13 ms·
The iPad's new cursor and keyboard
- mmastrac 6y agoThe nice thing about the "linear" spaces on MacOS and Windows is that in the vast majority of cases there's a 1:1 mapping between the pixels on the screen and the UI elements. What makes me nervous is when they start making the pointer space non-linear. Is there a risk that you just can't get the cursor to activate a part of the screen because it keeps getting sucked into a nearby control? Or is the pointer space just a reversibly-warped version of the screen space?
- ricardobeat 6y agoMost likely the Human Interface Guidelines that Apple enforces for all of their software is a major enabler for this, as it mandates minimum touch areas and spacing that should eliminate that type of issues. No other platform has as much native UI adoption - used to be the case for Mac too until Electron and others came along.
- Nition 6y agoDo minor platforms count? I suspect Sailfish has higher native UI adoption. IIRC back when I had a Sailfish phone, all the apps I used including the third-party ones used the same standard UI elements.
- thomashobohm 6y agoThey probably meant out of the platforms Apple competes with. Presumably I could find a platform with, say, 12 users and only 1 non-native app, and if that app followed native UI guidelines I could say it has 100% native UI adoption and thus the “highest” out of every platform ever, but that is a useless statement.
- saagarjha 6y agoYou forgot watchOS, where you literally cannot design a non-native app.
- skavi 6y agoI’d expect them to hand more precise control back to the user as the pointer slows down.
- lonelappde 6y agoBut there isn't a 1:1 mapping between where I am trying to tap and where my fat finger registers a click on a linear screen.
- kondro 6y agoI have one of the new Magic Keyboards in front of me now. I had the same reservations as you before trying it out (and it’s a little hard to tell because all I have to rely on is my meat brain’s interpretation), but it feels like the cursor still moves in linear space. It’s just that whilst it’s over a button (or other control) that the cursor disappears and the selection feels glued to the control for the duration it passes over.
- bitwize 6y agoThere hasn't been a linear mapping between on-screen pixels and space traversed by the mouse for decades now. "Mouse acceleration" messes that up.
- userbinator 6y agoMouse acceleration is one of the things I always turn off on a clean install, precisely because of that nonlinearity. When I have to use others' systems who do have it on, I find myself always overshooting with the cursor.
- systoll 6y agoThe 'pointer magnetism' in iPadOS has two different effects. The main effect doesn't change pointer movement: Most controls on iPadOS are bigger than they look, because fingers. With no adaptation, the cursor would be hovering over controls when it looks like it's 24px away from them. To avoid this, controls move toward the cursor when hovered, depending on how far away the cursor is from their centre. On any given frame, if the cursor is within a control's actual bounds, the control will visually overlap the cursor's current position. The second thing does affect pointer movement: If you quickly swipe in a single direction, and the cursor lands on the edge of a control, effect #1 still happens on the approach, but the element bounces back to its resting location, and the cursor goes with it. This seems to work well in practice. It doesn't change anything while your finger is moving, it doesn't affect any 'precise' motions, and it can't lead to your swipe landing on a different element.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gouggoug 6y agoUnrelated to the post, but related to TechCrunch: is there a way for me to prevent them from hijacking my back button? There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking back to go to my previous page, only to be redirected to the same exact page I already am on.
- throw03172019 6y agoThey need to stop pushing to the HTML5 history. They should replace instead.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoThey shouldn't touch it at all.
- dkdk8283 6y agoIt’s a huge pet peeve of mine, including manipulating the copy buffer.
- madeofpalk 6y agoYes, I've noticed this... I think it's something to do with their cookie consent?
- hhjj 6y agoI guess they don't want you to go back through guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers endpoint.
- zozbot234 6y agoClick and hold on the back button, you should get a list of previous pages.
- manigandham 6y agoThey ruined this site with the automatic “smooth” navigation to other stories and the homepage. I don’t know anyone who likes it.
- mikelward 6y agoReminds me of Android's "Show Taps" option in developer settings. Albeit with much more physics and animation.
- zozbot234 6y agoIt's sad that this is a hidden option; I can't imagine using a capacitive touchscreen that didn't do this. The instant feedback on an input channel as fiddly as that is simply invaluable.
- poglet 6y agoI've been using a mouse on my 2016 iPad 9.7" iPad for a few days now. Here are my thoughts: - Anything related to selecting or copying text is improved, including web browsing. - Sometimes right click brings up context menus and sometimes 'long left click' brings up context menus. Sometimes both work but with different options. - I would like to change the cursor to an arrow pointer. - I would like to change the scrolling direction (it's the opposite of Windows). - Scrolling doesn't feel smooth, many people report different scrolling issues. - You can assign different actions to different mouse buttons, this has made multitasking more efficient for me.
- madeofpalk 6y ago> - I would like to change the scrolling direction (it's the opposite of Windows). You can. You want to turn off "natural scrolling" in settings, somewhere.
- partiallypro 6y agoI don't think this (meaning the cursor) is "reinventing" anything, it's actually a work around because the iOS UX doesn't have good non-touch affordances. It will be dumbed down over time, and apparently you can turn it off.
- bitwize 6y agoAndroid devices, with a mouse or trackpad connected (e.g., Asus Transformer series), have shown an alpha-blended disc instead of an arrow pointer since forever ago, so not even that bit is an Apple innovation.
- tosh 6y agoNow that I’m using the trackpad on the iPad for a bit I wish websites also had a way to make the cursor behave like this. Maybe it could use role=“button” as hint?
- tsar9x 6y agoHopefully Apple patented it and I won't see it on websites, normal cursor works fine.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mirroregami 6y agoMy only gripe with the smart keyboard is the touchpad uses a mechanical button for clicking. It feels clunky compared to the crispness of the last few mbp generations which use a haptic electromechanical component to (perfectly) simulate a click feel.
- joegahona 6y agoWow. This so perfectly simulated a click feel for me that I didn't even know this was a fake click until reading your comment.
- macintux 6y agoiPhone home buttons do the same.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoFunny thing about haptic click is how jarring it is if it's off, like pressing your iphone's home button before you realize it lost its charge. It really feels super-dead.
- rayiner 6y agoI’ve known it’s fake for years, and I still feel like it’s moving.
- renewiltord 6y agoRight? It's a masterpiece in design. I know, I look, and I still feel the movement of a click. How?!
- saagarjha 6y agoTo be fair, it moves just a tiny bit. But the click feeling itself, yes, that is magical.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
- Lammy 6y agoUnrelated to the actual article but the animated headline/hero image nauseates me. It's such a huge and inappropriate area for animation in general much less a choppy loop of a glaring bright iPad screen.
- banana_giraffe 6y agoHaving used the iPad with a mouse and now a trackpad for a while, I've got to say I don't like the mouse cursor turning into the button. It feels like the cursor gets "trapped" in the button, and often I can lose track of which button has focus since the hint can be rather subtle on some buttons. Mostly, I just want a normal mouse cursor. Of course, Apple isn't designing for a user like me, though, I'm really not sure what user they've designed this mouse cursor for.
- ramensea 6y agoIt seems like an anti-pattern to me. Also saying Apple reinvented the cursor is a bit much. Highlighting elements, snapping, and changing the cursor weren't just invented. The author really bought into Apple's marketing here.
- xingyzt 6y agoYeah, it's fairly simple to crudely replicate the effect in CSS. It gets rid of the possibility that your cursor is blocking a portion of the button label, but creates uncertainty in the position of the cursor -- jiggling the mouse lightly won't let you locate it anymore. What iPadOS 'invented' was to transition the effect in a smoother and snappier way.
- dannyw 6y agoI feel like the quality of TechCrunch has really gone down as a whole over the years, and this article is a great example. It is essentially a fluff and marketing piece for Apple that can be summarised in three dotpoints: * Apple invented the cursor (untrue) * On iPad, the cursor is a round circle * They bought over the same Apple TV effect on iPad Most of the words and sentences in this article are meaningless, and if there's anything reading this has made me feel, it's that I'll never subscribe to their subscription service. I'm not sure why TC is submitted so much - over often times better articles like: https://www.wired.com/story/ipad-trackpad-cursor/ https://www.wired.com/story/ipad-trackpad-cursor/
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
- 5cott0 6y agoArticle is an editorial content advertisement.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoBreathlessly worded and everything as well, I mean, nobody in tech would genuinely describe a fucking cursor on screen as "This stir fry of path prediction, animation, physics and fun seasoning is all cooked into a dish that does its best to replicate the feel of something we do without thinking: reaching out and touching something directly." That's lifted straight out of an Apple ad. Unapologetically plastic.
