iOS developer adds 3D Touch to iPad Pro using Apple Pencil

William Judd

apple-pencil

Veteran iOS hacker / developer Hamza Sood has impressed the ‘net with his latest project: enabling 3D Touch on the iPad Pro.

The hack is pretty clever, too. 3D Touch works on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus thanks to pressure sensors built into the screen. These sensors aren’t present on the iPad Pro, but there are pressure sensors in the Pro’s Pencil stylus. The hack uses that stylus data instead, multiplying by a constant value in order to provide a similar feeling to using 3D Touch with your finger. That means you can’t use 3D Touch on the iPad Pro without the stylus, but it’s still quite a useful hack.

Take a look at the hack in action below:

With 3D Touch capabilities enabled on the iPad Pro, you can press harder with the Apple Pencil to access shortcuts, additional functions and variable-speed video scrubbing. For example, you can press lightly to ‘peek’ at links to see them without moving off the page you’re on, and press harder to ‘pop’ and actually open these links. Reviews of 3D Touch state that it’s not essential for getting around in iOS, but it is definitely a convenient time-saver.

3D Touch debuted with the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus this autumn, and is itself based on a simpler system called Force Touch that was released with the Apple Watch. We already know that 3D Touch is accurate enough to work as a digital scale, so it’s nice to see it unlocked for the iPad Pro. If you’re paying nearly £1000 for a tablet and essential accessories, then you definitely want to get as much out of it as possible.

Sood has released his work via GitHub, so if you’re happy to deploy this yourself using Xcode, then you should be able to add these functions to your iPad Pro as well. Hopefully we’ll see this nicely bundled up as an iPad app, perhaps released on the Cydia marketplace, before too long.

What do you think of the news? Let us know in the comments below.