Great story by Nick Heer on his trip to Indonesia:

At around 9:00 at night, the temperature in Magelang finally drops to a more hospitable 28°C from the 37° or so that it’s been hovering at. My girlfriend and I are in Magelang for this leg of the trip and we’ve stopped at a warung for dinner — think of a small trailer that can be pulled behind a bicycle serving ridiculously tasty food. This warung is known for several noodle dishes, but we’ve asked for mie godog — literally, “boiled noodles”. The broth from this cart is made with candlenut and it’s cooking overtop some hot coals in a wok with spring onions, garlic, some mustard greens, and the aforementioned egg noodles. Every few seconds, someone on a scooter or motorbike putters past, inches from the trio of younger men sitting and smoking on the stoop of the karaoke bar next door.

I’ve taken a couple of Live Photos of the scene and play them back, and I realize that it’s captured the sights and sounds well enough that I’ll be able to show my friends and parents back in Canada, but something’s missing: the smell of this place. It’s a distinct blend of engine fumes, clove cigarette smoke, burning wood, and this incredible food. This, to me, says worlds about the immediacy of place of Live Photos, as well as the limitations that they have. They are a welcome step closer to better capturing a moment in time, but the technology isn’t quite good enough yet for this moment.

Lots of spot-on observations about using an iPhone (and iOS) outside of North America and Europe in the article, too.

Ryan McLeod, Chase McBride, and Brice Tuttle created Gravity, an iPhone app which ingeniously used the 3D Touch display of the iPhone 6s to turn the device in a digital scale and weigh objects with an accuracy of ~1-3 grams. Alas, the app has been rejected from the App Store:

With the force values linearly correlated to weight, turning any force into a weight was going to be as simple as recording the force of known weights and creating a linear regression. It’d even be possible to use some statistics to predict how well the calibration went (there are many factors that can throw off a calibration). We opted to use coins for calibration, with a framework that made it easy to internationalize in the future.
[…]
To make a long story short the final answer over the phone was that the concept of a scale app was not appropriate for the App Store.

We were—and still are—bummed to say the least, but we understand some of the reasons Apple might not be allowing scale apps at this time.

I understand why Apple may not be sure about an app that requires placing a spoon on screen. Still, I hope that, eventually, novel uses of 3D Touch like Gravity will be accepted on the App Store. Make sure to read the technical details behind Gravity (and watch the video as well).

See also: weighing plums with 3D Touch.

Speaking of 3D Touch, Victor Baro has put together some examples of how the technology can be used to build custom controls on iOS 9:

Since I discovered 3D Touch, I have been thinking about new ways of interacting with the content. Peek & pop is a great interaction; but what I really want is to create my own controls.

We need to take into account that, because 3D touch is only available in iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, no action should be completed just by using this feature. The user should be able to achieve any action without using 3D touch (just like peek & pop does), and 3D touch should only provide an extra level of interaction.

It’s a technical read, but make sure to check out the demo videos. As 3D Touch trickles down to Apple’s entire lineup over the coming years, it seems obvious that these new types of interactions will become the new default.

Nice demo by Lim Chee Aun, showing how you can use 3D Touch on the web in a simple drawing app:

This is a demo for 3D Touch on Mobile Safari on iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. It’s a simple line drawing app which you can use the force of the finger to control the width of the drawn line.

Mobile Safari on iOS 9 for iPhone 6S and 6S Plus introduces 3D Touch for web developers. The line drawing code is heavily inspired by (or copied from) @kangax’s 2013 article: Exploring canvas drawing techniques.

Make sure to apply different levels of pressure to get thicker lines. You can play around with the demo here.