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"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

• ethanjiang4 7y ago
  I was just trying to select all before giving up and manually moving the edges of the selection bar. Eventually I found out you can only select all when you have nothing selected and hold the cursor and release. And I'm 20...
• EugeneOZ 7y ago
  Hold finger over the "space" button - you'll switch whole keyboard into the mode where you can move cursor by moving your finger. "Select all" disappears for 36 y.o. too, and I have no idea why and how to fix it.
  • arnado 7y ago
    The best I can find is while holding the space button, use another finger to "click" then drag the space to select.
  • acqq 7y ago
    I also can't find Select all for the text shown in the browser, when the cursor is anyway not visible before. Btw (not iOS 13 specific) when I select the word in browser the hovering menu has more options behind a minuscule right arrow that I almost always manage to touch outside, making the menu disappear. And I need the "second part" often. Sad.
• corey_moncure 7y ago
  Designers gotta design, I guess. How to justify that $300,000 annual compensation when there's no work left to do?
  • nkrisc 7y ago
    As evidenced by all the posters here who didn't know about features, there's plenty of work left to do.
    • mannykannot 7y ago
      Indeed there is, but not in the area of adding more cryptic, convention-breaking features offering little improvement in the user's experience, even when they do not actually degrade it.
  • jdhn 7y ago
    As a designer who makes nowhere near $300k, please tell me where these jobs are that pay that much and let you break things.
    • EpicEng 7y ago
      Apple, it would seem.
• cinbun8 7y ago
  For #1 - I feel the same way. I now use this technique instead -> https://mashable.com/article/ios-12-precise-text-selection-keyboard/ https://mashable.com/article/ios-12-precise-text-selection-k... Interestingly I did not know about it and only found out whilst complaining to a friend. Friend pointed me to this selection alternative, but it was not obvious.
  • edraferi 7y ago
    That's a perfect example of UI discoverability fails. The feature is super useful and perfectly hidden. Will use this all the time now, thanks!
  • Zelphyr 7y ago
    Prior to iOS 13 I used this all the time to great success but now it seems like whenever I use it, it tries to select all the text beneath wherever I move the cursor instead of simply moving the cursor to where I want it.
  • senectus1 7y ago
    Rofl, just yesterday I was teasing a ex apple employee about how I can do that very same trick in Android but apple can't do it unless you install the Google keyboard.... Even HE didn't know this trick was in the default some keyboard! Can't wait to show him on Monday... Lol
    • StavrosK 7y ago
      Wait, how do you do that on Android? Do you mean with Gboard?
      • lisnake 7y ago
        Yeah, it actually does work. Didn't know about it either til now. The trick is to swipe from space button in GBoard, then selection cursor moves. If I just hold my finger on spacebar it triggers language selection, so it's a bit tricky
• edraferi 7y ago
  > I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before. This 1000%. Working with text on iOS is such a pain now.
  • sswezey 7y ago
    Hold on the space bar. They removed force touch on the whole keyboard, but this is an okay alternative. I find not having to hold my finger over what I'm selecting much easier to use.
    • bonestamp2 7y ago
      They should let us re-enable holding anywhere on the keyboard. I used to always hold the middle of the keyboard, giving me lots of room to move in any direction. Now that we have to hold the spacebar, we have very limited room to move down. English doesn't use any special characters that requires me to hold down any letter on the keyboard, so I should be able to re-enable long touch on the whole keyboard for moving the cursor. Or make it like iPad, where two fingers will move the cursor from anywhere on the keyboard and without any hold.
• hellofunk 7y ago
  Holy Christ, thank you so much for this: > I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before. I had no idea you could move the cursor this way! Until I read your comment!
  • FPGAhacker 7y ago
    My wife had the same problem. I knew how to do it because the tips app showed me after I upgraded. Not sure if it didn’t show the same thing to everyone. I think it works fine although I still generally prefer the haptic/long touch spacebar method. I always had trouble with selection vs placing the cursor, and it irritated me to no end. The long touch spacebar works great though and I still prefer it. If you aren’t familiar with the long touch spacebar, give it a try. It temporarily changes the keyboard to a touchpad for moving the cursor. It’s great.
• deegles 7y ago
  My cynical view is that this is just more promotion-driven development for all those UX designers. The optimistic view is that this is necessary to integrate new features. The reality is probably somewhere in between.
• Zelphyr 7y ago
  "It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before." To my mind this is becoming a BIG problem in tech and I'm really saddened to see Apple falling for it. I guess too many people in a position to change things that feel like they need to justify their positions. Either way, it needs to stop. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
  • soup10 7y ago
    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.
    • rescbr 7y ago
      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.
      • oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
        I just tried this on iPadOS. It’s not quite as simple as you suggest; the steps are: 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.
    • K0SM0S 7y ago
      Agreed, on both accounts. I'd like to interject that 15-10 years ago, Apple was stellar at this, I only noticed their general UX/UI out-of-this-world-excellence slipping down (slightly, still among the best-in-class, just not the unrivaled best) as of 2014 or so for the very first "little things", and by 2016-17 it had become a true UX issue for me. I frequently support my mother for all digital things, and everytime I need to fix something on her iPad (or formerly her iMac, since then I put her on Windows), I too often spend several frustrating hours with a 50/50 chance of success. Android for my SO is the same, my god, it's a misery of UX, the absence of thought into human cognitive flow reminds me of old Windows sometimes. To be fair I think we're seeing one downside of an agile ecosystem where things are much less holistic, much more disjointed than with previous waterfall, major version box paradigm. It'll take time before we collectively learn how to address these issues under the (relatively) new DevOps model. Things are moving fast, faster than ever; UX requires time. There's a fundamental tension here, it's not an easy problem.
• wizzard 7y ago
  Re: 1), you also have to place the cursor before you can grab it and move it. You used to be able to place it precisely in one step using a long press to get the the magnifying glass, but now that selects the word under your finger instead. If there’s no cursor yet, you have to 1) tap somewhere to get a cursor to appear, 2) drag it where you want it. Super annoying to change such a basic, useful functionality.
• notyourday 7y ago
  > It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before. Companies hire too many designers, developers, project manager and product managers which means they must do something to occupy their time. Bug fixing is boring. Writing something new is sexy. Sexy > boring so you get a "new and improved" version.
• cjsawyer 7y ago
  I miss the cursor magnifying glass widget and will miss using 3D touch to open the cursor when my iphone 8 eventually dies. Disappointing. That used to be one of the major things separating iOS from Android. Holding the spacebar feels nowhere as smooth.
  • hackmiester 7y ago
    My suggestion: get a used 10S when your 8 dies.
  • andrewla 7y ago
    I found the 3D touch on the keyboard to be flakey compared to the spacebar -- if you moved your finger before 3D touch activated, then it lost context and wouldn't activate 3D touch, and then you'd have to delete the stupid 'j' that just got dropped in your email.
• hackmiester 7y ago
  I disabled the swipe keyboard and now selecting text works like I expect it to again.
• artursapek 7y ago
  Cursor thing has also made me sad. It's confusing and hard now.
• taneq 7y ago
  I've gone the opposite direction (or just skipped ahead into second childhood?) - if I can't see the option I want I spend a minute or so monkey-slapping the screen in random directions with random numbers of fingers, because apparently this is what qualifies these days as "discoverable". (A simple example I discovered before I devolved to this level - when looking at messages on an iphone, swipe and hold left to see the sent times. Did you know that? If so HOW DID YOU KNOW?)
  • claytron5000 7y ago
    I have been looking for that for so long!
  • FPGAhacker 7y ago
    I knew because it was in the tips app, that shows how to do new stuff with new releases. I got a notification from the tips app after I upgraded, offering to show me what’s new. Somehow this doesn’t seem to work for everyone. Not sure if people just ignore the tips app notifications or if they don’t get them for some reason. It’s a normal app you can run any time. I just looked and the cursor movement as well as peeking at the times of messages are both in there and demonstrated.
    • billfruit 7y ago
      Yes, but it doesn't answer why these things had to change and why it is better now.
