Now with iOS 5, you can create and activate custom touch-gestures that will control your touch screen when activated.
iOS 5 is packed with over 200 new features. I hope all of Modmyi's readers didn't think that the short list on Apple's website was all that there was to look forward to in iOS 5. So far, we've discovered that you can make custom text tones. Well now, you can also make custom touch gestures. Here's how:
You Will Need:
- An iDevice running iOS 5.
To start, you need to go into your Settings app. From there, go into your general section:
Next, scroll down and go into the Accessibility section:
After that, scroll down and go into the AssistiveTouch section:
Once you are in the AssistiveTouch section, flip the AssistiveTouch switch to the, "on" position, and then tap on, "Create New Gesture...".
Upon doing so, you will open a UI where it asks you to, "Touch to create a custom gesture".
For this guide, I drew a circle. After you draw the circle, tap on the blue, "Save" button at the top right of the screen:
Now, if you go back to the AssistiveTouch menu, you will see your gesture in the menu of gestures to choose from:
Now that we've actually created a gesture, we can try it out. For this tutorial I will be using an app from the App Store known as Zen Brush. It's a high quality brush app that can be downloaded in the App Store for $2.99 if you would like to try it. I also recommend it for joy-drawing purposes, but that's besides the point. Once I open Zen Brush, I'm going to tap on the AssistiveTouch button at the bottom right of the screen:
Tapping it will open a heads up display. The four options are: Favorites, Device, Home, and Gestures. Tap on Favorites:
That will present you with another heads up display, this time tap the gesture that you created; in this case, Circle:
When you do that, a blue circle will appear. This is called your tracer. The tracer lets you know where your finger was when you started the gesture:
Now just tap anywhere on the screen and the tracer will trace your gesture across the screen. Tapping in different areas will activate the gesture on different locations of the screen. As you can see in the image below, it drew an exact replica of the gesture that I drew earlier:
This new feature in iOS 5 has a ton of kickbacks. For one, if you're lazy and don't feel like flicking your finger a thousand times to scroll down a very long webpage, you can create a scrolling gesture so that all you need to do is tap the screen and the gesture will scroll down for you. Another thing you can do is make automated gestures for games. This video, compliments of Cult of Mac, shows these features in depth based on usage:
Youtube Video
This new feature makes people will hand disorders more iPhone friendly. If you have a bad wrist, or hand and find flicking your fingers difficult, the purpose of this feature is to allow you to simply tap to perform a complex touch action. But that doesn't mean that the more fortunate of us can't take advantage of this cool feature. You can set it to automatically scroll down your notification center, to automatically play Angry Birds for you, or even to make scrolling less of a workout. Whatever the choice that you choose to implement this feature with, I feel it's truly a welcome functionality to my device simply because it's cool. This feature is available on all devices that run iOS 5; so iPod touches, iPhones, and iPads alike.
Will you be showing your friends that you can make your iPhone play angry birds for you? Share what you might do with this feature below!
Sources: Cult of Mac
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