Facebook Rolls Out Support For 3D Touch, Offering Shortcuts For Posting Statuses, Photos And Videos On New iPhones

An update to Facebook’s iOS application, which rolled out earlier this morning, now allows iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system to take advantage of the newly introduced 3D Touch feature to more quickly interact with the social network. Following the update, a hard press on the Facebook’s app icon will offer you a handful of shortcuts, including the ability to take or upload photos and videos or the ability to write your status update.

The addition is one of the more highly anticipated rollouts of third-party support for 3D Touch, a new user interaction that’s something of a spinoff of the similar Force Touch option on Apple Watch. A flagship feature on the new iPhones, 3D Touch is another gesture you can use with your device for faster access to apps.

It’s been likened by some as a right click for apps, as it’s a shortcut to things you can do within a mobile application, but also something of an optional step for power users rather than a new interaction everyone has to learn.

Initially, the 3D Touch option was available with a number of Apple’s default applications, like Mail, Music and Maps, for example, but has been steadily rolling out to third-party applications following the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus’s launch. Facebook-owned Instagram was among the first to offer 3D Touch support, but Facebook’s support means the feature now reaches one of the top mobile apps of all time – and one that reaches more of the app audience than any other, according to comScore.

Facebook’s other apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger, Moments, Groups and others, have yet to support the new interaction.

In addition to Facebook, other top apps now supporting 3D Touch include Pinterest, Jet, Twitter, Shazam, OpenTable, chat apps like Confide and FireChat, Medium, Dropbox, Evernote, and more.

The updated Facebook app is now live on iTunes. It doesn’t appear that Facebook has gained any other iPhone 6s or 6s Plus-only features in the new update, such as support for Live Photos, though that’ssomething in the works for later this year, Apple has said.Of course, users would never know that Facebook had rolled out 3D Touch today because of Facebook’s refusal to offer detailed app release notes – a plague in the industry, where developers no longer feel it’s necessary to inform users of the changes arriving in new versions of their applications.

Comments

Peel Turns Your Apple Watch Into A Universal Remote Control

Does it make sense to use your Apple Watch as a remote control for your media devices? Smart remote maker Peel thinks so, having just launched a universal remote control application for the Apple Watch which lets you operate over 400,000 models of home electronics, including not only televisions, but also DVD players, and even audio and streaming devices, like the Roku. The Apple Watch app is actually an extension of the company’s existing smart remote app for iPhone . And while in a few cases the new Watch app will allow you to control your devices via Wi-Fi, for the most part, it will require the Pronto hardware just like the iPhone version does. The Pronto 360-degree IR blaster is what turns the iPhone, and now the Apple Watch, into a smart universal remote control. A $49.99 piece of hardware about the size of a salt shaker, Pronto sits in your entertainment center to provide the IR capabilities required to operate your TV and other electroni...

How to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10?

Windows 10 has included some optional features which are in-built in the operating system but not installed by default. The Graphics Tool is one such package. The Graphic Tools are needed for users who use Visual Studio to develop DirectX apps or games. The tools have many utility like Graphics debugging, tracing Direct3D calls, inspection of parameters, analyzing Direct3D calls, experiments with shaders and many more. Visual Studio has a Graphics Frame Analysis tool that operates on graphics debugging log. It also collects all necessary information to draw Direct3D calls. The Graphics tools also consist of GPU Usage which lets you analyse and track GPU use in real time and at the same time collects and analyzes the timing data of the workloads. Steps to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10? 1. Open the Start Menu, go to Settings and tap on System . 2. Go to Apps and features . 3. In the right panel, tap Manage ...

What is your preferred smartphone screen size

Screen envy. We all have it. Or do we? See, that’s the thing, I’m just not so sure. One thing I am sure about is that our phone screens have gotten progressively bigger and bigger over the last few years. The funny thing is, we as a society have taken that ball and run with it, like we just don’t care. But I always thought we did care? Some time ago, when phones were in the sub-5” range, we used to have a term called “phablet” which described an almost absurdly big phone. The definition varied from person to person. I always considered a phone with a screen 5.5” or bigger to be a phablet. The Galaxy Note fell into that category. The Lumia 1520 certainly did. There are others as well. I was safely ensconced in the 4.5” area at the time with my Lumia 920. What did I know? Leon’s getting laaaaaaaarrrger But slowly, phones started topping the 5” mark. I’m not talking about phablets here, I’m talking about normal flagship phones – the Galaxy S4 (barely) and the HTC One (M7) are ...

Barnes & Noble is killing itself

I’ve been chronicling the slow demise of B&N for years now, watching the company bleed out, drop by drop, until it has become a shell of its former value. B&N was a cultural center in places without cultural centers. It was a stopover on rainy days in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland and it was a place you could go to get your kids’ first books. That’s mostly over now. On Monday the company laid off 1,800 people. This offered a cost savings of $40 million. But that’s particularly interesting. That means each of those people made an average of $22,000 or so per year and minimum wage workers – hourly folks who are usually hit hardest during post-holiday downturns – would be making $15,000. In fact, what B&N did was fire all full time employees at 781 stores. From a former employee: On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the pe...

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla And Others Team Up To Launch WebAssembly, A New Binary Format For The Web

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the engineers on the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web. The web thrives on standards and, for better or worse, JavaScript is its programming language. Over the years, however, we’ve seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of JavaScript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to JavaScript. Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft’s TypeScript) or speeding up JavaScript (like Mozilla’s asm.jsproject). Now, many of these projects are starting to come together in the form of WebAssmbly. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the J...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog