531–540 of 571 posts
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Can't get that working in my android
It's in the Gboard settings under "Glide typing": "Enable gesture cursor control". There's also "Enable gesture delete".
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Was it ever announced? How are new users supposed to figure anything out? My C=64 came with a thick reference manual, with circuit schematics in the back. Every computer I've bought since then has had a smaller manual. I think my smartphone came with a small pamphlet with a couple screenshots. It seems you're supposed to learn how to use electronics these days by having people say "oh, don't you know?"
I mean, ideally electronics are designed so that it’s impossible not to understand them if you’ve been raised in a more or less progressive civilization. It’s just that often they are not, and both good and bad design comes without a decent manual.
It feels to me like it happened around the time of the first iPad. That was such a usable device (and OS X was just about at its peak of perfection at the time) - I remember just opening the box, turning it on, and everything being intuitive. I’m 99% certain scroll bars were still present then, for example.
I don’t think we ever really made the transition from paper manuals to online help very well. Some apps need additional help, and some even make it available, but I rarely see people-in-need actually making use of it. Heck, they rarely even consider googling for help (the issue in the article can be worked around, at least, with a google search). At least with a physical manual, you knew how much help was available/necessary for a given app - that’s just not the case with 'software help' or help online.
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Same here. I thought IOS was cool in 2007 when most people first got it, but then the constant forced-upgrades and forced-updates of the phone where it would randomly reboot the phone while sitting idle on your desk and where you would randomly lose functionality -- this was happening in 2007 -- made me really want to switch to something different. I always felt like Steve Jobs was in my pocket and I couldnt control…
So you went to a platform that on 99% of devices barely offers any OS updates?
Classic car comparison: imagine every time you took your car in for a service, the mechanics not only fix any problems, fine-tune the workings, and give it a clean, but they also 'improve' the controls. Your automatic becomes a manual, you gain acceleration but lose top speed, and your indicators switch with your wipers. It would be an absolute nightmare, up with which no one would put!
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Apple design often prioritizes "slick, stylish and minimal" over straightforward, obvious and pragmatic utility. It's definitely gotten worse as demonstrated with the iPhone X, but they've always had things like hidden gestures and timed presses for basic functionality. Android designers aren't doing much better though.
I remember "right clicking" with a long press back on Windows CE and Windows XP Tablets. If you had experienced this era of mobile devices, it is natural. How to delete an app? Right click on the icon, delete. Kind of the same action on iOS as on Windows 95.
1. Hold down (long press? 3D Touch? I’ve never quite understood the difference) on the icon until a context menu appears. This is analogous to right-click.
2. Select “Rearrange Apps” from the menu - you need to know/guess that deleting is a sub-action of rearranging.
3. Click the familiar close icon that now appears.
Step 2. is the new one, and it introduces quite a lot of friction.
On the other side of the analogy, I think there was an easier (more discoverable) alternative to the right-click in win95 - certainly OSX - which was to drag the application to the recycle bin / trashcan.
I've always considered this a tradeoff, but I also get the feeling that some people did not even consider that the old designs had an actual reason in usability (for boxes, the second big reason is preattentive recognition in the human brain).
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As a heavy vim user, I can’t live without escape key. One Of the fast way to alienate an entire userbase. I know people sometimes map cap lock but my brain is not conditioned to bimodal action and I don’t want to be tied to a certain specific keyboard layout, not to mention the pain to overwrite muscle memory.
So the escape key is there on the Touchbar. It is always the same size. It never moves. It is always there. And because the keyboard is already pretty thin the difference in feedback isn't that significant.
I need to use a MacBook Pro for work. Discovering that there is an option to make scrollbars always visible when there is scrolling to be done was, by a significant margin, the best QOL improvement I have discovered. This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrollin…
My favorite was an issue which plagued Chrome for a while. When you need a scrollbar to jump down a very long page: 1) wiggle the page with two fingers to make the scrollbar appear, 2) switch from two fingers to one finger and grab the scrollbar handle, 3) just kidding, they automatically hid the scrollbar before you had time to grab the handle. edit: the issue is still there :(
"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…
Now you can tap anywhere to more the cursor there. Before you had to do some sort of cursor grab I think.
You say "under your finger" but obviously you'd move your finger down or up so you can see where the cursor is going? There's no swiping gesture needed anywhere, not sure what's that about?
I do remember it being very annoying to move the cursor before. Now it seems much easier. I'm happy, that's one data point I guess. And yeah, I'm getting older. My father, now 70-something, says he likes it, too.
"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…
To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks): Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least: 1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor. 2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the hig…
4. Deep press anywhere on the keyboard to switch to cursor moving mode.
On my iPhone X, I used this all the time. With the iPhone 11, there is no substitute: you cannot long press on anything but the space bar to move the cursor. Also, a deep press was quicker to activate, a long press takes a fraction of a second longer. It's a bit annoying.
This is only for things like keyboard. Even the OS won't understand that somone wants to save a photo and isn't able to discover the save button.