Live data from Hacker News

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

technicallychallenged.substack.com

191–200 of 369 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who only occasionally has to use macOS and iOS for work. The gestures and key combos required to do even the most basic things are insane.. and there is (almost) zero discoverability or affordances for them. On iOS gestures with multiple fingers, on macOS keyboard shortcuts with 3 or 4 keys. I also dont often use Linux, but I could try some new distro with a completely different windows manager I have neve…

> there is zero discoverability The shortcuts associated with menu items are shown in the menu item. I realize that there other discovery problems with keyboard shortcuts (on all platforms) but there is non-zero discoverability for "the most basic things" on Mac OS. Gesture discoverability is much closer to zero, IMHO.

Yeah fair enough, I was being hyperbolic, edited my comment to be more accurate.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Force Touch would have been usable for me if I could just disable its vibration without having to disable it on the whole phone, I don't understand why they don't add special settings to do things like this. I hate that anytime I want to move the cursor and long press the space bar my phone has to vibrate.

I'm curious, how did the haptic feedback that indicates that you've enabled the feature make it unusable? FWIW its replacement is the same in that respect.

I hate notifications and talking on the phone, and after years I developed a pavlov reaction to it whenever my phone vibrates or makes a sound so I keep that at a minimum for important notifications, I used to love the samsung notification led but the iphone doesn't have that, so having a haptic feedback whenever I want to move the cursor (which is lots of times) makes me cringe.

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

#193
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will probably soon add an old 3D Touch iphone to my small Human Machine Interface hall of fame along with the old click wheel iPod Classic. They probably removed it because nobody was using it and they couldn't figure out how to teach people, while spending extra $ to add it into phones.

As if they put any effort whatsoever into teaching or UI discoverability these days. If there was a tutorial app I would have used it, but I have repeatedly had to use Google to find unrelated blog sites describing how to accomplish things in the iOS interface. Cynically, it feels like they think everyone should already "just know" how the various gestures work, which is obnoxious and user hostile.

One way to do discoverability here is to make a suggestion if you notice the user hoping around between texts during typing.

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

#194
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 was wondering how and why text selection seemed to have gotten much worse. Now I know

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

#195
post #122
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 will probably soon add an old 3D Touch iphone to my small Human Machine Interface hall of fame along with the old click wheel iPod Classic. They probably removed it because nobody was using it and they couldn't figure out how to teach people, while spending extra $ to add it into phones.

These features really need games added, where the only real requirement to play is learn the new feature.

Some say it's why minesweeper et al were added to Windows, so people could learn how to use the mouse.

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

#197

I have an extremely outdated version of iOS and I still have this feature lol

It hasn't been removed from newer versions of iOS (yet), it's just not supported by newer hardware. An iPhone XS or older with the most up-to-date iOS still has 3D touch.

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

#199
post #10

Every family member whose midrange phone I have to update due to EOL software or additional carrier bands somehow loses every feature they actually value and they rightfully complain it's a downgrade.

I know everyone’s sick of hearing about it, but they’ve permanently lost my interest in upgrading thanks to the aux jack removal. Some features are so important that across the board improvements elsewhere still don’t justify the loss.

Kind of like an escape key on a keyboard.

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

#200
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with the keyboard and predictive typing being a huge problem child that needs serious attention at this point. Some frustrations I have been dealing with: - The two word replacement pattern is immensely frustrating and leads to typos, e.g., where “AI” seems to think it knows better what I was trying to write and changes the previous correct word based on what it thinks I am trying to currently type/swip…

Another one - you can't use the swipe keyboard to type phrases apple thinks are "naughty", such as "white woman" or "kill myself". iOS will always change one of the two words, e.g. changing "white" to "while" or "kill" to "hill".

It's really fascinating -- on my phone (iOS 15.5), "white people" was correct to "white purple," "black people" was corrected to "blank people" (wtf Apple???), but "Asian people" went through just fine. I wonder if it has to do with something like specific ethnicity vs. broad categorisations used for bigotry. Dunno.
Post reply on HN