ashertrockman/touchscale — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-07-18 · repo last pushed 2015-11-03
Place a light letter on your iPhone and press down to estimate its weight before mailing it.
Measure a rough portion of a cooking ingredient using your phone instead of a kitchen scale.
Try the web version of TouchScale without installing anything to see how the pressure-to-weight measurement works.
Explore how 3D Touch hardware can be repurposed for a use case beyond its original interface-pressing design.
| ashertrockman/touchscale | thebriangao/pebble | easychen/markmark | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 82 | 84 | 85 |
| Language | Swift | Swift | Swift |
| Last pushed | 2015-11-03 | — | — |
| Maintenance | Dormant | — | — |
| Setup difficulty | easy | moderate | easy |
| Complexity | 1/5 | 3/5 | 1/5 |
| Audience | general | vibe coder | writer |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Only works on iPhone models with 3D Touch hardware support.
TouchScale is an app that turns your iPhone into a simple scale by using 3D Touch, the pressure-sensing feature on newer iPhones. Instead of needing a separate physical scale, you can place a lightweight object on your phone and press down with varying amounts of force to measure its weight. The app works by calibrating itself to understand the relationship between how hard you press on the screen and the actual weight of an object. When you place something on your iPhone and apply pressure, the 3D Touch sensor detects the force, and the app translates that into a weight measurement. It's a clever hack that repurposes hardware that's already in your pocket for a completely different purpose. This would be useful for people who need to weigh small items occasionally, like checking the weight of letters before mailing them, measuring portions of ingredients while cooking, or just satisfying curiosity about how heavy something is. Since it's on your phone, it's always available and requires no extra equipment or setup. There's also a web version you can try without installing anything. The main limitation is that this only works on iPhones with 3D Touch support (certain older models had this feature), and it's best suited for lightweight objects since the phone's screen has a practical pressure limit. It's more of a clever proof-of-concept than a replacement for a real kitchen scale, but for quick, casual weighing tasks, it's a neat way to use technology you already have.
TouchScale turns an iPhone with 3D Touch into a makeshift scale, letting you press down on an object placed on the screen to estimate its weight without any extra hardware.
Mainly Swift. The stack also includes Swift.
Dormant — no commits in 2+ years (last push 2015-11-03).
No license information was stated in the explanation.
Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.
Mainly general.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
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