Gatecaster
Run your whole Mac from a touchscreen. Gatecaster is a user-space macOS driver that gives USB-HID touchscreens everything Apple never shipped: pointer, tap, drag, right-click, momentum scroll, native pinch-zoom & rotate, edge gestures, palm rejection, calibration — and a Touch API your own apps can build on.
No kernel extension. No account. No license key. The beta is the driver, it is free, and it runs fully offline.
Coming soon. The Deck, the on-screen keyboard, the virtual trackpad, the floating control launcher, edge gestures and remote input from the iPhone client are not part of the beta — they land in a later release. See End-user features.
Gatecaster is fully supported today on the ELAN 04F3:5512 controller (the
Visual Beat V17UT). Generic HID support is on the roadmap — see
Compatibility.
How it works
Everything flows one direction, and everything downstream of the decoder is controller-agnostic:
HID report → contact stream → engine state machine → synthesized CGEvents- HID report — a feature-report handshake unlocks the 10-finger digitizer;
raw 11-byte contacts are decoded into a clean
{ id, x, y }stream. - Engine — a state machine handles palm rejection, tap/drag/right-click, the two-finger intent latch (scroll vs pinch vs rotate), momentum and edge dwell.
- CGEvents — Quartz output: cursor moves, phase-tagged scroll, keystrokes and real animated magnify/rotate gesture events.
What it costs
| Price | What you get | |
|---|---|---|
| Gatecaster (beta) | Free | The full touch driver + the complete Touch API (incl. input suppression). Personal, non-commercial use. |
| Commercial | Contact us | Required for any kiosk, business or bundled/OEM deployment — see Licensing. |
There is no paid tier in the beta and nothing to activate. The features still to come have no announced price.
Next steps
- Getting started — install, grant permissions, calibrate.
- Gestures — the full gesture vocabulary.
- Touch API — stream fingers and gestures into your own apps.