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Posts tagged with "System Haptics"

Apple Previews a Wide Range of Upcoming Accessibility Features to Mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

With Global Accessibility Awareness Day coming up this Thursday, May 15, Apple is back with its annual preview of accessibility features coming to its platforms later in the year. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the creation of the first office within Apple to address accessibility, and there’s no sign of any slowdown in the company’s development on this front. While no official release date has been announced for these features, they usually arrive with the new OS updates in the fall.

In addition to a new accessibility-focused feature in the App Store, Apple announced a whole raft of system-level features. Let’s take a look.

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Annotable Adds Wide Color Support and Haptic Feedback on iPhone 7→

Nice update to Annotable, my favorite image annotation tool for iOS: the latest version has brought support for wide color (pictures you edit will be saved in wide color without changing their color profile back to sRGB) as well as haptic feedback on the iPhone 7.

The latter is one of the most interesting third-party implementations to date: both in the app and the Photos editing extension, Annotable will give you feedback when you snap to the edges of a picture, when an oval becomes perfectly circle or a line perfectly vertical/horizontal, or when you’ve zoomed an image to fit. That’s a clever way to augment the user experience without cluttering the interface with visual messages, and it’s line with Apple’s adoption of the Taptic Engine for system haptics as well.

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System Haptics on the iPhone 7

Apple introduced the Taptic Engine with the iPhone 6s, where it replaced the old vibration motor and was also used to provide haptic feedback for when you activated 3D Touch. This year with the iPhone 7, Apple has improved the Taptic Engine and it plays a critical role in simulating the press of the Home button, which is no longer a physical button. But the Taptic Engine in the iPhone 7 goes even further with the introduction of System Haptics, where a number of UI elements in iOS will now also provide tactile haptic feedback when you activate them.

I have had my iPhone 7 for nearly a week now, and these new System Haptics have been a great delight to discover, and use. These System Haptics are mostly subtle and feel very natural, so you may not have even noticed them. Below I’ve compiled a list of all the places in iOS that I’ve noticed them appear.

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