- itsajoke 6y agoAlthough like many I probably would prefer a traditional cursor, I appreciate that people are exploring the possibilities of the space. I hate change for its own sake. But there are so many choices that go into graphical user interface design. Even if we've hit a local maxima, I don't think we've hit on the best paradigm. We've only been at this for ~60 years or so. Not to mention the personal preference that goes into this. Keep exploring! Keep experimenting! (Just please don't force me to change how I use my computer against my will.)
- glram 6y agoI think this is another sign that iOS/iPad OS and Mac OS are converging. If I had to guess, once Apple adopts ARM processors for the Mac, there won't be much of a distinction between the two.
- chrismorgan 6y agoThis article uses a number of enormous GIFs instead of videos. Please don’t ever do that. They’re drastically wasteful of bandwidth (16MB should have been much less), ignore the user’s “don’t autoplay videos” preference, yield lower quality results, and load extremely badly.
- christoph 6y agoIt also completely hijacks the back button on iOS Safari for me. It’s impossible to leave the site by pressing back or swiping.
- wmwragg 6y agoYeah, you have to long press on the back button and then select the previous site from the history dropdown. I hate sites like this, and actively avoid them
- iainmerrick 6y agoThis has been annoying me too. I’ll definitely be avoiding TechCrunch now. What I don’t understand is, what exactly are they trying to do? Is this just a bug, and it’s only supposed to hijack the back button once? I can see (reluctantly) how a single hijack might nudge users to stick around longer, but surely there’s no upside to infinite hijacking...?
- lazyjones 6y ago> what exactly are they trying to do? Is this just a bug It might be important for SEO: It assesses the number of people who leave your page by hitting the back button to return to the search listing page. If Google sends 1,000 people to one of your web pages and each of those 1,000 people hit the back button within a few seconds, it tells Google your web page isn’t relevant. https://www.quicksprout.com/ranking-factors/ https://www.quicksprout.com/ranking-factors/
- 6y ago
- soinus 6y agoI just have to chime in on this. While I don't use the mouse with an iPad on a daily basis, I have found a new use for it yesterday. Once every <insert-some-time-frame> I start missing games and decide to play something. I have a dedicated relatively powerful PC for that. What I have recently found out is that I can play XCOM2 on my PC through my iPad with Steam link. The experience was good enough out of the box but the way the cursor was controlled through an iPad screen felt a bit out of place. Yesterday, I suddenly realized that I can use a Bluetooth mouse with my iPad and holy crap, the experience is like playing on the PC but I am not attached to the desk! There is only one minor issue of not being able to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen without triggering the applications bar, but this was not too annoying. Not sure how important this is to anyone, but I was amazed that I could do this.
- busymom0 6y ago> not being able to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen without triggering the applications bar Is it possible to fix that by using the method described here? (start at 1:10 mark): https://youtu.be/7dxLcr68lLc?t=71 https://youtu.be/7dxLcr68lLc?t=71
- tosh 6y agowow, ty, wasn’t aware of this
- soinus 6y agoOh my! This is amazing! It is exactly what I need to fulfill the picture! To those, who can't or don't want to watch the video: you can configure iPad to lock you in a single app and unlock with either biometric or pin entry. This is available in the accessibility settings.
- busymom0 6y agoI think this is what a lot of those restaurants like Sushi places use on their iPads.
- 6y ago
- zeoshillo 6y agoThis was btw invented in Finland by the failed kickstarter project, the Solu computer: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/676993694/solu-a-new-breed-of-computing https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/676993694/solu-a-new-br... For people understanding finnish, this podcast tells the whole story: https://areena.yle.fi/audio/1-50499091 https://areena.yle.fi/audio/1-50499091
- hedora 6y agoToo bad they failed. I want one.
