Favorite use of Force Touch so far?

anon(27512)

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I use it frequently in safari and iMessage. I love instagram's implementation as well. Tweetbot is another third party app that makes good use of it.
 

Nickkk101

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My list would be

Keyboard track pad (although I'm using SwiftKey and it doesn't allow that)

Maps for directions home in the waze app.

And the one that I use the most is the 3 quick contacts. I have the necessary ones. Mom,dad and my wife.

The quick dial is the one I use about 5 times a day. It's super handy. All the rest I usually forget about.

Just read about the app switcher one. Thanks for that tip also.

never even knew about the 'quick contact' one, that a great tip. I see that WhatsApp just added 3D touch to access chats this morning. good to see it coming to more apps.
 

PoisonMaps

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Great thread - I've learnt a lot of good uses of 3D Touch. I think the main problem is that it is not intuitive: unless you try force touching everything (or read threads like this) then you miss out on lots of things that it can do for you.

It's not so bad with the home screen icons, where you can easily force touch to see what shortcuts are available, but when running apps it is not so obvious what force touching can do for you.

For example I have written an app where force touch can be used to easily pan around a map, but I know that the majority of users won't have a clue that it is available.

Maybe Apple need to come up with some way of helping users know what 3D touch features are available? Perhaps if the user does some unlikely force touch operation (force touch with 4 fingers at once?) then an information window could appear describing the available operations.

That way people only need to remember to try this one obscure gesture on an app to see what force touch can do for them. It would also be easy for developers to implement as they would just specify what text should be displayed when the obscure force touch gesture is performed.

This example is far from ideal, but do I think that Apple need some (hopefully more elegant) way to help users find out what force touch features are available.
 

doogald

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I think the main problem is that it is not intuitive: unless you try force touching everything (or read threads like this) then you miss out on lots of things that it can do for you.

I agree with this 100%. I'm not sure what the answer is: animations that show potential force touch targets (until you use them a few times)? Some sort of onscreen hint (skeumorphic or otherwise?) It's hard to think of how to train a user that 3d touch exists in a casual, useful way without a quick explanation. That's one of the reasons that I'm not so excited about it - almost all of the uses of it are just replicas of things that you can do in other ways anyway, and some don't even save steps.

One of my main gripes is with the app Overcast. Sometimes when I 3d Touch the app icon it has a top option to resume the last episode that I was listening to - but sometimes that isn't there. I don't get why it would be different. This is the one thing I want to do with Overcast every time - just resume where I last left off (or go on to the next item in my playlist.) Because I can't know whether it will give me that choice each time, it's just easier to open the app and restart where I was the "old-fashioned" way.

Hopefully Apple will figure these things out. Right now I can generally get by without it, though. As I said, I do the keyboard/trackpad sometimes, but otherwise I just rarely use it.
 

metalchick719

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I'm afraid I use 3D Touch very sparingly, but usually, when I do use it, it's to activate the camera (typically to select the selfie option).
 

john_v

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My biggest use to date is New Note shortcut for Evernote, and with yesterday's Chrome update, I expect to be using the Voice Search shortcut quite a bit.

But the biggest thing really is to re-train yourself to do things differently. We get so used to using our devices a certain way, that often a new shortcut takes time for our muscle memory to learn. I experienced that when I picked up a Note Edge last February...had to re-train myself to use the Edge functions.
 

SprSynJn

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Just reading all these messages makes me quite thrilled to upgrade next year. Looking forward to using this feature.
 

robertk328

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Just read about this one that I think was mentioned here but wasn't sure how it worked.

Take a picture of something. Here's my steering wheel (before I took the photo).
c5d167c8193794e329ff202731c2e522.jpg


I would usually go to photos to check it but force press the tiny thumbnail in the bottom brings up a full preview. Force press more brings up edit functions.
a48b9b3a41864fed9a379b6290e61089.jpg