      • FPGAhacker 7y ago
        For me I was always struggled to get the phone to do what I wanted. Either selecting or moving the cursor. It works better for me now. You drag to select, tap to place a cursor, or “pick up” the cursor for more precise placement. i still use the long touch on the spacebar though out of habit. And it’s where my fingers are naturally most of the time when I’m doing stuff with text. The gestures became more single purpose. I get it that we like the way things work and when they get changed it’s annoying. But unless you think the phone has reached the perfect interface with no room for improvement, you should continue to expect things to change. If you do think it’s perfect, well, good for you. Stop upgrading, and you will at least have a few years of stability.
• andrewla 7y ago
  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 highlighted bar that represents where you want to place the cursor will move around on the last line of the text. If there are non-text elements (images, etc.) in the block, then this will be unpredictable in where the cursor ends up. Also your finger blocks the text and there's no more magnifying glass. 3. Single tap in the text to place the cursor -- but if you tap on a misspelled word, it will go into "suggest replacements" mode. Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph. To select all, you have to have a free cursor (nothing selected) and tap on the cursor itself. To avoid accidentally double-tapping (and thus selecting a word instead of bringing up the context menu) you have to make sure that you wait a beat before tapping again. To paste (most to least reliable): 1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor. 2. Enter the select all menu above and tap on the cursor (same caveats) and one of the options will be paste. But very often the second tap will either activate a double-tap (and thus select a word) or move the cursor a little bit, making a precise paste difficult.
  • taneq 7y ago
    Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-pinch".)
    • reaperducer 7y ago
      It was in the WWDC keynote speech. The rest of the world else can "discover" it the next time a bug crawls on their screen.
      • Liquix 7y ago
        Herein lies the problem: it doesn't matter how much 'better' or 'smoother' or 'consistent' the change is - or is not, in this case. It's a gross oversight to never inform end users of the change in any way. How many iPhone users attentively watch WWDC or read each update's (often incomplete) release notes? 1%? 3%? 5% tops? Why roll out a feature when 95% of your users will need to discover it through trial and error? A relatively juvenile UX mistake for such a mature company, but seems to be their MO these days...
• fortran77 7y ago
  There used to be a little magnifier, too, when I was moving the cursor around. I don't see it anymore, just the "caret" moves. I don't know if it's because I switched to the bigger size, or did they just drop that feature when moving the cursor. At age 56, it's hard for me to see where the cursor/insertion point is, especially because it's blocked by my finger when I try to move it.
  • WorldMaker 7y ago
    They dropped the magnifier between iOS 12 and 13. That's been bugging me quite a bit too as I was very used to using that to make cursor movement easier. You can compensate a bit by grabbing the cursor from a lower spot in the I-bar, to the point where you can basically grab the cursor from entirely underneath (ie, touch the cursor as if it was a line below where it actually is), but discovering that was a lot of trial and effort on my part, and it's still not quite so useful as the magnifier was.
• FPGAhacker 7y ago
  Be sure to check out the tips app. It has stuff like this in it. The long touch spacebar method still works great for cursor movement and it’s my preferred way. Also, that’s weird about the select all. Still works for me, but I can’t be sure the behavior didn’t change.
  • ninkendo 7y ago
    One reason I like to force touch the keyboard rather than using spacebar is that, when you force touch, you can force touch again with the cursor active, and it will select an entire word. Dragging on keyboard now expands the selection a word at a time. Force touch again (while keeping your thumb on the screen) and it selects a whole paragraph. One more force touch and it switches back to a plain cursor. It doesn’t seem possible to do this using the long-touch spacebar approach.
• reaperducer 7y ago
  It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before. I fired up my old launch day iPhone a few weeks ago. The phone works great, though some of the apps no longer have services to connect to (Weather, for example). What struck me is how intuitive iOS 3 was to use. Everything seemed more (to use the parlance of our times) "discoverable." Maybe part of it was just remembering how things work, but it seemed like a much better experience than iOS 13. Also, as much as people on HN enjoy bashing skeuomorphism, the fact is that it works, it's intuitive, and is 9,385% more user-friendly than a bunch of identical Playskool-colored squares with no demonstrable function.
