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

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Western Union Brings Money Transfer And Its Tricky Fees To Chat Apps

Remittance has always been a shady business. Migrant workers need to send money they earn home to their families, but get hit with fine print fees so less cash comes out the other side than they might assume. Remittance companies earn extra by keeping the margin between their own made up exchange rate and the real one. Western Union is the best known remittance company, with 500,000 brick-and-mortar locations around the world. But tech startups like TransferWise, Azimo, and WorldRemit are gunning for the business. They hope to increase convenience and reduce fees to lure customers away from Western Union, Moneygram, and other old-school remittance providers. So Western Union is going digital thanks to partnerships with big messaging apps. It launched its Western Union Connect system in October last year, followed by a partnership with WeChat for sending up to $100. Now it’s getting into bed with Viber , which has over 664 million “unique” users, thou...

Google Calls Out EFF Over Bogus Claims That It Snoops On Students With Its Chromebooks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) caused quite a stir this week when it alleged that Google is using its Chromebook platform, which has made a significant impact in the education sector, to snoop on students. The charges were damning, with the EFF claiming that Google was violating its own corporate policies and using students’ personally identifiable browsing data/habits to refine its services, in addition to sharing that data with partners. "EFF bases this petition on evidence that Google is engaged in collecting, maintaining, using, and sharing student personal information in violation of the 'K-12 School Service Provider Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy' (Student Privacy Pledge), of which it is a signatory,” alleged the EFF in its initial FTC complaint. Google takes such allegations very seriously, and has thus responded to every claim brought forth by the EFF. “While we appreciate the EFF’s focus on student data privacy, we are confid...

Following Patent Deal, Every Time Apple Sells An iPhone, Ericsson Gets A Bit Of Money

Telecommunications infrastructure company Ericsson just announced that it has reached an agreement with Apple over an ongoing patent dispute. For the next seven years, Apple will pay a fraction of its iPhone and iPad profit to Ericsson in royalties. Back in February, Ericsson filed suits in many different jurisdictions for patent infringement (the International Trade Commission, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, as well as courts in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands). According to the Swedish company, Apple has been violating 41 patents over the past few years with its iPhone and iPad, in particular patents related to GSM, UMTS and LTE technologies. As expected, the two companies have reached an agreement and Ericsson is dropping all of its lawsuits. Today’s news isn’t particularly surprising as Ericsson holds more than 35,000 patents. Many of them are related to wireles...

Android Oreo vs iOS 11: What’s different and what’s the same?

Google just announced Android Oreo and it packs a handful of new features. Some are at the system level and speed up the system and extend the battery life, while others are features that will change the way users interact with their phone. A lot of these features should be familiar to iPhone and iPad owners. Normally Apple is the one accused of copying Android, but for Android Oreo, Google lifted a handful of features straight from iOS, while a couple of new functions are hitting Android before iOS. Notifications Google cribbed iOS for Android’s new notification scheme. In An...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog