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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

#41

Post by vosper »

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.

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

#42

Post by tomduncalf »

3D Touch was a lovely feature but to be honest I’ve adapted to its replacements to the point where I hadn’t thought about it for months until reading this. I imagine the amount of engineering complexity on the hardware side for such a relatively niche feature just didn’t make sense, also the fact that it seemingly couldn’t scale to iPad sized screens. A shame, but probably a sensible move.

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

#43

Post by wruza »

My favorite keyboard feature:

            ^
    ctrl- ctrl->
            V
  shiftlock    cut cpy pst
               srch shr …
That’s all I need to edit/select text instead of these glamour gestures. Assuming ctrl-likes use \b word boundaries.

I’d also like to turn off input focus zooming in safari.

Related, I’d also like to jumps 5s in videos rather than 15s. Not very useful to rewatch 15s when you missed a word or a visual.

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

#44

Post by dash2 »

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.

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

#45

Post by dan-robertson »

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?

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

#46

Post by wingerlang »

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.

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.

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

#47

Post by jiehong »

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…

Oh wow, I never knew this existed.

It seems the selection can only grow and on both sides, which is the main problem.

If they showed the cursor with a different color than the selected text, and if they shrink and grow the selection as you move, I think it could be pretty nice: select the starting point of the selection, and select only what’s in between the original cursor and the moving one.

Alas it’s more like painting a selection at the moment, with an invisible brush.

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

#48

Post by wingerlang »

I actually had to go check the keyboard cursor thing, I have fully switched to using the long press on the spacebar. Works totally fine to me. I wonder if having the extra space below on the iPhone X (etc) helps to alleviate the issues on other phones, where there is less/no room to select downwards without hitting the actual phone bezel.

One thing that no one mentions for 3D touch is gaming. Being able to aim and just "click" with the same finger is really amazing. Makes FPS games on the phone feel way better.

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