
Exploring Apple's 3D Touch - _rknLA
https://medium.com/@rknla/exploring-apple-s-3d-touch-f5980ef45af5
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Tepix
@freino made a web-based 3D-touch demo that prints the value in question,
however the javascript DOM attribute has values between 0 and 1, not 0 and
6.666667.

Check it out with an iPhone 6s/6s+ at
[http://freinbichler.me/apps/3dtouch/](http://freinbichler.me/apps/3dtouch/)

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_rknLA
Yep, I'm seeing the same thing -- a DOM attribute with values between 0 and 1.
Interesting.

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rajadigopula
Wondering how the 3d touch changes the cross platform development!?

What happens when a developer has 2 different actions for a long press and
pressured (3d touch) press!?

I have trouble understanding the usability pov for the 3d touch! Do we really
need it?

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eridius
Apple very strongly advises that actions available via 3D Touch must also be
available via some other mechanism. 3D Touch right now is used for shortcuts
(e.g. on the home screen), or previewing things (e.g. Peek) where the Commit
behavior is the same as what you get when you actually tap on the item instead
of 3D Touching it.

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qq66
This is important because many users, especially the elderly, do not have the
physical ability to press hard on the screen.

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eridius
It doesn't really require _that_ much force. Subjectively, it feels to me like
Peek requires less force than pushing the Home button, and Pop requires a bit
more, but not significantly more.

Also, under Accessibility, there is a way to control the 3D Touch sensitivity,
so it requires less (or more) force to activate.

That said, for people who use alternative input mechanisms (whether it be
various forms of assistive touch, or just using VoiceOver), AFAIK they can't
3D Touch (well, you can 3D Touch with VoiceOver, but only if you can see where
to push; there's no way to trigger 3D touch on the highlighted element if it's
not under your finger).

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LoSboccacc
and to think there was an api to derive pressure from contact size back in 2.0

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UITouch_Class/index.html)

anyone knows any app usage of this? I remember some games had pressure
calculated from the accelerometer, don't know if any did use this one instead.

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sigmar
I would love to see how closely/consistently the output from "contact size"
increases with "force"

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_rknLA
This sort of thing really depends on the application, and the nice feature
provided with the new "force" property is that you can actually distinguish
between a "whole finger pad" light touch, and a "thin, firm, almost just the
finger nail" hard touch, and most things in betwee.

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amelius
I'm wondering: can it measure force also for different presses simultaneously?
And how far apart do the presses need to be?

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_rknLA
In my experience so far, yes, it will provide unique force values per-touch,
though I'm not sure if the quality deteriorates, or at what point it might
deteriorate.

I don't know how far apart the presses need to be, as I haven't done a "two
fingers as close as possible" test yet.

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3dfan
I really would like to see google maps to make use of 3d touch to make zooming
easier. Moving the finger up/down while pressing would zoom in/out. That would
make one-finger usage of the maps so easy.

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aidos
You may already know this but you can double-click, hold and slide up/down on
google maps to zoom in and out.

I have the 3D thing on my macbook trackpad (force touch) and I have it turned
off. Unfortunately the click on the trackpad is triggered by the same
mechanism, which means detection of the click is effectively handled by
software.

The net result is that, unless you make distinct actions when moving between a
zoom and a click, the OS can't tell when the scroll ends and the click begins.
I work in CAD software where it's really common to zoom out and roll straight
into the click and drag (pan) but it's an absolute nightmare on this trackpad.

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lewisl9029
The laptop I have right now has a similar pressure sensitive Synaptics
ForcePad, and I've never used a more annoying trackpad before. Just simply
moving the cursor on the trackpad can be ridiculously error prone, with random
clicks triggering whenever you let your guard down and push a little too hard.

The worst part is, I can't even use it as a regular trackpad with tap-to-click
only, because the pressure sensitive clicks can't even be completely disabled.

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pazimzadeh
I'd like to know how precisely the force sensors are calibrated during the
manufacturing process, i.e. what is the variation in maximum detected pressure
across iPhones?

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melling
For more on 3dTouch, I've catalogued a dozen other articles here:

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?age=10000&q=3dTouch](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?age=10000&q=3dTouch)

By the way, over the weekend I added a Swift Weekly view, which should be a
nice way to keep up on new Swift blogs:

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?week=0](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?week=0)

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OldSchoolJohnny
How does pressure sensitive touch essentially differ from a long touch?

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chrisdroukas
A long press is a function of time: "How long has the user pressed?"

3D Touch is a function of pressure: "How hard has the user pressed?"

In practice, things that your application previously accomplished with long
presses may be more suitably accomplished with 3D Touch — things like
contextual menus or shortcuts come to mind. Additionally, iOS has new APIs for
presenting content using 3D Touch. The article briefly references them.

