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This comment makes no sense. Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and

This comment makes no sense. Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes. It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.

josteink 7y ago
> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestures. Pardon my math but to me that sounds like ignoring 3 core design-principles just to appear trendy and have something new to sell.
- t34543 7y ago
  I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today. Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.
  - breatheoften 7y ago
    I came here just to say the same thing — Apple really needs to track the statistics on success rate for text selection ... “User Selected the text they wanted first try” “User Selected the text they wanted within 30 seconds” “User Selected the text they wanted within 1 minute” “User Failed to select the text they wanted” I hit that last case probably more than 30% of the time nowadays — and very often it’s not because the text representation on screen makes it impossible — but because it’s just fucking horrifically bad ui and I can’t select the text I’m interested it despite trying for frustratingly long amount of time. I hit categories 2 and 3 frequently when I really need to get the data selected — and that makes me want to throw my Apple iPhone into the sun ...
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      Maybe it’s because idiots don’t know/care about selecting text to begin with and their products are more and more targeted to them, as opposed to people why (try to) do real work on their devices as opposed to scrolling social media?
      - breatheoften 7y ago
        I don’t know many people who would be unable to derive value from the use of text selection on their mobile device - that should be a low percentage of the market, because everyone should be succeeding at using the functionality ...?
        Nextgrid 7y ago
        In my experience a lot of non-tech people struggle to use it or are not even aware of what the feature is for and consider it an annoyance. What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features. Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s
  - josteink 7y ago
    > I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. Seconding this. It literally took me months after I updated to iOS13 until I was able to reliably use copy & paste again. At some point I had given up completely, but then later on I randomly read an article which explained how this core feature has been changed, how it was supposed to work now. A seriously wtf moment. Definitely not cool, and definitely not good UX. Is this the butterfly-keyboard equivalent for touch-interfaces?
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    I was gonna post about this as well. How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it? The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as each attempt has a delay before the feature activates (3D Touch solves this on my iPhone 8 but they removed it from the new models). Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? It makes no sense, has no “prior art” so nobody is used to it (and why would there be prior art for the dumbest UX ever) and it always gets in the way when trying to scroll (in fact I tried the space bar trick first to avoid this but couldn’t move down with it so had to scroll the text box directly and ended up moving the cursor instead). If I recall correctly even themselves had an embarrassing moment trying to demo it at the Keynote.
    - FabHK 7y ago
      > Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks. It’s definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.
      - Nextgrid 7y ago
        Tap and hold between words used to bring up a cursor and a magnifying glass above your finger so you could move it and know where you were. Plus moving it away from the currently visible line would start scrolling infinitely allowing you to navigate beyond what you see on the screen. Both of those behaviours are now gone. Moving the cursor with the finger now scrolls both the text field and the outer page, at a speed high enough to make it unusable. The “space bar trick” on the other hand doesn’t scroll the text beyond a couple of characters, making it impossible to get to the end of a long URL in the address bar for example.
  - tasogare 7y ago
    I still don’t get it either. Apple platforms are full of bizarre gestures and 4-keys shortcuts but it didn’t creep to the most basic features until now.
- egwor 7y ago
  Supporting this argument: I remember googling how to switch apps since the new iPhone X's feature didn't explain it. I've had to verbally explain it a few times to others who use my phone.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  > fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason Except making room for the one thing iPhone has always been about: the touch screen.
rosybox 7y ago
Not fundamentally changing the design is a plus for usability and accessibility. It would be a disappointment if I had to relearn a UI I've been using over a decade just because I upgraded my software. I don't have time for that. Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there.
- msla 7y ago
  > Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there. And here I am, using Window Maker, utterly unchanged for decades, older than the distro I use.
- kick 7y ago
  Alternatively: let developers do what they want! The dozens of us on Linux are excited and entertained that we're now the leading desktop experience.
jbverschoor 7y ago
The iPhone has become a 2-handed device instead of a 1-handed device.
- josteink 7y ago
  The iPhone SE may have been the last true iPhone IMO. Too bad Apple seems hellbent on the much less usable 6” monstrocitious these days.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    Typing this on my SE. Only thing that makes me remotely interested in newer models is the improved camera abilities. Not sure it’s worth it to give up the form factor and affordances. Also gonna hang out on iOS 12 for as long as possible if what I’ve heard about text selection for 13 is true.
    - mihaaly 7y ago
      I am planing to keep my SE and buy a small/medium Fujifilm or other camera. (text selection/navigation in 13 makes me a madman! why the f hey had to fiddle with this, are they f bored to make something f different instead of something better, they are insane! they do this - making differently but not better - repeatedly!)
    - leesalminen 7y ago
      Text selection as well as copy paste are horribly broken on my up to date iPhone 11 Pro. It’s crazy bad and it bothers me every single day. How has this not been fixed by the .3 update? Crazy.
    - sjy 7y ago
      I’d take the complaints about iOS 13 text editing with a grain of salt. I’m on board with most of the criticisms of iOS 13, including that the new text editing functionality is hard to discover, but now that I am familiar with it I would not want to go back to the old UI.
cycloptic 7y ago
The over-reliance on gestures and other hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem. It's a complete about-face from their classic 90s design policies, which were about ensuring applications were fully discoverable and did not hide any state from the user.
- josteink 7y ago
  > hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem I’ve had an iPhone for around 5 years now and I still have no idea what 3D Touch is. I hear it’s not supported on all models, so my phone may be lacking it, but if it does, I wouldn’t even be able to tell.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    Pressing hard on a UI element, like an app icon[0], tweet, etc will show certain actions. On the newer models without a pressure-sensing screen, you can hold the UI icon for about a second to perform the same thing. 0: https://imgur.com/a/wOTDT3s https://imgur.com/a/wOTDT3s
    - kohtatsu 7y ago
      I.e. it never really mattered. My girlfriend still swears by it tho.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > On the newer models without a pressure-sensing screen, you can hold the UI icon for about a second to perform the same thing. On all devices that run iOS 13.
    - Zarath 7y ago
      Hmm interesting. I always knew I had to press and hold with different pressure on songs in my library to pull up different menus but I didn't realize that this is what that was. Thanks
    - whywhywhywhy 7y ago
mihaaly 7y ago
> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases A whole lot of design department got insulted just now! Seeing their focus in product design almost the whole Apple! :) Jokes apart even I - design/visuals/very-cool-new-feature-wow agnostic - can see serious changes. Changes that are f*ing up my workflow and user experience!!
t-writescode 7y ago
I’m sorry, what? Their phone UI used to have a button you could tap on the bottom. That button powered many things and now it is gone. Now ‘take screenshot’ and ‘turn off screen’ are nearly ergonomically indistinguishable. Now ‘shut down’ is somewhere random. Seeking through text has changed, too. It used to provide a bit of a zoomed in view when you slid your finger across the text, so you could see where your cursor was going. This is gone now, to usability’s detriment, and now you’re required to use the undiscoverable ‘hold space bar to turn keyboard into a seek function’ to see where your finger is moving, if you want precise control. The swipe down features on the newer iPhones where the side of your mammoth phone needs to be selected to view calendar or help apps is also new and random and forgettable. iOS UX has changed a lot and a lot for the worse.
- bambataa 7y ago
  Thank you so much for the space bar trick. I have been cursing the broken text seeking. How on Earth am I supposed to have known the space bar now seeks? I actually like idea but I went months without knowing that.

