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

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

#291

Post by Izkata »

frankfrankfrank wrote: post #110
PinguTS wrote: post #33

Yeah, missing this 3D Touch. The input experience (or AI supported typing) is getting worse and worse for me on the iPhone. Especially, if your are using different languages in parallel. For me it is my mother tongue German and my most second language English and sometimes using Spanish. In an (for me) unpredictable way, there are words replaced to "correct" typos. But, independent of the used keyboard language, whic…

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…

> 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/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.

SwiftKey on Android (Microsoft) does the same thing to me on occasion. It is indeed very annoying.

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

#292

Post by lolsal »

aquanext wrote: post #284

I agree both about the keyboard feature and 3D Touch in general. Just because some people can't figure out how to use right-click or force touch, doesn't mean it shouldn't be there for the people who can figure it out. I feel like it shouldn't have been removed and that the experience of editing text is objectively worse now than it used be. I used that keyboard feature the exact same way all the time.

> I agree both about the keyboard feature and 3D Touch in general. Just because some people can't figure out how to use right-click or force touch, doesn't mean it shouldn't be there for the people who can figure it out. I feel like it shouldn't have been removed and that the experience of editing text is objectively worse now than it used be. I used that keyboard feature the exact same way all the time.

As a developer, it'd be nice if I didn't have to support a minority. I appreciate that iOS streamlines the experience that I have to develop for.

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

#293

Post by jacobsenscott »

Long touch/force touch etc are all terrible for anyone who has lost fine motor control in their hands. I guess because the people who design these interface are all young and dexterous they don't realize a single tap can take over a second, and modulating the amount of pressure on the screen can be impossible.

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

#294

Post by Dylan16807 »

mrtksn wrote: post #96
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…

> However, as much as I miss it every time I fail to accurately select text on iOS, I don't mourn its loss Yes, it's slightly worse now but for a greater cause and the greater cause, IMHO, is the unified interaction model on mobile devices. If not all devices and apps are using it there's no reason to having it. In the Android world there are tons of exotic stuff, novel ideas and even "standards" that go nowhere unle…

> There is a magic in general availability. I think, if all Apple devices had it, it could have been possible to rely on its existence and build the UI with that assumption in mind. With just some devices having it, you need to have few versions of the UI to handle each case.

The way you get there is by putting it into everything for several years.

Cutting it after three is the opposite of working for that greater cause.

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

#295

Post by uxamanda »

This explains so much. I didn't realize this feature was removed, and I just assumed that I had somehow changed my settings to add a delay. For how I used it, long press still works pretty well, but now you have to "trust" that it is working during the delay.

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

#296

Post by jacobsenscott »

idiotsecant wrote: post #281
NikolaNovak wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure there is such a thing as an 'intuitive' interface beyond those where the physical action of the control is visible and obvious (turning the wheel rotates the gear that raises the gate type interface) I think just about everything else requires context, which is just a fancy way of saying that someone taught them how it worked at some point or they played with it long enough to guess their way to enough b…

Yes, but you can reduce the number of gestures required to use an interface. It wasn't that long ago when the only required gesture was tap, and it was quite easy for novices to figure it all out from there.

But then they added long press, so now one icon does two or more things depending on how long your finger is touching it.

Then they decided some things don't do anything at all if you tap them, only if you long press them.

Then they decided it should matter how hard you long press.

Then they decided you should memorize which quadrant of the screen you need to swipe to do something.

"intuitive" is a spectrum, and we are steadily moving to the less intuitive side. I think just giving users a bash prompt and a cheat sheet might be more intuitive at this point.

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

#297

Post by SllX »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #289
SllX wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tips is underrated. I think back then people just didn’t want a thick manual (also available in the Apple Books store) just to get value out of their phones, but Tips fills the need of providing some guidance as changes occur.

What is Tips?

It is an App installed on current iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. It just outlines features in the products, e.g. new iOS 15 features, “Essentials”, What’s new in watchOS 8, “Health”, “Beyond Basics”, “AirPods Max”, “AirPods”. I think various sections show up depending on what you buy or add to your Apple ID, and usually I’m able to learn a few things a year from it that I missed in the announcements or didn’t see covered elsewhere.

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

#298

Post by giobox »

xt00 wrote: post #209

Maybe 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 did sort of like the press slightly to move the text carat, but my biggest complaint is the level of pressure needed to activate never felt really consistent to me - there is a sort of range of pressures it worked across, I could never get reliable muscle memory for activating it with 100% success rate. I think people arguing this was intuitive are extremely misguided; it has almost zero discoverability unless you read about it or are shown.

I always assumed the bigger issue is that because this is strain based, extrapolating the feature to an iPad sized screen was possibly too challenging without resorting to something like an array of strain gauges to measure across the display. IIRC, no iPad ever got this feature. Given how it worked on an iPhone sized display, I can imagine challenge increases with screen size of measuring this accurately.

One also has to imagine that when Apple reviewed their usage metrics, was this feature even worth the cost to ship?

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

#299

Post by [deleted] »

kube-system wrote: post #262
NikolaNovak wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I bought the iPhone SE partly because I find the swipes from the bottom confusing to use too.

[deleted]

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

#300

Post by avhon1 »

kaba0 wrote: post #276
NikolaNovak wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Was definitely a feature on Blackberry's BB10 OS
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