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.
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.
On all devices that run iOS 13.
Regardless, it's still available as an option for phones with the 3D Touch hardware.
I'd use macOS’s three finger trackpad swipe for switching workspaces as an example of a great gesture. It’s just one of a ton of ways to switch workspaces.
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.
Also gonna hang out on iOS 12 for as long as possible if what I’ve heard about text selection for 13 is true.
(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!)
I switched from an iPhone 4 to Android, and went back to the iPhone when they released the larger size - the 6 IIRC.
It’s bigger, fatter and heavier with a cheaper feeling finish. The 7 feels positively elegant if you hold one after the other.
And apart from the slight camera improvements the performance feels identical.
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.
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.
“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 ...
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Except making room for the one thing iPhone has always been about: the touch screen.
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!!
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.
And here I am, using Window Maker, utterly unchanged for decades, older than the distro I use.
The dozens of us on Linux are excited and entertained that we're now the leading desktop experience.