josteink 7y ago

> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestures. Pardon my math but to me that sounds like ignoring 3 core design-principles just to appear trendy and have something new to sell.

t34543 7y ago
I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today. Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.
- breatheoften 7y ago
  I came here just to say the same thing — Apple really needs to track the statistics on success rate for text selection ... “User Selected the text they wanted first try” “User Selected the text they wanted within 30 seconds” “User Selected the text they wanted within 1 minute” “User Failed to select the text they wanted” I hit that last case probably more than 30% of the time nowadays — and very often it’s not because the text representation on screen makes it impossible — but because it’s just fucking horrifically bad ui and I can’t select the text I’m interested it despite trying for frustratingly long amount of time. I hit categories 2 and 3 frequently when I really need to get the data selected — and that makes me want to throw my Apple iPhone into the sun ...
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Maybe it’s because idiots don’t know/care about selecting text to begin with and their products are more and more targeted to them, as opposed to people why (try to) do real work on their devices as opposed to scrolling social media?
    - breatheoften 7y ago
      I don’t know many people who would be unable to derive value from the use of text selection on their mobile device - that should be a low percentage of the market, because everyone should be succeeding at using the functionality ...?
      - Nextgrid 7y ago
        In my experience a lot of non-tech people struggle to use it or are not even aware of what the feature is for and consider it an annoyance. What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features. Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s
- josteink 7y ago
  > I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics. Seconding this. It literally took me months after I updated to iOS13 until I was able to reliably use copy & paste again. At some point I had given up completely, but then later on I randomly read an article which explained how this core feature has been changed, how it was supposed to work now. A seriously wtf moment. Definitely not cool, and definitely not good UX. Is this the butterfly-keyboard equivalent for touch-interfaces?
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I was gonna post about this as well. How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it? The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as each attempt has a delay before the feature activates (3D Touch solves this on my iPhone 8 but they removed it from the new models). Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? It makes no sense, has no “prior art” so nobody is used to it (and why would there be prior art for the dumbest UX ever) and it always gets in the way when trying to scroll (in fact I tried the space bar trick first to avoid this but couldn’t move down with it so had to scroll the text box directly and ended up moving the cursor instead). If I recall correctly even themselves had an embarrassing moment trying to demo it at the Keynote.
  - FabHK 7y ago
    > Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks. It’s definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      Tap and hold between words used to bring up a cursor and a magnifying glass above your finger so you could move it and know where you were. Plus moving it away from the currently visible line would start scrolling infinitely allowing you to navigate beyond what you see on the screen. Both of those behaviours are now gone. Moving the cursor with the finger now scrolls both the text field and the outer page, at a speed high enough to make it unusable. The “space bar trick” on the other hand doesn’t scroll the text beyond a couple of characters, making it impossible to get to the end of a long URL in the address bar for example.
- tasogare 7y ago
  I still don’t get it either. Apple platforms are full of bizarre gestures and 4-keys shortcuts but it didn’t creep to the most basic features until now.
egwor 7y ago
Supporting this argument: I remember googling how to switch apps since the new iPhone X's feature didn't explain it. I've had to verbally explain it a few times to others who use my phone.
tinus_hn 7y ago
> fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason Except making room for the one thing iPhone has always been about: the touch screen.

