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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

> downloaded your favorite personal finance, social media and productivity apps,

The phone, as an interface SUCKS. Full stop.

Touch has limitations, voice has limitations, there is a reason that people who have to type still sit down with monitors and keyboards. There is a reason that physical switches still exist. (IF you touch input by rote on a screen that may be in some other state, you check before you start).

As for google, stop using it if you dont like it. Bing, DuckDuckGo Kagi all exist at a price point that works for you.

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The phone is wonderful for a lot of stuff, especially for people who aren't naturally very tactile and don't usually do things by feel.

The design language is also far more indirect, high level, and automated. It forces people to make everything very obvious and very automated. Phones make it easy to tap a button and very hard to do complex "blank canvas" kind of work.

On desktop sometimes programmers build a UNIXy modular system and the UI is just a direct translation, so you have to do manual bookkeeping steps between parts of the program, like in old school KiCad, where modern apps just have everything unified and sync instantly.

Are the other search engines actually better? It seems like the problem is the AI generated trash content, not the engines themselves.

> The phone is wonderful for a lot of stuff, especially for people who aren't naturally very tactile and don't usually do things by feel.

There's tons of research on this, HCI, Airplanes... Even when you aren't tactile, something being tactile is how you can keep a plane in the air. Or NOT crash every time we adjust the heat, stereo, or turn signal when driving a car. It's how chef's can chop veg without looking and do it fairly uniform.

> Are the other search engines actually better? It seems like the problem is the AI generated trash content, not the engines themselves.

I broke down and spent the 10 bucks to try Kagi, best money I have spent in a long time! I had to go back to google today and was appalled.

Vehicles are a special case of a hard realtime interaction between a person and the world, which should probably not be done at all by people who aren't good with their hands. I'm still not exactly sure how drivers don't hit the gas when they mean to hit the brakes at least a few times a year.

If a UI is realtime outside of video games(Where people do in fact love tactile UI), most would probably hate it.

Most UIs are an artificial constrained world where we deliberately don't want the level of control a chef has over the knife, because that would mean our own dexterity affects the final product, like with handwriting.

Tactile would be nice, but it's not as necessary when the UI only has a limited number of possibilities and a confirm step for everything.

Which is probably part of why we spend all day staring at the dang things, they are so carefully designed not to challenge us that even staring at a wall feels like effort.

I liked t9 word and 9 key. Could type without looking.

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