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

technicallychallenged.substack.com

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

#81

Post by thom »

I’ve only ever used 3D Touch accidentally and been annoyed by it. I still make accidental long touches in all sorts of apps and they do weird things.

I do use the keyboard cursor thing but to be honest text entry on a touchscreen has never really been good for me. I don’t think I’ve ever typed a sentence correctly in 15 years of iPhones. Even with autocorrect I’m often having to go back. Selection, cut, paste are all terrible. Tap somewhere and hope it offers to select a word but sometimes it doesn’t. Try to copy some text on a web page oops it’s a link. Tap elsewhere and try to paste but sometimes it doesn’t. Try to extend a selection and get weird multiline behaviour I can’t explain. Maybe I have the world’s biggest thumbs but it’s constant aggro that you just end up internalising.

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

#82

Post by frankfrankfrank »

tomtom1337 wrote: post #57
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.

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

When you have activated the cursor move function by long-pressing the space bar, while still pressing the screen, tap another finger on the screen to move into selection mode.

The prior mention of defining the start and end points of the selection is a bit more tricky and may not even be an actual feature, which involves moving the cursor around in a kind of handoff between start and stop point. That’s trickier to describe because it fellas like it may just be a quirky behavior that can be manipulated.

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

#83

Post by grsmvg »

Nition wrote: post #70

Re text selection, what I find annoying is that that you can't just tap with your finger on the text itself to place the cursor in an exact location. You can tap to place the cursor, but it always snaps to the end of a word. Why? My favourite iPhone feature that was removed though was being able to fully turn off WiFi from the Control Center (last seen in iOS 10).

You can then ‘grab’ the cursor and move it. Or just use the hold spacebar trick two merge those two steps into a single action.

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

#84

Post by the-golden-one »

The only place 3D Touch remains active is on the flashlight button on the lock screen.

If you have a phone that supports 3D Touch, give it a try. You’ll find that simply long pressing on the button doesn’t work, you have to apply a certain degree of pressure before it responds.

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

#85

Post by nprateem »

And samsung have replaced their previously excellent, immediate touch sensor for some under-screen bullshit that takes a few seconds and doesn't work half the time. I mean, it's not like anyone unlocks their phone about a hundred times a day...

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

#86

Post by frankfrankfrank »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #32
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.

Same! I only just upgraded phones a couple weeks ago and the lack of 3D Touch was confounding when I made text errors! I didn’t know I could activate it with the spacebar but that works pretty well!

It took me forever to learn how to select text again. I feel like Apple really kind of damaged itself by hiding things, not telling anyone properly, and then removing things because no one was using it because they had no idea it was there. It’s such a typical asinine corporate/communist/top down/command structure problem. problem

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

#87

Post by Nition »

grsmvg wrote: post #83
Nition wrote: post #70

Re text selection, what I find annoying is that that you can't just tap with your finger on the text itself to place the cursor in an exact location. You can tap to place the cursor, but it always snaps to the end of a word. Why? My favourite iPhone feature that was removed though was being able to fully turn off WiFi from the Control Center (last seen in iOS 10).

You can then ‘grab’ the cursor and move it. Or just use the hold spacebar trick two merge those two steps into a single action.

Yeah, I just find it a bit strange that you can't just tap once for exact placement. I know from previous non-iOS phones that it's not that hard to get it in the right spot.

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

#88

Post by ninedays »

There clearly was a discoverability issue with 3D Touch. When you knew which app supported the feature, it was awesome but there was no way of knowing in advance if there was support for it before using it. Long pressing an icon or anything just to see that nothing happens was just frustrating. Long term effect was that users probably felt this wasn't reliable/supported enough to use the feature at all or at least not in the scale Apple wanted.

edit : fixed typos

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

#89

Post by frankfrankfrank »

needle0 wrote: post #74

The replacement of “force touch on keyboard to move cursor” is “long-touch on space bar to move cursor”. This works fine for western languages where the key to input a space is large and centered, but some keyboards like the Japanese flick input keyboard look more like phone numpads where the middle of the keyboard is taken by the “number keys” (each key represents a consonant). The space key is located on the right…

It’s definitely a solvable problem.

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

#90

Post by WelcomeShorty »

hericium wrote: post #76

I didn't even knew that my favorite iPhone feature was listening to the music I want until Apple introduced forced shuffling, playing titles alphabetically and started disturbing built-in music player UX in order to push their online offering. It's a typical Cook's Apple experience to listen to 10 tracks from different albums, all called "Outro", after album chosen by me finishes playing with a track called "Outro" a…

For me the complete opposite: I LOVE the shuffling with their library.

Pick one song I shazamed and poof, I get to listen to "random" "identical" songs for hours. A gem.

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