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Apple’s 3D Touch displays on the iPhone 6S or 6S Plus can be used to weigh objects

Apple’s 3D Touch on the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus opens up a number of nifty use cases, including the ability to peek at emails without opening them, draw dynamic pictures with your finger, and weigh plums. That last one is made possible thanks to a developer who lives in Paris.

In a playfully written blog post, Simon Gladman talks about his newest app, which is called the Plum-O-Meter. As its name implies, the app leverages the 3D Touch technology in his iPhone 6S to act as a scale of sorts that tells the user which of the objects placed on the smartphone’s screen is heavier.

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Gladman’s video example shows three plums lined up and placed two at a time onto the screen of his iPhone 6S. The Plum-O-Meter app displays the normalized force of each object on the screen as a percentage and uses a yellow highlight to indicate which object is heaviest.

The app is open source and can be sideloaded onto an iPhone 6S or 6S Plus without any jailbreaking.

Technically, the iPhone’s multitouch display can simultaneously sense up to five objects at a time, iDownloadBlog points out.

“I did originally build this app for grapes, but they’re too light to activate the 3D Touch,” Gladman writes in his blog post.

Whatever you may decide to weigh on an iPhone 6S or 6S Plus screen, it may be a good idea to properly clean the screen beforehand or remember to clean those objects afterward.

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Jason Hahn
Former Contributor
Jason Hahn is a part-time freelance writer based in New Jersey. He earned his master's degree in journalism at Northwestern…
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