  • andrewla 7y ago
    Even little things -- the slider to unlock on the main screen. Incredibly obvious even after a minute of playing with it (my toddler at the time had no difficulty with the concept, despite not being able to read). And the single button model was incredible as well -- "stuck somewhere? Press the button. Want to switch apps? Press the button." It was guaranteed that the button was not controlled by whatever app you were in; now all the gestures and sliding stuff means that half the time I'm stuck doing some in-app operation when I really want to do a "phone" operation. And I'm on an iPhone that still has the button! I dread the moment that I'm going to have to give it up.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    Skeuomorphism and pixel perfect design where the interface was tightly tied to the screen resolution doesn’t work when you have multiple screen sizes. Back then developers only had to worry about the 320x480 iPhone screen and the 1024x768 iPad resolution.
• hinkley 7y ago
  One of the hazards of working in this space is that as you develop sympathy for others, trying to “think like a normal user” you eventually succeed. Your own thinking starts to shift and pretty soon you suffer from the same class of problems. I overheard several people talking about this when I first started thinking about UX and sure enough within a couple years I was making some of the same sorts of “mistakes”.
  • mntmoss 7y ago
    Having fallen into that thinking, at some point a few years back I realized that I was selling myself short by thinking that I should behave "like a normal user". And now I combat it with a secondary mindset of training some actions into muscle memory, as if I were learning martial arts techniques. With a lot of hardware-only workflows, muscle memory training happens by default, which also means that they "get away with" really poor UX ideas at times. With software you can have some mixture of defaults/presets and technique. It's not worthwhile to try to customize all of it(good defaults are precious, early-binding forms are valuable) and technique usually suffices for covering the remainder. But technique is less discoverable than a settings menu, as well, and swipe-and-tap techniques are extremely so since they operate on many dimensions. Compare the new iOS gestures to chorded keystrokes - once you know that chording exists, you can learn any new one given some time.
• jiofih 7y ago
  Im running iOS 13 and those features are all still here. Are you sure you haven’t changed some kind of accessibility setting?
• maire 7y ago
  Yep - the biggest difference between older and younger people in a usability study is that older people remember things and younger people discover things. As much as I like iOS - it favors discovering over seeing and remembering.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  In fairness, iOS these days is wildly unintuitive, and I'm not yet thirty. It's positively littered with hidden gestures and features that you'd never discover during normal usage. Many of them are really slick once you learn about them! But discoverability is worse not only compared to previous Apple software, but even to other systems like Android. And from what I've read, iPadOS is even worse.
  • unlinked_dll 7y ago
    I switched from iOS to Android in the iPhone 4 days, and switched back last month. The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything. Part of this is the obsession over gestures in place of buttons, the size of the screens and distance of the swipes also makes it difficult to use with one hand (I can't use my thumb to unlock the device), apps are completely unintuitive, and there seems to be an obsession with presenting new data at you rather than keeping the same pathways to find previous data giving me a sense of always being lost in every app. The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app. I'm going to stick with Apple due to privacy concerns for the time being, but I'm really upset with my purchase.
    • _bxg1 7y ago
      I've gotten to where I really enjoy using it (for the most part: the notifications list stands out as feeling terrible compared to Android), but only after, like, reading guides on the internet. Which is the kind of thing Apple products have traditionally prided themselves on not requiring.
      • unlinked_dll 7y ago
        re: notifications Is there a way to dismiss them with a single gesture like on Android? I haven't figured that part out, it's weird since swiping it right opens it, but so does tapping it, and swiping left opens a Manage | View | Clear All (x) menu. It's so hard to use this thing with one hand...
• notadoc 7y ago
  I blame the flat design trend, it is not intuitive.
• Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  This particular iOS thing has also been annoying me since I upgraded to iOS 13 (which for the record, has otherwise been very positive for me). I really wish they had done some kind of "Here's what is new" tutorial. Rearranging icons in folders is still a clusterf--k though - am I the only one that ends up fighting sometimes just to a) get the icon into the folder I want and b) actually keep it there without accidentally scrolling the screen, accidentally dragging it out of the edge of the folder because I'm trying to page it to a particular place? What I'm noticing with iOS in particular is that lots of 'hidden' functionality is creeping in. This is something I remember Microsoft getting criticism for with Windows 8 -- non-obvious gestures like swiping from the edge of the screen to bring something up. Apple seems to have wandered down that same road.
  • closetohome 7y ago
    Yeah, rearranging icons has always been inexplicably fiddly, but they somehow managed to actually make it worse in iOS 13. It used to be possible to explain most of the mechanisms and concepts in iOS with about a ten minute tutorial. Now it feels like every time I see my parents I have to explain some new concept or procedure to them.
  • jxdxbx 7y ago
    It is easier if you use two fingers--one to "pick up" the icon or icon you want to move (you can grab a whole stack of them) and the other to navigate to where you want to be.
  • egypturnash 7y ago
    god yes I fucking hate trying to rearrange my icons oh look I accidentally moved this icon between two others and it reflowed everything and the last icon in THIS screen is the first on on the NEXT screen and this cascaded to the next few as well, now I get to move them all back, joy! It's especially fun when you are trying to put an icon into a folder in the last slot in a screen and it slips to the next page instead. JOY. UNMTIGATED JOY AND DELIGHT. And I still hate how you can't have any organization for your icons beyond "all of them crammed up towards the top left of the screen". I still miss that from Android and I still miss that from the days when there was a usable jailbreak.
• rolltiide 7y ago
  ITT: “The A/B test and creepy stalker analytics told us that everyone was doing other things more often so lets not show these less often tapped features”
• DenisM 7y ago
  >I cannot figure out why things have to change How many promotions in your life did you get by not changing things? Or by doing the exact same thing as the guys before you did?
• TuringNYC 7y ago
  For me and the whole family, sharing via WhatsApp has gone from being the first option to being hidden under a sub-menu. Naturally my mom has stopped sharing photos on WhatsApp since the iOS upgrade. Certainly there is local historical telemetry data so removing one of the most-used options during an upgrade seems careless.
  • egypturnash 7y ago
    Deep at the bottom of that submenu is a place where she can change the order of what's shown in the share menus, but the likelyhood of her ever finding this is of course nil.
• ir77 7y ago
  i still can't figure out how to do screen splits on iPad, since it was introduced in OS 11? i watched videos on it, etc, and still couldn't get it to work. the only way i got it to work is to split screens for an app that's on my dock, which itself is very limited. i ended up giving the ipad to my 5 year old as his toy and the other day it died completely. i guess i will never know.
• Aeolun 7y ago
  I don’t think the changes to selection and sharing in this update had any point. Previously when I got an update I would think ‘oh, that tiny annoyance is finally gone!’, but now I just thought ‘why in fucks name did they find it necessary to change this’.
• toddmorey 7y ago
  I agree it was better before. One nice tip, though, is that you can press and hold the spacebar to turn the keyboard area into a trackpad of sorts to move the cursor. That’s totally undiscoverable but works well.
• tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  one of the more challenging experiences in my adult life was my dad screaming about how upset he was that windows had forced some upgrade, and as a result (?) he'd lost genealogy work he'd been doing for years (eventually he found it). he was furious, and crying, and shouting... "i don't want any f* upgrades! just leave my f* computer alone!! i never asked for any of this, i just want to do my work" i dont' spend a lot of time at the house any more ... and i didn't know what to tell him, so i hugged him. later i brought up linux (again) and i think we'll get to that place soon, so that he has a chance to learn before age sets in too much further.
• azdv 7y ago
  Change for the sake of change is the reason why I quit using Windows at 2005. My Linux interface is pretty much unchanged for the past 14 years (and any incremental change was willingly adopted).
• metafunctor 7y ago
  I'm not really following the complaint here. I've been on iOS 13 for a few weeks, but honestly I don't recall that much of a change. 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.