It appears that there is no way to detect where exactly a touch is located on the remote's touchpad? touchesBegan always seem to return the center of the view that the touch began in (960, 540) in the case of the screen and then touchesMoved returns values relative to that value. This seems really lame as I want to know whether the touches are in the top half of the touchpad or the bottom half. Is there anyway to return the actual touch position on the touchpad and if not, would that be a hardware limitation of the remote's touchpad or could Apple add this feature?
No way to detect absolute touch position on remote's touchpad?
If you'd like to know when a user taps a specific area of the Siri Remote then you can use a UITapGestureRecognizer and set the -allowedPressTypes to UIPressTypeUpArrow. This means it will also work on the silver Apple TV remote. See the documentation on Detecting Gestures and Button Presses for more.
Will I be able to get an actual touch position relative to the touchpad's area with any Gesture Recognizers though? I've never used them before so I'm not sure what they can do yet. I'd like to be able to move my game's camera left and right by swiping left and right in the bottom half of the touchpad but rotate the camera by swiping left and right in the top half. Being able to get at the actualy x,y position of a touch on the actual touchpad where say (0, 0) is the top left and (1024, 1024) is the bottom right would be great.
If you use the remote as a gamepad using the GCMicroGamepad profile, you can set reportsAbsoluteDpadValues to YES, which will then give you the absolute position.
Beware this issue I posted about yesterday though: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/18877
The UITapGestureRecognizer just recognizes a tap (finger down onto the touch surface and then back up again within a short delay) and not a touch (just finger down)