This is included in our what’s new in iOS 5 Beta 3 post, but its so cool we thought it deserved separate highlighting.
In the new beta, Apple has activated the “Assistive Touch” settings pane for the iPad (but not on the iPhone or iPod Touch). Update: This works on the iPhone 4, but not my iPod Touch third-gen.
The new feature allows you to activate a menu overlay on the iPad by pressing on a designated corner of the dock after clicking the Home Button twice. This menu then allows you to trigger all of the iPad’s functions just by tapping an icon.
So let’s say your iPad’s gyroscope or rotation is broken, or won’t detect the lock switch. Now, you can just tap the iPad’s home button twice, tap a corner in the dock and trigger that function on the handy overlay that pops up.
Very neat, and very useful for troubleshooting, even if you don’t need the function for accessibility reasons.
[via MacRumors]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
10 responses to “New Assistive Touch Feature On iOS 5 Beta 3 Is Really Useful”
This would be really handy for my iPod touch, as the lock switch hardly ever works. Oh wait… it’s a 2nd Gen iPod touch. :(
It worked on my ipod touch 3rd gen…
Turn it on and wait for a bit…
What “Assistive Touch” means to me is a segway for Apple to remove all hardware buttons… possible?
The usual idea is that you would use NFC to set up the link between the two devices and then do an automatic hand over to a different protocol for doing the actual transfer of data – eg Bluetooth,iphone 5