iOS Long Press: The Hidden Feature You Didn't Know You Needed

Hey Thomas,

Thanks as always for giving us pointers on saving time and making our lives easier. Smile. Much appreciated!

In a game I've been playing since 2018, Lords and Knights, I recently discovered a the virtue of long press, specifically, long pressing on the back button, which reveals all the levels the player can go back from the depths of their current decision tree. I could be five levels down, and by long pressing, I can choose to go directly to any of previous levels with a single tap instead of hitting the back button time and time again to back out of each level to the level I want.

The other thing I discovered is that I can immediately return to the top of the decision tree by simply tapping on the appropriate tab at the bottom of the screen. For example, if I'm deep into the depths of the profile tab, by simply magic tapping on the profile tab, I'm immediately returned to the top level of the profile screen.

Smile. Experiment? Definitely! I encourage Applevis to consider creating a new forum. Maybe it could be called Experimentation, where Applevis users can post new discoveries, just like you have done with your podcast.

Joy!

Bruce

Hi Thomas, absolute cracker of a podcast. Extremely useful, I have never explored this enough. My problem is now I’m going to spend all day playing with long press! Keep up the great work. Cheers, Fish

I've been using long press in apps for a while. It's an easy way to adapt mainstream tips. In Safari, you can long press on the tabs button in the toolbar to easily close one or all of the tabs you have open.

I also use it in the music app a lot. It makes it easy to just start playing an album or playlist, or add it to your library.

Using the long press on apps on the home screen sounds awesome, but it doesn't work with the Siri widget that suggests apps that you use throughout the day and puts them on the home screen. Too bad. I would love that easier way to get to the app updates because i, too, check that throughout the day since I have auto updates turned off.

If you long press on the app store it will show updates.

Thank you for another wonderful podcast it is truly appreciated. You're podcasts are awesome.

Hi, how do I do that I don't see subscribe button on this thread am I missing it? did the name change?

Hi Dennis,

AppleVis does not support subscribing for alerts on replies to podcasts. This is primarily because podcasts don't typically get comments like other types of content on the website.

At least not until this one came along ☺️

I'm embarrassed I didn't understand this action. Thomas, you are a star!

David can you change that? Thanks.

Thank you all for the praises and I’m so glad to see that you enjoyed the podcast. It’s amazing of the places we just didn’t realize were there for the taking with the long press.

I was facing a very hard issue in Uber APp, the call button was not working at all, but now with the long 3rd tap, it is working very will
Thanks so much for your hard work

Thomas, thank you so much for yet another excellent audio. I too, have done the long-press a few times, mostly by accident. I especially like your Seeing AI example. A lot of times when I come back downstairs to go to bed after being at an upstairs neighbor's apartment, I want to check and be sure all my lights are off. My living-room lights are controlled by 2 switches, one at each end of the room. When I lived upstairs I had a ceiling fan in my living room, but they haven't been installed yet in the new apartment. Often times I have trouble telling the status of these lights, because of light coming in from outside. I therefore have to open Seeing AI and swipe up to the appropriate channel, but now I'm going to start using the shortcut.

Helllo, Thomas! First of all, thank you so much for a great and useful podcast! I must admit, I'm not as familiar with long-press as I probably should be. But, this podcast for sure will change that! Especially with me still getting used to my Iphone! I especially LOVE being able to go DIRECTLY to the forward button in the email app! Because I deal with A LOT of emails daily! Part of that means forwarding emails to people. Whether it's to pass info on to people, or, send attachments and files to people to get them converted into accessible formats. Which brings me to my question.
So, another part of what I do in my dealings with emails, especially as of lately, is dealing with attachments. Whether it's sending them to people to get them converted into accessible formats for my braille display. Or, getting them and making sure it works. So, my question for you is:
Can you grab an attachment from an email and put it somewhere with a long press like you can when you get to the forward button? In case I'm not clear, here's an example. Say I send a PDF to someone to convert it to TXT format, so I can read it with my braille display. Well, they convert it, and send it to me. So, I find the email, and, instead of opening it, I do a long-press. So, can I grab the attachment from there, and save it to files and my USB drive by extension from there? Because I know you can long-press on attachments when in an email, and, I use the heck out of that. But, anything to be more efficient.
Especially with the amount of emails I get/h to deal with a day. That Don't include attachments! But, it also matters because I'll be starting a volunteer position on a committee for accessible virtual meeting accommidations soon. So, I've got a feeling I'll be needing this stuff. So, once again, thank you for a great podcast! Also, one more thing, and then, I promise, I will shut up. :-) But, as a braille display user, you can still do long-presses. The command to do that (at least for my Brailliant BI 40X that is) is space with dots 3, 7, (also known as the backspace key) dot 6, and dot 8 (also known as the enter key)

Hello Bryan. Thank you so much for sharing how you close multiple tabs in the Safari app. I didn't even open the app. I just did a one finger, double tap on the Safari icon, and it popped up a whole host of things. It took me a second, because I think I would've named it differently, but when I opened up the reading list, I could see all of my tabs sorted by date, even the time of day, and I found a clear all button to rid myself of all of those tabs. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing this. I bet I reclaimed a whole 10 GB of memory. 😂 probably not, but seems like I did, because there was so much to close. It's simple thing, but priceless. Thank you again.

