The iPad's new cursor and keyboard
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
In particular, each system has a setting to turn off animations for a calmer experience.
On Windows you can make the text cursor thicker so it's easier to see on a high-DPI display, and select a black mouse pointer instead of the default white.
There are a bunch more - worth a look around even if you don't think you have any accessibility needs.
It seems to me that the gradient from “application state” to “color scheme/theme” to “preferences” to “accessibility” is a continuous one, and we are still treating it from a mental model standpoint as discrete buckets.
Now it’s back to being used in the literal meaning of the term, which, as you pointed out, is basis for confusion. This is one reason why I try hard to avoid euphemism in general; imprecision that results in context-specific definition drift makes for needlessly messy communication.
The fact that others can used it is just a side effect.
(At least that's what I'd guess given Apple's usual approach to UX)
I didn't bother looking for settings, and sure enough, you can switch off "Pointer Animations" and now my cursor isn't getting "trapped" all over the place.
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.
* 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/
I feel like this has been happening to a lot of online publications because they’re focusing on SEO over quality content.
> Honestly, the thinking could have stopped there and that would have been perfectly adequate. A rough finger facsimile as pointer. But the concept is pushed further. As you approach an interactive element, the circle reaches out, smoothly touching then embracing and encapsulating the button.
> The idea of variable cursor velocity is pushed further here too. When you’re close to an object on the screen, it changes its rate of travel to get where you want to go quicker, but it does it contextually, rather than linearly, the way that macOS or Windows does.
Could be shortened significantly. The passage repeats each point twice, including the main point, and is mostly flowery language that doesn’t add anything.
> The thinking could have stopped there, but instead of being a rough finger facsimile, the circle accelerates, then reaches out to elements as you approach them, embracing and encapsulating the button. This is unlike macOS and Windows, which vary velocity linearly.
The entire article is like this. I think the author was padding for word count or seo or something. I didn’t read the wired piece.
For example, your rewritten version is not an accurate representation of what the author was trying to convey, and mangles the two separate points into one. The contextual acceleration the author is describing is not the same thing as the circle "reaching out" as it approaches buttons.
I literally don’t understand what this means
The videos are from The Mother of All Demos with Douglas Engelbart and Bill English at Stanford Research Institute on December 9, 1968.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
https://www.wired.com/story/how-doug-engelbart-pulled-off-th...
PARC was founded in 1970.
https://www.parc.com/about-parc/parc-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)
(The Wikipedia article says 1969 in one place and 1970 in another, but 1970 is what PARC's site says.)
Anyway, thanks for your link.
Fwiw the writers (at least, the one I knew) hate it too because it floods the job market with ultra low paid competition, and since it's "just the way things are", a lot of those underpaid people are very talented and are glad to accept very little pay
And that's not even getting into just how annoying it is to try to read anything on Forbes because of all the pop-ups etc.
This is a question I've asked myself way too many times in relation to Apple hardware these last few years. Mostly when I had to deal with needless dongles.
E.g. I have a Razer laptop which has all the build quality and properties of a MacBook... except that they somehow managed to do the impossible: install 2x USB-C and 2x USB-A. How would have thought something like that is possible?!
She used to have a thicker HP with all the ports, but this one was still plugged into a dock at work, as that was simply the easiest thing to do.
For her, her daily life has not changed at all going from all the ports to two USB-C.
Just an anecdote.
Microsoft got this right with the Surface. I kinda wish Apple would just do that.
Speaking of low power devices, depending on Intel for a device that needs to be both high performance and power efficient is a non starter.
Even though I’m almost all in on the Apple ecosystem. I still use Windows PCs mostly. This isn’t an anti-Windows screed. It’s just a horrible touch screen operating system.
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...?
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.
Sounds plausible, though.
What makes me sad is that I know how to do this, but my parents don't. So they put up with an experience of the internet that's totally degraded.
It is great for mobile (Firefox), because you can set the "large media element" threshold to something tiny and thus get a mostly text-only web that is very fast.
- 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.
You can. You want to turn off "natural scrolling" in settings, somewhere.
The other direction is more natural when you're using something like a mousewheel or a touchpad scrolling area, since that renders it quite "natural" to think about dragging the viewport, or a representation thereof such as the scrollbar handle. Dragging the "handle" downwards on a mouse or touchpad is also more ergonomic, so it's better to match it with the common direction of scrolling.
EDIT: please, if you’re going to downvote me please discuss why
That said, it took me a few years before I ended up switching. Unchecking the scroll direction checkbox was the first thing I used to do on a Mac. Now, I'm quite happy with the natural direction.
Here's example press from the time: https://slate.com/technology/2011/09/apple-s-mousetrap-why-d...
I mention that I prefer the old method of scrolling and they are insistent that it has always been "natural."
I think the pull-down-to-scroll-up action came from the scroll bars at the side of the page.
Edit: years -> a decade
You couldn't make text selection in iOS any worse if you tried.
Whereas a cursor does not signal “scrolling intent” as good: it can be sort of anywhere (it can be “left behind” while you are reading som text) and is always on screen as opposed to your finger.
This became very clear to me when I realized that you have not ever been able to even change the color of the pointer in macOS, nevermind the shape. I wanted it to be white so it would stand out more. Apple doesn’t care - they are too busy projecting style to care about users petty practical needs.
It seems this feature is still in Windows 7, but no longer in Windows 10.
https://github.com/alexzielenski/Mousecape
There's various commercial pointer modification utilities, as well as simpler highlighter-effect ones like Mouseposé and Pinpoint.
Theming on macOS was a big awesome thing at one point, kind of too bad it seems to have fallen away a bit (in part because Apple's new security efforts have made it ever more work). At least it's still doable though.
That’s why it will never, ever be an option on the iPad.
I've been browsing TechCrunch without JavaScript for years - it works fine.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It used to be terrible on old non-mac machines (probably still is), but Apple's trackpad has been good enough for tap to click to be preferable since at least 2014, maybe earlier.
Another lesser known feature I think is great is three finger drag. This lets you move a window by just using three fingers on the menu bar of that window. It used to be an easy to find setting, but they've since buried it in trackpad accessibility settings for some reason. It's still one of the first things I enable on a new machine.
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.
Is it possible to fix that by using the method described here? (start at 1:10 mark):
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.
Aside from the "drag past the bottom of the screen to go home" issue, I find the mouse support has worked really well in games that have an on-screen cursor (I've tested with SimCity 4, Disco Elysium, and Factorio). It doesn't work at all in games that expect to fully capture the cursor (usually to control a camera perspective, so most first person or action games).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/676993694/solu-a-new-br...
For people understanding finnish, this podcast tells the whole story:
When did the web become such an unusable place?
In any case, even disabling the adblocker resulted in multiple redirects and having to accept multiple privacy policies before seeing the article.
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.
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.
Maybe it could use role=“button” as hint?
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.
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)
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.