Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

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Anyone who says everything about an iPhone is easy or obvious hasn't ever tried to do sophisticated things on an iPhone without prior knowledge. I remember when I got my first-gen iPhone there were multiple things that were unclear to me, whether it was 'swipe to reveal the delete button' or 'long-press this random thing to reveal more options'.

Apple fans can ramble all they want about how everything is simple and easy in Apple products, but eventually products get complicated. That's why Macs grew those awful hidden bits of complexity called Context Menus and you find them all over in OS X apps now, and that's why features like multitasking on iOS are hidden behind increasingly arcane and obscure actions. Double-tap the home button? Shake to undo? Yeah, defend that stuff all you want: Sometimes good UX design still involves compromises.

You assert "Apple fans can ramble all they want about how everything is simple and easy" without evidence.

This is incorrect. For example, many pro-Apple commenters have discussed how the "home" button on iOS devices is a horror show of modality which performs about at least five different actions.

You also dismiss arcane and obscure actions too easily. There is nothing wrong with providing an obscure action as a "keyboard accelerator" so long as there is also an obvious way to perform the same action too. You're examples of "double-tap the home button" and "shake to undo" are good examples where this principle is not obeyed: there is no simple alternative and is, as you say, a UI compromise.

I'm responding to the original article. This should have been clear to you by the fact that my comment was at the root?

I don't disagree with your thoughts on the difference between scenarios where a bad verb is chosen as a shortcut and scenarios where a bad verb is the only way to do something. However, that still isn't relevant to my core point, which is that the iPhone has been and continues to be a place where important actions can only be performed with poorly chosen, confusing, undiscoverable verbs.

This is hardly unique to Apple, to be sure, but again, I was responding to the original article's smug assertion.

All those things on ios are really shortcuts, sometimes really non obvious, I agree, but not essential to get things done. I think only shake to undo doesn't have a visible counterpart?

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