5 ms·

> Anecdote: The first time this happened, I had no idea why it wasn't working and naturally started clicking on things and pressing buttons to try to get it to

• WalterBright 7y ago
  > I think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing On the other hand, when my iPhone suddenly would connect with a caller, but neither party could hear the other, redialing didn't help, turning it off/on didn't work, I remembered the ancient trick of "cold boot". Which resolved the problem.
  • tcoff91 7y ago
    You put an iPhone in the freezer and booted it, and that fixed it? Wow. I thought that was just for saving spinning disk drives and preserving the contents of RAM for an attack.
    • WalterBright 7y ago
      A cold boot means shut off all power to the device. The normal "off" button the iPhone puts it in standby mode, not off. This is so it can still listen for calls.
      • craftinator 7y ago
        I tried to power off an iPhone today for 5 minutes, failed, and just gave up. Why Apple, why would you make this simple action so damn obscure.
        • tvmalsv 7y ago
          My iPhone 10 locked up hard a few days and I couldn’t get it to turn off using the standard method. After some digging, I found a new trick that I guess is implemented at a lower level: press and release volume up, then volume volume down, then press and hold the main button until it powers off.
        • nitrogen 7y ago
          Wait, is it not press-and-hold power like on Android?
          • zwaps 7y ago
            you have to press the "power" button and a volume button afaik
          • tvmalsv 7y ago
            No, on the newer iPhones press and hold simply brings up Siri. Gotta press and hold main button and either volume button simultaneously. If that doesn’t work you should be able to use the trick I describe above.
• Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
  I still remember the first time my young niece sat at my traditional desktop computer a few years ago. She must have been about five or six years old. She immediately started using her hands to try and interact with the screen and was utterly confused as to why nothing was happening.
  • Frondo 7y ago
    Like Scotty in that iconic scene..."Hello, computer...........Hello, computer......" someone hands him the mouse, which he holds like a microphone "Hello, computer...."
    • ethbro 7y ago
      For those unfamiliar, from the second greatest Star Trek film: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xaVgRj2e5_s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xaVgRj2e5_s
• zrm 7y ago
  I think it's the familiarity which is actually hurting you there. If you come up to a device which as far as you know is alien technology, you don't know if it should behave like a Mac or an iPhone, so the thing that works on an iPhone feels like more of a valid possibility. If you come up to it knowing exactly what kind of device is and that it isn't at all like an iPhone, it doesn't. Because any hope of guessing it comes from knowing that phones do that, so the less like a phone you know it to be, the less likely you are to try that. Notice that even on phones it isn't intuitive if you've never done it before. If you tap the lock screen on Android it shows a message that says "Swipe up to unlock" -- because how else would you know that for the first time? But at least there it serves a purpose.
• Leherenn 7y ago
  Windows 10 has the same mechanism, she might have learnt it from there first and just applied it here.
  • alpaca128 7y ago
    Windows 10 allows a normal mouse click as well, unless Microsoft changed that afterwards.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      It still does. When you do a mouse click, the lock screen moves up very fast - the animation is also a hint for the future. If you have a touch-enabled device and touch-press the lockscreen, it jumps up a little and falls back down, suggesting the swipe movement. On top of that, just typing on your keyboard works. So MS has managed to make an interface that works just the same on desktops, laptops and touch-enabled devices, and the UX isn't bad on either.
      • iggldiggl 7y ago
        Generally yes, except I seem to run into an annoying bug where if you start typing your password too quickly after the initial unlock keypress, the password input control sometimes decides to select everything you've managed to type so far when it initialises, so your next key press overwrites everything. Plus at home I've kept the full lock screen because I actually like those random landscape pictures, but at work they've set the computers to directly boot into the password entry, which of course rather plays havoc with your muscle memory.
    • OOPMan 7y ago
      It hasn't changed.
  • Ma8ee 7y ago
    I’ve been actively using computers since CP/M. On windows, that I use daily, just random click and press and shake the mouse until I get a password prompt to login. Since there is slight delay until something happens after each action I’ve never been patient enough to figure out what exactly it is that works.
• SiempreViernes 7y ago
  In my experience Ubuntu shows a little animation of up arrows, and maybe even says "swipe to start" if you look long enough at the login screen. It is pretty confusing the first time, and annoying every time after that, didn't conciously know about the "Enter" trick before now.
• jpxw 7y ago
  I’m 20 and it took me literally minutes to realise I needed to swipe up. I thought the computer had frozen.
  • hilbert42 7y ago
    It's not your fault. It's the shitty ergonomics that have been pervading software UI design for several decades now. From the huge number of responses to this article, it's clear the software industry has a very major problem. The question I ask is why haven't users/user complaints been successful in stopping these irresponsible cowboys. Seems nothing can stop them.
    • masoudd 7y ago
      > Seems nothing can stop them. Of course. The people complain. They say fork it and change it yourself or use what we give you. The people that can't just suffer through it. The ones that know enough use something else. I login in linux tty. And startx starts dwm. No fancy login screen for me.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > The question I ask is why haven't users/user complaints been successful in stopping these irresponsible cowboys. Most users don't complain, because technology is magic to them and they have no point of reference; they assume things must be the way they are for a reason. From the remaining group that does complain, many do it ineffectively (e.g. complaining to friends or in discussion boards that aren't frequented by relevant devs). And the rest just isn't listened to. It's easy to dismiss few voices as "not experts", especially today, when everyone puts telemetry in their software (see below), and doubly so when user's opinions are in opposition to the business model. Finally, software market isn't all that competitive (especially on SaaS) end, so users are most often put in a "take it or leave it" situation, where there's no way to "vote with your wallet" because there's no option on the market that you could vote for. The problem with telemetry is that measuring for correct things and interpreting the results is hard, and it's way too easy to use the data to justify whatever the vendor (in particular, their UX or marketing team) already thinks. A common example is a feature that's been hidden increasingly deeply in the app on each UI update, and finally removed on the grounds that "telemetry says people aren't using it". Another common example is "low use" of features that are critical for end-users, but used only every few sessions.
• kgwxd 7y ago
  Windows 10 has the same stupid UX, they likely learned it there. It also supports hitting Enter, or any other key. I don't know if Ubuntu supports other keys too, I use Xubuntu to avoid these exact pointless changes.
  • contextfree 7y ago
    I don't know about Ubuntu but on Windows you can also just click with the mouse to open it, no need to swipe up.