rosybox 7y ago

Not fundamentally changing the design is a plus for usability and accessibility. It would be a disappointment if I had to relearn a UI I've been using over a decade just because I upgraded my software. I don't have time for that. Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there.

msla 7y ago
> Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there. And here I am, using Window Maker, utterly unchanged for decades, older than the distro I use.
kick 7y ago
Alternatively: let developers do what they want! The dozens of us on Linux are excited and entertained that we're now the leading desktop experience.

jbverschoor 7y ago

The iPhone has become a 2-handed device instead of a 1-handed device.

josteink 7y ago
The iPhone SE may have been the last true iPhone IMO. Too bad Apple seems hellbent on the much less usable 6” monstrocitious these days.
- wwweston 7y ago
  Typing this on my SE. Only thing that makes me remotely interested in newer models is the improved camera abilities. Not sure it’s worth it to give up the form factor and affordances. Also gonna hang out on iOS 12 for as long as possible if what I’ve heard about text selection for 13 is true.
  - mihaaly 7y ago
    I am planing to keep my SE and buy a small/medium Fujifilm or other camera. (text selection/navigation in 13 makes me a madman! why the f hey had to fiddle with this, are they f bored to make something f different instead of something better, they are insane! they do this - making differently but not better - repeatedly!)
  - leesalminen 7y ago
    Text selection as well as copy paste are horribly broken on my up to date iPhone 11 Pro. It’s crazy bad and it bothers me every single day. How has this not been fixed by the .3 update? Crazy.
  - sjy 7y ago
    I’d take the complaints about iOS 13 text editing with a grain of salt. I’m on board with most of the criticisms of iOS 13, including that the new text editing functionality is hard to discover, but now that I am familiar with it I would not want to go back to the old UI.

cycloptic 7y ago

The over-reliance on gestures and other hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem. It's a complete about-face from their classic 90s design policies, which were about ensuring applications were fully discoverable and did not hide any state from the user.

josteink 7y ago
> hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem I’ve had an iPhone for around 5 years now and I still have no idea what 3D Touch is. I hear it’s not supported on all models, so my phone may be lacking it, but if it does, I wouldn’t even be able to tell.
- judge2020 7y ago
  Pressing hard on a UI element, like an app icon[0], tweet, etc will show certain actions. On the newer models without a pressure-sensing screen, you can hold the UI icon for about a second to perform the same thing. 0: https://imgur.com/a/wOTDT3s https://imgur.com/a/wOTDT3s
  - kohtatsu 7y ago
    I.e. it never really mattered. My girlfriend still swears by it tho.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > On the newer models without a pressure-sensing screen, you can hold the UI icon for about a second to perform the same thing. On all devices that run iOS 13.
  - Zarath 7y ago
    Hmm interesting. I always knew I had to press and hold with different pressure on songs in my library to pull up different menus but I didn't realize that this is what that was. Thanks
  - whywhywhywhy 7y ago

mihaaly 7y ago

> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases A whole lot of design department got insulted just now! Seeing their focus in product design almost the whole Apple! :) Jokes apart even I - design/visuals/very-cool-new-feature-wow agnostic - can see serious changes. Changes that are f*ing up my workflow and user experience!!

t-writescode 7y ago

I’m sorry, what? Their phone UI used to have a button you could tap on the bottom. That button powered many things and now it is gone. Now ‘take screenshot’ and ‘turn off screen’ are nearly ergonomically indistinguishable. Now ‘shut down’ is somewhere random. Seeking through text has changed, too. It used to provide a bit of a zoomed in view when you slid your finger across the text, so you could see where your cursor was going. This is gone now, to usability’s detriment, and now you’re required to use the undiscoverable ‘hold space bar to turn keyboard into a seek function’ to see where your finger is moving, if you want precise control. The swipe down features on the newer iPhones where the side of your mammoth phone needs to be selected to view calendar or help apps is also new and random and forgettable. iOS UX has changed a lot and a lot for the worse.

bambataa 7y ago
Thank you so much for the space bar trick. I have been cursing the broken text seeking. How on Earth am I supposed to have known the space bar now seeks? I actually like idea but I went months without knowing that.