Comment by afoxtron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by afoxtron | Hacker News Reader

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It's kind of a shame to see so much hate for a neat feature. I think a lot of non developers gave Apple shit for 3D touch as just another gimmick because they don't see the fundamental interaction problem that it solved. Long holds on mobile are excruciating interactions for people, and 3D touch fixes that. It allows the user to reach a deeper level of contextual actions, without forcing them to wait like a long tap and hold does. Anything that empowers the user like that is a huge win in my mind.

I really hope apple sticks with it moving forward. As a developer I have been having a blast coming up with new and interesting ways to use it that legitimately increase a user's satisfaction and the usefulness of an app.

>Long holds on mobile are excruciating interactions for people, and 3D touch fixes that

But it doesn't provide an easier way to access long hold functionality, instead of provides different functionality that could be activated accidentally instead of long hold functionality.

e.g it doesn't make deleting apps less tedious, it instead adds a shortcut menu you might activate by accident when trying to delete the app.

In my view it would have been OK if force touch had been equivalent to a long hold. The problem is that force touch and long hold do different things.

In my view, a long hold was always basically a "secondary click"—but Apple didn't use it for much, since it was so tedious. So, rather than getting a menu, it mostly served to activate a single important secondary function on the item. (And devs came up with different solutions for menus, like side-swiping in list-views; and modal multi-select, with additional actions to apply to selected results.)

Force touch, on the other hand, isn't tedious, so it does what Apple wanted to do: it gives you a menu. I would expect that whatever a long hold does to an item should also be a thing on that menu. You could think of a long hold, then, as the "default secondary action"—like how shell object handlers in Windows use their "default primary action" from their context menu when double-clicked.

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