iPhones are hard to use • Hacker News Board

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#41

Post by geophile » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:25 PM UTC

iPhones (and all smartphones and tablets) are magic wands. You have to know the spells.

Any of the hundreds of capabilities that are made easy and obvious, cause other capabilities to become more obscure and harder to enable and even know about.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#42

Post by vezycash » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

"Apple never admits it makes mistakes." Best sentence on the page.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#43

Post by mrzool » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

pcmoney wrote: post #21

Ok, I need to say it. This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views. This is a problem with not just all smartphones but all rapidly evolving technology products. Do you think you could hand an android phone to one of those example cases and have them do any better with it? Also half of the time I am in an apple store I am helped by someone who needs to use the accessibility features to check me out/in.…

> This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views.

This article has iPhone in the title because it talks specifically and exclusively about iPhones.

Of course there's always a lot of improve with UI and UX on all devices, but this article focuses on iPhones.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#44

Post by threeseed » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #39

pcmoney wrote: post #21

Ok, I need to say it. This article just has iPhone in the title to get more views. This is a problem with not just all smartphones but all rapidly evolving technology products. Do you think you could hand an android phone to one of those example cases and have them do any better with it? Also half of the time I am in an apple store I am helped by someone who needs to use the accessibility features to check me out/in.…

Just because all companies handle the problem space really badly, doesn't mean we should excuse it. Apple products, as far as I can remember, do not come with any sort of manual describing the nifty little shortcuts that they have. Even as someone who did IT support and handled a lot of iPhone troubleshooting constantly, I got blindsided by lots of small things, like when they switched the force reboot from power+hom…

The lack of a manual is quite interesting.

They could easily include one but instead they encourage people to come to the Apple Stores and discuss the problem with a Genius. This in turn encourages people to look at at new products and get premium 1-1 support that you don't get from other vendors.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#45

Post by 0culus » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

polalavik wrote: post #2

And now dumber than ever. At least on my iPhone 6s with the latest update. Now you have to go through 2 screens to send a photo to someone in imessage, whereas before the most recent photos were easily accessible. And on facetime you have to pull up a menu [that covers the entire screen] to flip the camera around, and if you accidentally hit it a couple times theres no way to know which way your camera is facing with…

Accessing the recent photos is now accessed directly as one of those "iMessage App" icons that appears in the ribbon above the keyboard. However, the UI change is annoying and I constantly open the camera (though you can also get to recent photos by tapping the icon at the upper left of the camera, when inside messages).

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#46

Post by marklubi » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

rrauenza wrote: post #37

My biggest difficulty is moving the edit cursor when trying to edit text. It takes too many tries to get it exactly where I want. I wish they'd add cursor keys...

For iPhone, you can force-press on the keyboard (on newer phones), or just long-press on the space bar. On an iPad, you can use two fingers on the keyboard

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#47

Post by aaaaaaaaaab » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

>What can press-and-hold do that people don’t know about? >Directly move a scrollbar. (Fails most of the time due to tiny narrow hotspots you’re expected to hit on the first go.)

I couldn’t get this to work.

>Show a magnified absolute-centred duplicate of nearly anything onscreen you cannot actually manipulate, like whatever is in the title bar. (Try pressing and holding on the battery icon.)

Neither this one.

Do I need some obscure accessibility setting for these?

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#48

Post by mrzool » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

polalavik wrote: post #2

And now dumber than ever. At least on my iPhone 6s with the latest update. Now you have to go through 2 screens to send a photo to someone in imessage, whereas before the most recent photos were easily accessible. And on facetime you have to pull up a menu [that covers the entire screen] to flip the camera around, and if you accidentally hit it a couple times theres no way to know which way your camera is facing with…

I'm still on iOS 10 (I know, I know) because I can't handle how they butchered that perfect control center.

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#49

Post by lightyrs » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

rrauenza wrote: post #37

My biggest difficulty is moving the edit cursor when trying to edit text. It takes too many tries to get it exactly where I want. I wish they'd add cursor keys...

Another hidden UX: you can long press the keyboard and it'll turn into a touchpad that you can use to move the cursor (still not as easy as cursor keys but much better than the long press and drag method).

Re: iPhones are hard to use

#50

Post by TheKnack » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

> If Apple actually cared about accessibility (it does not), on the setup screen for every iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch would be a step you could not skip wherein you have to choose your preferred text size.

iPhones literally do have an unskippable screen during setup that prompts you to choose a text size

https://www.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/styles/xlarge/pu...