You must have heard of Apple Force Touch after the latest Apple MacBook launch. It certainly must have rung a bell as well if you love the Apple Watch.
Still confused about what is Force Touch? Well, let’s fix that.
Apple was already ahead of the competition when it came to touchpads. If you know Apple well enough, you would know that Apple rarely comes up with brand-new technology, instead, they make existing implementations better in such a way that makes it the best implementation ever.
Enter Apple Force Touch. This feature combines a capacitive screen with a Haptic feedback system and is implemented on the touchpad of the new MacBooks. Haptic feedback is the key differentiator here. It’s the same technology that most, rather all, Android users are familiar with. When one types or holds a key on their screen, it gives you vibratory feedback. Apple in classic Apple fashion has taken this one step ahead and made it better; the new Force Touchpad not only vibrates when you press it but also detects how hard you press it.
How does this make a touchpad better, you ask?
Classic trackpads have buttons that you press, but this one does not. Every time you press the trackpad, it gives you pushback feedback acknowledging the press. This means that the Force Touch and Apple Watch screen, which also has Force Touch, does a lot more than a regular touchpad or screen. Since all of it is software controlled, the new Trackpads with Force Touch lets you program the touch-sensitive to your liking and use it to its full potential.
All Clicks are not equal when using a Force Touch-enabled device. Since it can now recognize the difference between a light and deep touch, it has enabled Apple to make use of multiple gestures. For example, when browsing the web on the Safari browser, you can now select a word and deep press on it; this would automatically bring up a Wikipedia entry for the same. You can Deep press the address link for the map pop-up, and when watching videos, you can press harder to make the video skip faster. I so wish this technology existed when we grew up playing racing games where the cars didn’t go any faster, no matter how hard we pressed.
Currently, these are just some of the implementations of Force Touch. We can be assured that this will only get better over time as Apple makes it available for the developers to take advantage of the same.
[Related Read: How to Force restart iPhone]Force Touch on the New iPhones
It’s also rumored that the upcoming iPhone 6S (that’s what we guess it’ll be called) is coming with a screen that is Force Touch enabled. Even though Android phones have always had haptic feedback but it has never been used so innovatively other than to indicate a long press or touch indication.
Here are some ways we think the forced touch might be used in the new iPhone 6S. For starters, it would make it easier to select text; depending on how much pressure you apply, a word, sentence, or whole page might get selected. Also, a lot of how it’s being used on the new MacBook, where you can press the screen to put down location pins on apple maps or use the pressure sensitivity to scroll media playlists and other similar functionality in various media apps. Most importantly, it will allow the configuration of Force touch and allow apps to determine their own functionalities. The possibilities for new experiences are limitless.
Here’s hoping Apple paves the way again with this technology, and this trickles down into all products from other manufacturers and companies because more and better competition only means the best products for the consumers.
This was a guest post by Siddhy, who is a gadget junkie and hard core gamer. He is part of the domain expertise team at FindYogi.com
Raju is the founder-editor of Technology Personalized. He worked as a software developer in banking domain before he turned into a technology journalist back...