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Comment by simonswords82 | Hacker News Reader

When I tell people about the long press spacebar feature they react like I’ve changed their (mobile) lives.

The long-press spacebar wasn't even really a great design, it was a hack to replace an older, better feature.

iPhones prior to the iPhone 11 used to be able to sense the pressure you touched with on the display, and a firm touch had a ton of neat but hard to discover user interactions, from previewing links in safari without opening them to preventing accidentally hitting the flashlight on the lockscreen on X/XS by requiring a bit of pressure.

One of the best (imo) features was the ability to move the cursor in any direction by dragging firmly anywhere on the keyboard. No delay, no press and hold, just instant access to a cursor. The new "haptic touch" way of doing this makes it difficult if not impossible to scroll down, and needing to press and hold ensures it will always be slower.

20 second video demo of how it used to work: https://youtu.be/XlcCgiYF2Fs?t=25

>One of the best (imo) features was the ability to move the cursor in any direction by dragging firmly anywhere on the keyboard.

Must be tons of fun to use with Swipe-type input (aka Flow, etc)

You really had to press hard to get it to happen. iOS has also natively had swipe input for a while now (not sure if it was at the same time though)

I really miss the haptic touch features. The flashlight one was particularly cool because you could instantly enable it by just clicking it like you'd click on an actual flashlight (usually the on button requires some pressure). Now it's an awkward half second delay that is still hard to discover and now feels less natural.

In my experience (on an iPhone 7 Plus), the hard-press still involved a small delay, so the new long-tap isn't that much different. They may have optimized this in newer versions of the phone, but I jumped from a 7 to an 11 and thought it wasn't that bad. I didn't like the original version because the delay left me wondering if I'd pressed hard enough or not waited long enough for it to activate.

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