Hacker News Reader

Comment by jurip | Hacker News Reader

One inexact wording here I noticed: "Swiping right from the left edge of the screen does the same as pressing the Back button." If you're implementing that yourself, it's important it's not a swipe gesture, it's an edge pan gesture. It has to be an interactive, cancellable pan that follows your finger, or it just feels wrong.

View on HN

I think the X/Twitter iOS app and the reddit app are guilty of this. I find myself way too often typing something out, then barely touching the edge of my phone, and my entire comment is gone.

Pro tip: Twitter works as PWA.

On Twitter you can't swipe out of the tweet compose screen. You have to explicitly click the "Cancel" button in the top left, and if you have anything written it'll pop a dialogue to either delete the contents, save as a draft, or cancel (go back to composing)

I'm not sure how you'd swipe out of this screen.

Swiping right from left to go back is a horrible horrible way of implementing a "back button" and you should never do it, always have an actual back. Why? Because left handed people exists. It's a not a natural of comfortable movement when done with your left thumb. You also can reverse the direction for left handed people, because if you normally read left to right, then swiping right seems like it should take you forward, not back.

Generally I'm not a fan of swiping to navigate. On iOS it's really bad, because swiping from the bottom up, you bring up some menu, which actually contain a bunch of important stuff, which you can never find when you need it, but which you will trigger constantly when scrolling a web page.

Perhaps more generally: iOS have devolved into a horribly complicated OS that is an absolute nightmare to navigate and I feel like Apple should start to take UI/UX serious again. Mostly the issue to me seems to be the expectation that the phone should handle a whole hosts of tasks for which it is ill suited.

I exclusively use my phone with my left hand and I have no issue with the swipe to go back gesture in iOS.

Sailfish OS does this properly and consistently - in all apps.

https://sailfishos.org/

I've found it overall simpler and better than both iOS and Android.

I'm sure Sailfish, too, allows you to prevent the gesture if you want. On iOS if you use the standard navigation controller, you get it automatically. If you're swimming against the tide and want to do something unusual, you have to implement it yourself, but it's easy enough with a readily available gesture recognizer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com