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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 ...

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?

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 ...?

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

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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