Apple has killed off 3D Touch first with the XR and now the entire iPhone 11 line
They've still kept the functionality AFAIK - you could just long-touch for force touch menu. Instead of pressing hard, you're now pressing longer to invoke the 3D touch menu. I know why Apple got rid of force touch - BOM cost. Not that I condone the concept of Force Touch, but some wizbang designer pitched to the management that hey "We could solve this using just the UI with long press, and save $$$ in LCD costs to…
Except, long press has been a gesture since the earliest days of iOS. They’re simply reverting back.
I think you’re correct that cost was a factor, but more likely that the marginally utility of force touch over long-press wasn’t worth the trade-off. (Both gestures have to be learned, but force touch is faster once learned. But probably not enough people used it to justify the extra layer of technology.)
The Windows 95 UI was inspired by NextStep. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif
Taskbar was a bad clone of RISC OS's iconbar, but without the separation of Application and Window/Document that made it so much better
While RISC OS was influential, the 'app bar' idea mostly came from Windows 1.0 with minimized apps at the bottom of the screen. It went through several iterations and for a while it was a storage location for documents with no apps at all. Eventually the simple app list tested best so that's what stuck.
[I worked on parts of the Win95 UI although George Pitt I think did most of the work on the Taskbar itself]
Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.
In early 2000s, I used to make Windows applications with embedded IE browser and used system colors for CSS to make the whole UI look native. I believe it still works [0] but I don't think I've seen it in a long time on any site. [0] https://www.sitepoint.com/css-system-styles/
I tried it recently and its pretty random. The different names means different things depending on the os and browser combo and does not take into account user defined theme colors. So while the idea is great, the implementations are broken.
The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an an…
25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers. Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility. Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.
I recently spent one week making a dropdown menu. Then I spent another week making it possible to use it with keyboard only and with a screen reader. There are actually standards on how a dropdown menu is supposed to work. But no easy way to implement one. Dropdowns are however very bad UI because it hides info and you need to click or move the mouse to certain places to see more. A unique feature on the web is the scroll to see more. Using the mouse wheel. So instead of putting info in one screen hidden behind menus, tabs etc, you just put All info in one looooong scrollable page. This works great when information is presented like in a book, eg. you read from top to bottom and rarely jump back and forth. So the challenge is to present the functionality in a way so that the user does not have to scroll back and forth to reach it. Key presses or gestures could instead be used to switch between different scrollable screens/pages. And each view should have an unique URL so you can link to it.
The ribbon has Alt shortcuts with clear hints. It’s an all-around improvement on menus. Not on the Mac though. But Macs also don’t have alt shortcuts in menus.
Ribbon buttons are smaller than menu items and have no text until you hover over them. They're both harder to find and harder to press even if you know where they are. And somehow there seems to be less space in ribbon than in menus, because some commands are tucked away in second-level palettes. E.g. you need to open the "Reveal formatting" palette in MS Word: 1. Switch to Home pane. 2. Click the tiny icon at the bo…
I don't see how. Do you remember office menus and toolbars? They were insane. I remember the 'collapsed' menus in 2003 as a low point in UI design.
(Shift+F1 opens the 'reveal formatting' pane. I think it's tucked away on purpose, as a 'wrong' way to do things in modern Word)
Idk, my mom found windows 95 etc very hard to use but has no trouble with her iPhone, iPad or even a Mac (let alone the TV or can-speak-to appliance). Maybe part of is it is that a lot of problems that required UI solutions before just work magically now. Like file sharing, networking or dealing with different document formats. You don't need nearly as many controls for the most part so the UI can be simpler.
You think she learned nothing in the years between?
I am embarrassed to say I hadn't considered this actually; and it's a good point. But considering it, no, I don't. She simply doesn't have the mind for it, as far as I can tell.
It's easy to discover when there are only two buttons on your mouse. If it had one and pressing strongly did something else, you'd be right.
It's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click. Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.
Um, ease of use has little to do with discoverability. Two buttons are there in front of you.
But if you "hard-press" a button that doesn't support hard-pressing, won't it just detect a normal press? Depending on what the button is, that might be destructive or at the very least time-consuming.
Newbie Windows 95 users would quite frequently hide the entire start bar because they accidentally moved the mouse while trying to click on an item, and the system interpreted that as a drag intended to resize the start bar to a zero height. At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.
You still see a small bar even with "zero" height.
Worth noting they also disabled the feature on older hardware in iOS13 for feature parity. So even if your device can detect pressure it no longer bothers.
Not true. Force touch works perfectly in iOS 13 on my XS. As does long pressing. It is true though that they had disabled force touch altogether in the iOS 13 beta.
Doesn't work the same as it used to on my iPhone 7. You don't get the feedback as you force press an icon on the home screen anymore, you can tell its just the same simulated algorithm as on the new phones.
Newbie Windows 95 users would quite frequently hide the entire start bar because they accidentally moved the mouse while trying to click on an item, and the system interpreted that as a drag intended to resize the start bar to a zero height. At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.
You still see a small bar even with "zero" height.
Which was of absolutely zero use to them now as it remains today; they don't understand what happened.