating launcher, and remote input from an iPhone. Whether those will be free or paid hasn't been decided.

A new out-of-process API lets third-party apps consume touch and gestures directly.

• Local Unix socket at ~/Library/Application Support/Gatecaster/api.sock, owner-only (0600), speaking newline-delimited JSON both ways.
• Subscribe to post-palm-rejection fingers, every rawFingers contact, or recognized gestures (pinch / rotate / scroll / swipe with phase).
• Suppression leases — apps can mute input, gestures or edges; the lease is connection-scoped, so a crashed client can never wedge touch off.
• Reference clients included for Python, Node.js and Swift — dependency-free, drop-in.
• Backpressure-safe at ~120 fps: slow consumers get a dropped frame count instead of stalling the engine.

A guided first launch gets you from download to driving your Mac by hand in under a minute.

• A Metal vortex intro crossfades into a real Liquid Glass panel over your desktop.
• A staged flow walks through welcome → permissions → display pick → calibration.
• The permissions step shows live Accessibility and Input Monitoring status with Grant / Open Settings / Relaunch buttons.
• Calibration is a simple four-corner tap, stored per display by UUID.

Not in the public beta. Versions before 0.9.0 were development builds. The Deck is built and works, but it's switched off in the first public release while the driver ships on its own — see the 0.9.0 entry.

A programmable button-and-slider grid lives on your touchscreen.

• Tappable buttons and sliders that open apps and URLs, send keystrokes, run Apple Shortcuts or shell commands, set volume and trigger media keys.
• Multiple pages, configurable column count, drag-to-reorder edit mode.
• Layouts persist to disk and export as a portable .gatedeck file.
• A draggable floating control launches the keyboard, trackpad, Deck and Settings, then collapses to an edge tab.

The gesture engine learned to speak macOS fluently.

• A two-finger intent latch commits to one gesture — scroll or pinch or rotate — for the whole sequence, decided in a single comparable unit.
• Pinch and rotate are now synthesized as real animated trackpad gesture events, not approximations.
• Every gesture is guaranteed an ended phase, even when two fingers drop to one — closing a class of system-wide recognizer wedges.
• Momentum scrolling carries on smoothly after a flick.

The first working build. A USB-HID touchscreen drives the Mac cursor.

• A feature-report handshake (GET_FEATURE 0x44) unlocks the ELAN 10-finger digitizer.
• Raw contacts are decoded into a clean {id, x, y} stream — controller-agnostic from there on.
• Tap, drag and a calibrated panel-to-screen mapping, posted as Quartz events entirely from user space.