The thing I really miss is in apple maps on car play. Until a few months back you could press the big direction button to turn voice directions on and off, really easy to do while driving without looking at the screen. Now it's press in the right part of the screen, press a tiny button, press another tiny button
My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
271–280 of 369 posts
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#272iOS dev here who’s built apps using the force touch feature, in my opinion it never got much traction with developers because the standard ui toolkit elements were never extended to make use of pressure touch. So instead of being able to create UIs by connecting storyboard outlets to function calls like probably 95% of iOS app UI development, a dev would have to drop down to and override the lower level calls to touchesBegan, touchesMoved and touchesEnded functions that govern the phases of a touch where the force pressure information was available, a much more involved and tricky coding and debbugging experience.
But if you were willing to do that, whole new interface possibilities open up because you have an entirely new dimension to work with! I made a music instrument app where position on screen controls note/frequency and pressure controls amplitude and it works very smoothly[0]. But all the established paradigms that devs and users know revolve around 2D, so to take advantage of the force touch you have to both invent a new paradigm and teach it to users, all while supporting devices without 3D touch or losing that share of the market. There weren’t enough takers or it didn’t happen fast enough so Apple decided it wasn’t worth keeping, which is understandable but also kinda tragic in my admitedly biased opinion.
[0] Xalophone digital musical instrument incorporating 3D Touch: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/xalophone/id1420669553
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#273"Why do users disable automatic updates?"
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#274I wonder if reliability was a factor in ending this feature. 3D touch malfunctions badly with a slightly swelling battery pressing against the lcd backplate inside the phone. Or a bend in the phone chassis. The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket. I saw malfunctioning 3d touch several times every week back when I was in phone repair. Especially with carrier insurance refurbs, where t…
> The 6s case was bent for every person who carried it in their back pocket Baloney - it was the 6 Plus, not the 6S, and it was far more rare than twitter would have had you believe.
You're probably thinking of the bend gate controversy, where the bend in the case in the plus model was severe enough to damage the logic board. That, also, was not rare. We saw it constantly in the shop. Nearly every iphone 6, 6s or 6p that entered the shop had a bent case to some degree.
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#275> What really blew my mind was that if you pushed harder anywhere on the keypad it would go into trackpad mode and you could move the cursor in the text you were typing and quickly edit, delete, and fix things.
One thing that annoyed me quite much when I received my6S Plus was that fixing typos felt clunky (couldn't move the cursor not that easy as before).
If I just would have known that 2 years earlier, I would still have a lot more colorized hair... I love that feature!
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#276Maybe I’m in the minority here but I really did not like the feature and many people I tried to explain the feature to were confused that it existed.. “no no don’t tap the screen, you need to PUSH on the screen to make it do the action”.. and I would get a look like “huh?? Push on the screen? Why what’s that gonna do..” people saying pushing hard on the screen is intuitive seemed to live in a different bubble of peop…
I kinda agree, but also... NOTHING about modern phones is "intuitive". Every time I have to introduce a modern phone to a 70yo+ family member, I come to that realization promptly. Swipe from bottom to switch programs? Swipe from top left and top right to get different (IMPORTANT!) panels? Why are three lines a "Menu"? But sometimes it's dots, or a gear icon, and they're never in the same place. On iPhone, there's no…
IOS’s swipe from the bottom (and left-right for basically alt-tab) is genius in my opinion. Not sure how true is it, but the designers of the then new iphone caught themselves multiple times trying to swipe gesture on their older, home-buttoned devices.
While I don’t believe a sufficiently complex UX could be totally intuitive (it can at most depend on existing knowledge of similar devices), it does extend the app as a physical rectangle idea very well, the animation strengthens the memory, and the movement becomes second-nature in no time.
(Also, credit where it’s due, I believe this feature was first introduced by Palm?)
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#277> I can’t push anywhere on the keyboard anymore to activate it. I now have to move all the way to the spacebar to activate it.
"All the way" is just moving the finger a couple of cm. The main difference is that 3d touch instantly activated the touchpad, now there is a small delay of 0.25s. Not a bad compromise if it means removing some hardware.
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#278I 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.
I believe it was removed in big part due to being a relatively big energy drain. With that in mind, I don’t believe it was a bad decision, even though I liked the feature as well. (Though probably with additional R&D on the topic, it could have been improved)
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#279Maybe I’m in the minority here but I really did not like the feature and many people I tried to explain the feature to were confused that it existed.. “no no don’t tap the screen, you need to PUSH on the screen to make it do the action”.. and I would get a look like “huh?? Push on the screen? Why what’s that gonna do..” people saying pushing hard on the screen is intuitive seemed to live in a different bubble of peop…
I kinda agree, but also... NOTHING about modern phones is "intuitive". Every time I have to introduce a modern phone to a 70yo+ family member, I come to that realization promptly. Swipe from bottom to switch programs? Swipe from top left and top right to get different (IMPORTANT!) panels? Why are three lines a "Menu"? But sometimes it's dots, or a gear icon, and they're never in the same place. On iPhone, there's no…
That's basically me using my husband's iPad or iPhone. So many different gestures, it's so confusing.
Re: My favorite iPhone feature was removed, long live its subpar replacement
#280What is this? I've been using iPhones since 4, and this is the first I'm hearing of this feature. I guess that's why they removed it.