- JustFinishedBSG 6y agoI can't even click the link, it's going through an advertising netwok, and is blocked by my DNS
- anhner 6y ago"The iPad is the most versatile computer that Apple makes" ?? Bro, I can't even run extensions in my browser. Not to mention the other things you can only do on a real computer. It brings nothing except for touch, but loses a lot of things.
- sulam 6y agoI am possessed by a sudden urge, indeed a veritable compulsion to wallop the scribe of this pretentious piece of faux journalism upside his mandible.
- dade_ 6y agoTech Crunch is brutal, and this is another fluff job that proves it.
- wodenokoto 6y agoI haven't tried the mouse/trackpad on the ipad, but it looks really fun to use. Kind remind me of how much fun, simply scrolling on the iPhone was, back when it was released. I am not, however, investing over 1.000 USD just to play with it. Has anyone build a demo I can play with from a laptop? Also, I wish the bubble would deform when entering and exiting an icon.
- tosh 6y ago@ USD 1000: you can try this with a bluetooth mouse using any iPad that supports iPad OS (you don’t need an iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard w/ Touchbar) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPadOS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPadOS
- ascagnel_ 6y agoI've been using a BT keyboard & mouse (Logitech Keys & MX Master 3) with my iPad since they announced the proper mouse support. Combined with the USB-C to HDMI multi-port adapter (which provides a USB-C pass-through port, USB-A port, and an HDMI port), it's close to using a desktop. I'm used to coding over a terminal, so I use the app Blink Shell to do anything like that since it fully supports external displays (most apps and the iPad interface will display windowboxed). Blink is open-source, and they provide instructions on their github repo, but you can also fund the project by buying it via the App Store.
- tosh 6y agoBlink is great, can highly recommend as well
- amelius 6y agoCan't Apple throw more money at revolutionary stuff rather than at evolutionary stuff that already works just fine?
- joeberon 6y agoAbsolutely atrocious writing
- ryanwaggoner 6y agoDisagree. Perhaps not your style.
- notum 6y agoJesus. It's a dot, not a fusion reactor.
- dade_ 6y agoThe new cursor is like being handed a jumbo marker when you are used to a fine point pen. I've been using iPads since the second one came out and I think Apple is just as confused about making a mobile interface into a desktop as Microsoft has been making a desktop interface into mobile. The iPad has never been more powerful, confusing and unintuitive.
- _pmf_ 6y agoI get angry just watching it.
- WhyNotHugo 6y agoLink redirects me to `guce.advertising.com`, which my adblock blocks. If I unblock it, it redirects to yahoo, where I have to agree with YAHOO's terms of use, and only after agreeing I'm taken to techcrunch's home page. When did the web become such an unusable place?
- dcwca 6y agoYou’ve got a point here about the complexity of the web or maybe advertising models, but it’s hard to criticize usability when you have installed a browser plugin that breaks it. Use the thing or don’t, but don’t complain when your own reassembly of the product doesn’t work.
- WhyNotHugo 6y agoThe web is a lot more unusable WITHOUT adblockers. In any case, even disabling the adblocker resulted in multiple redirects and having to accept multiple privacy policies before seeing the article.
- jrockway 6y agoThe web became an unusable place when people who wrote for print media and had mortgages to pay started putting their content online. People wanted to read their stuff, and they wanted money, but people wouldn't pay them directly to read their stuff. So they got sponsors who pay them to write the articles, and those sponsors want you to look at ads.
- WhyNotHugo 6y ago> people wouldn't pay them directly to read their stuff Has this actually been tested? How many blogs have a "drop $0.10" button at the end of the article or anything alike? I wouldn't mind paying for good content, but it seems that companies would rather try to track users than aspire to just get money.
- kbumsik 6y agoSlightly off-topic but I glad that the article mentions "Mother of all demos" [1] I watched this for the first time last year and I was shocked - Douglas Engelbart demonstrated what happens after 50 years. The mouse is the least amazing one but the demo featured real-time video conferencing and Google Docs-like real-time word editor with shared mouse pointers. It is hard to believe it's 1968 and he actually implemented them 50 years ahead. [1] https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY