Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

technicallychallenged.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 369 posts

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#51

Post by null_object »

timomax2 wrote: post #35
Daedren wrote: post #28

3D Touch was a big UX problem, there was never a way to show the user that you could do it and where you could. Apple has a problem with discoverability in quite a lot of features. There's many small little things in iOS that users don't know about and likely will never find out about, perhaps because they want to keep the UI clean.

Why do they refuse to give you a manual? Why are there no instructions. Drives me crazy.

> Why do they refuse to give you a manual? Why are there no instructions.

There’s a whole Apple app - Tips - included with every iOS device, dedicated specifically to these small features.

It’s updated by Apple with new tips and tricks regularly, and you can choose to be notified each time a new ‘episode’ is released.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#52

Post by canarypilot »

timomax2 wrote: post #35
Daedren wrote: post #28

3D Touch was a big UX problem, there was never a way to show the user that you could do it and where you could. Apple has a problem with discoverability in quite a lot of features. There's many small little things in iOS that users don't know about and likely will never find out about, perhaps because they want to keep the UI clean.

Why do they refuse to give you a manual? Why are there no instructions. Drives me crazy.

There is a large user manual available in “Books” ; https://books.apple.com/gb/book/iphone-user-guide/id15159955...

I imagine most iPhone users don’t know it is there!

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#53

Post by thih9 »

dash2 wrote: post #44

It was a feature with 1% of users who knew about it and who were its passionate defenders. This is exactly the sort of feature you should RUTHLESSLY kill off. If you do not, the end state of your software is that it is a collection of features, all of them known to 1% of your users, all passionately defended. Kudos to Apple.

Long press is in many ways an inferior (slower, less precise, easier to fire accidentally), its benefit is better discoverability. Why not work on making 3D Touch more discoverable?

Sometimes the 1% of power users are right and not listening to them leads to bland and less useful products.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#54

Post by stefanfisk »

dan-robertson wrote: post #45
avnigo wrote: post #36

I had a feeling this was gonna be about 3D Touch just from seeing the title. It was definitely one of my favorite features, and Force Touch isn't a drop-in replacement. With 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard, you could apply pressure to start moving the caret (text cursor) around, but what was even more useful was being able to apply a little bit more pressure to start selecting text with incredible precision . With…

I don’t know what you mean by force touch. Wasn’t that just Apple’s name for the action of pressing harder on 3D Touch devices?

The screen was actually presssure sensitive with a fair amount of precision. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#55

Post by dimman »

As someone who used this feature every single day, for every single text input on the phone: I 100% agree.

The replacement method works, but it is indeed subpar. It annoys me that my 3 generation newer phone is a downgrade in this regard, but I can live with it.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#56

Post by dan-robertson »

nottorp wrote: post #29

I'm glad you understood how to activate 3d touch as opposed to normal touch and long touch. I've had this iphone XS since it was a new model and I still haven't figured it out. This trackpad mode sounds interesting though, I'll try it :)

I think the feature got more confusing as Apple started to phase it out. They dropped the feature where you could force-touch to select text (on e.g. a web page rather than typing) and press harder again to select eg sentences/paragraphs. They also made force touch and long press do the same thing in many cases. I think about the only place it works well is in the keyboard but sadly there are now a bunch of bugs there with replacements/corrections not interacting with the text suggestions properly (and they deleted the feature where pressing shift while replacing will capitalise/uppercase the suggested replacement)

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#57

Post by tomtom1337 »

vosper wrote: post #41
Twisell wrote: post #30

> But the ease of use and selection capability has been greatly reduced. You can still select text but it takes two hands (or fingers?) and I can’t seem to figure out how it delineates its boundaries so I end up never using it. Only now thanks to the OP I understand how to achieve this without 3D touch. Poor discoverability on this feature never ends.

Could you explain further how to do it? I still don't get it :( I always just double-tap a word to select it and then drag the selection tabs to expand to what I want. If there's another way I'm interested to hear it.

Seconded. I don't understand what they meant by two hands/fingers.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#58

Post by graftak »

wingerlang wrote: post #46
vosper wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain further how to do it? I still don't get it :( I always just double-tap a word to select it and then drag the selection tabs to expand to what I want. If there's another way I'm interested to hear it.

Hold spacebar to start the cursor. Use 2nd finger tap on the keyboard, the selection markers will show up. Now use the first finger again to move left/right to select stuff. First time trying it for me but it seems.. odd, maybe need to get used to it.

The thing that trips me is that I need my initial finger to move about, I instinctively moved my second finger to move the second (selection) cursor.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#59

Post by nobrains »

So Jesse's feature was moved, not removed (as he can still access the trackpad feature using a different mechanism), and he is complaining because his muscle memory keep using the previous method? I feel for him, but no company can design to cater to all users.

Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement

#60

Post by [deleted] »

dash2 wrote: post #44

It was a feature with 1% of users who knew about it and who were its passionate defenders. This is exactly the sort of feature you should RUTHLESSLY kill off. If you do not, the end state of your software is that it is a collection of features, all of them known to 1% of your users, all passionately defended. Kudos to Apple.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN