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Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

Modern UI on the phones makes discovering features really hard. One often ends up with searching obscure forums just to know very useful feature like IPhone trick with holding the space bar to move cursor.

I can understand that on 4” inch phones there were no space for extra buttons, but with 6” screens this became ridiculous. So much for “good” design.

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I really miss Palm's zen. Great sweet spot of discoverability with a clutter-free design that didn't sacrifice functionality. I could even make the buttons do useful things instead of just opening a Bixby TOS I've declined a dozen times.

I have the Bixby button set to play/pause, and a long-press to turn on the flashlight. It works great.

Which you can only do if you agree to the tos...

I use an app called bxAxtions, and I'm pretty sure I didn't need to set up Bixby at all or agree to any terms of service (I can't remember for sure). I had to run some ADB commands to grant it extra permissions, and I think Bixby doesn't run at all.

I agree with you, but I think discoverability for me is a lot more critical for software I use infrequently versus something I'm glued to several hours a day.

I learned about the space bar trick after 2 years of using iPhone after my son showed me a post on a forum. This made fixing typos much more quicker.

I discovered that about a year ago. I'm sure there are some other obvious things I don't know. In general, most of us who have been using smartphones for 10 years or so are probably able to adapt to new features fairly easily (assuming we learn about them). But it's probably easy to overlook how overwhelming they might be to someone who has never touched one before.

Navigating settings on my new Android phone resembles "Where's Waldo?" more than anything else. The search bar at the top, while tantalising, doesn't actually work in finding any setting that I've tried.

The menus are inconsistent, options are divided into strange categories, there are several "rabbit hole" menus where entire trees of settings are tucked away rather than just put them at the top level. This could be partly down to having a Chinese phone, but some of those deep menus are from stock Android too.

Early Android phones were way nicer.

thank-you, I didn’t know of this feature. And I am using iPhone for over a year now. It was such a pain to get cursor to correct spot up until now. Please share if know of any catalog of such tricks.

Me too. Long time IOS user, have been continually frustrated by the somewhat recent cursor redesign (what was it, IOS 13?). Knowing this is a game changer for a lot of phone use, and it was completely unknown to me: a motivated tech-literate IOS fan. There really is something wrong with UI discovery here.

One hidden feature I quite like is the scroll up. Move a page a bit so that the scroll bar is visible and tap the clock.

I do this one on accident frequently (e.g. when trying to pull the top bar down to respond to a notification). I’m glad I know exactly what triggers it now so that maybe I can learn to quit triggering it all the time.

Swipe left and right on an SMS to reveal the timestamp and other stuff.

Blew my mind after tearing my hair out that this information was just gone. It's not gone, just hidden in a place you'd never think to look for it.

Not sure if apple really can be considered modern in a space developing as fast as that. From my pov apples ui is still the dated sister everyone is trying to copy from

What is more modern?

Apples UI has been copied since as long as I’ve been alive

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