First of all, Thomas, I officially vote you as rockstar of our personal podcast resources library. You are fabulous. You do such a wonderful job. You are in, out, explain exactly what needs to happen. No wasted time, no off-topic chatter. You are efficient. You are valued in this community. Thank you for all that you do.

Now then, it's time for me to cry. While going through this podcast, I actually thought I might have a little bit of hope, regarding the use of a workout music app called RockMyRun. Many of you may actually know this app. It is something that I have had in my possession for many years. To begin with, though it was a little bit clunky, I actually got along with the app beautifully. I have created playlists. I have subscribe to the app, because the playlist have such high value for me. But, sadly, quite a few years ago now, they broke accessibility. The only thing I can actually do now is, if I'm even successful in locating it, is use the play it now button, which just pulls something from my favorites queue, which is a good thing, except I don't get the choice of selecting the playlist that's needed for the workout, for that particular day. I am no longer able to preview new playlist that have been added. I can no longer select individual playlists. I cannot get a Playlist started in any other way except the one previously mentioned. And of course, skipping back-and-forth by individual tracks, inside of a playlist is not possible,because I can't open it, and it was always a problem, before accessibility was broken, but I had some bit of success doing so. Basically, the app is broken for me.

I've been aware of the long press for apps forever, it seems. But it just never occurred to me to try to utilize it in RockMyRun. Sadly, it's a miserable fail. If anyone actually uses this app, if anyone is willing to try to use this app, and see if they can do any better than me, any assistance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I so love the app. It has so much fantastic workout stuff in it, I seriously wish I could get it back.

To answer the first question I'm sure I would be asked, yes, I contacted the developers of RockMyRun, and it looked like they actually attempted something but nothing ever happened. What I'm referring to is apparently now we are able to have the app synchronize the music pace according to our step rate. So if I'm running really super fast, and my song beat is matching my feet rhythm, but then I slow way down that really fast piece of music will augment, and slow, to find my step rate. When they implemented this feature, accessibility got screwed. I did try to work with them, but I think they just threw up their hands. I mean, the ability of my steps pace and rhythm of the music matching is a fabulous thing to do in an app, and I wouldn't want them to eliminate that valuable feature. But somehow, I don't think they found out how to deal with accessibility and that new feature in the app.

If you actually made it to the end of this long diatribe, I congratulate you. I offer my apologies for going on about this, but I just thought I would share all of my experiences, in hopes that, maybe something can be resolved for this app. Thanks for reading.

Hi Dawn and Roxanne,

Aww, that was nice of you to say. I really appreciate everyone that participate on this site so that we can have a wonderful resource for the visually impaired community. So, thank you all for doing this.

Dawn, Unfortunately From what you have describe I believe there is no way to do this. It would be nice if more apps would let us customize what we like to see with in our actions and/or long press action but in these cases, we are in the mercy of the developers to include things that would make sense for VoiceOver users. Sorry, that I don’t have the answer you wanted but here is for hoping someone else may have a better suggestion. For now, I think the method that you are doing now is going to be the best option.

Roxanne, I'm sorry to hear about the RockMyRun app. As I understand the frustration in something we had and were able to get it to work with some work but then to have it get worse that make it useless for us to use at all. Sometimes, I have wonder as well if the developer doesn't know how to make things accessible in the way we would like. Perhaps, that is why they remain silence or they may at times just ignore us entirely for one reason or another. Such a disappointment. You can certainly start a post on AppleVis on this subject to see if others have this issue and if they have any suggestion. Also, you may get a few people to help you in reaching out to the developer to see if something can be done. Good Luck!

- AnonyMouse

I knew about it but for some strange reason I do not use it consistently.

Great podcast Thomas. I too have underused this feature but have been playing around with it lately and it is quite a timesaver for sure.

Roxanne said it exactly right! I too appreciate the time you take with these podcasts demos and explanations. Because of your excellent demos, we all in this community can use our phones more efficiently!

I've been using this since the feature was introduced maybe in 2015 to 2019. It works well. So for me this is nothing new, just old news.

I didn't know how widely it could be used so Thank you again Thomas.

Someone wrote:

I've been using this since the feature was introduced maybe in 2015 to 2019. It works well. So for me this is nothing new, just old news.

Thanks for your words of wisdom. As you can probably tell, a lot of folks did not know about this.

Just a tip for anyone who uses the Drafts app, the author has put this feature absolutely everywhere. Seriously, just about every control, and item can be long pressed.

what does it do? can you provide the link to it?