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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

You know, until you mentioned it just now, I’d forgotten my phone even has 3D Touch. It had been literally weeks since I last thought to use force-touch for anything, mostly because there is zero indication where it will work.

And it is half-baked in the sense that when I do activate 3D Touch, it’s usually by accident. It is almost the same gesture as deleting apps on the home screen! I go to delete an app, press-and-hold a little too long and instead of squiggly icons with delete buttons I get...a menu? And usually I get that the 2nd time I try, too.

Force-touch badly needs something to make it obvious, and they need to work a lot harder on making it not overlap with anything else. Ironically, for an interface that loves gratuitous animation, force-touchable objects might have made a lot more sense with some fancy appearance or animation and they have none.

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Start using the keyboard trackpad for moving the cursor, selecting and deleting words, paragraphs or the whole text input. It's the killer app.

holy shit

Well, I forget to use it on the keyboard too. :)

And the keyboard has exactly the same problem; force-touch uses space that already has a purpose and a gesture that is somewhat similar to that of the normal keyboard function. I tried it just now and there is a decent chance I will start typing random characters instead of activating it. That, to me, is a failure of an interface. I will admit that once activated correctly, the mini-trackpad is a better method for moving the cursor (although, almost anything could improve over the default text editing on iOS).

wow nice! I was only aware of the call button (useless 3 contact shortcut) and app store instant search. this is almost like a Easter egg.

Unfortunately the keyboard force touch only works about ~70% of the time, which is too unpredictable for me to start incorporating into regular use as a user.

It's odd that after ten years of development, Apple still hasn't made their keyboard just work. Selecting and manipulating text is still buggy and unpredictable.

Wait until the cursor stops blinking. Takes some tenths of a second after you stop typing. I was tearing out my hair until I read that.

I agree. I got really excited about the keyboard thing (when I edit code on my phone, proper cursor movement is severely lacking), but when I tried it on a friend's 6S I was severely underwhelmed. The activation force seemed random, and the cursor would never land where you expected. It was slower than using the little magnifying glass on the actual text.

Touch keyboards are a hard problem, but we use them so often (I'm using one now) that I think Apple would be smart to put some more thought into it.

That's an accurate assessment. I use the trackpad on my 6s+ frequently. 50% of the time it works perfectly. 50% of the time I apparently don't lift my finger in the speed or direction iOS expects, so the cursor moves forwards or backwards 1 or 2 characters from where I wanted it to stop. And I have to try again because there's no other way to nudge the cursor a character or two.

Just a little tweaking and it would be perfect. I don't have this problem with using the keyboard normally, which is quite accurate.

I just looked at the changelog for iOS 9.3 and it says:

> Improves reliability when using 3D Touch on the keyboard

Hopefully this means "just a little tweaking" was done and the feature is more comfortable to use.

On the subject of keyboards, I have always found the iOS keyboard to be the most satisfying to use, possibly also the most accurate. What do other people like using?

I liked the windows phone keyboard, thought the Fire phone was okay, but am chronically unsatisfied with the Android typing experience. I have played with a few but settled for a while on Google Keyboard before moving onto Fleksy which isn't bad. Shame its broken for HTML text input fields...

SwiftKey on Android is still by far the best for me, but unfortunately other problems with Android (namely the dearth of high-end devices under 5") are probably going to force me to switch to iPhone.

The default Apple keyboard makes me incredibly frustrated, especially when used one-handed (which is 90% of my usage). No flow typing, and nearly all numbers, punctuation, and symbols are locked away behind layers of menus. I do find it the most accurate for typing in unpredictable plain text, but that's not very useful even for passwords (LastPass + most of my passwords have symbols in them).

Most of the third party keyboards are crippled shadows of their Android counterparts, but I can least get flow typing through them.

> SwiftKey on Android is still by far the best for me, but unfortunately other problems with Android (namely the dearth of high-end devices under 5") are probably going to force me to switch to iPhone.

The Xperia Z Compact line is, for my money, the most pleasant Android phone I've found. The Z3C is still plenty snappy and is my personal favorite, but after sacrificing mine to the pavement deities the Z5C is still pretty great.

You can access the second mode of the keyboard by tapping on the "123" icon, dragging your thumb over to the key you want to select, then lifting. This also works with capitalization + shift and international keyboards.

There are a few gotchas that you have to learn which come with practice and it really pays off.

There's a delay for how quickly you can use it after the last time you've used it. The delay could/should be smaller, but don't get frustrated. Go slow and don't press too hard.

When you get used to the timings and pressures, it pays off and it's suddenly a pleasure to go and delete or correct something, or the whole input. Now I get frustrated on phones without it.

I went through a period of thinking the same: sometimes it would seem to want to type a letter instead of triggering the cursor movement. I think the key is that you just keep your finger on the screen while applying a bit more pressure (press harder, then release the pressure without lifting off the screen) to trigger the trackpad mode. I now find it 100% reliable and can't figure out how to trigger the odd behaviour I was previously experiencing.

If you try to use the force-touch "trackpad" too soon after you've typed a character, the keyboard thinks you're still typing and refuses to do it. You have to pause for a bit or tap somewhere outside of the keyboard then try to force-touch. At least, that has been my experience. It's incredibly frustrating because I almost always want to use it to correct something in the word I just typed.

I have the same problem with the dictation icon. Sometimes I'll start typing a message and then realize that I'd rather dictate it. Once you start typing, the keyboard goes into "typing" mode. If you try to tap the dictation icon, it thinks you're aiming for the space bar.

I think that the keyboard is trying to be "smart" by altering its behavior based on what it thinks you'll do next. The problem is that those changes aren't reflected in the UI, so there's no way for me to know about them. I'm sure I benefit from that intelligence some of the time, but I only notice it when it when the keyboard stubbornly refuses to do what I want.

If you ever find yourself trying to activate the keyboard cursor but the phone thinks you're typing, simply let off on the pressure a little (without removing your finger from the screen) and then press down again. This will switch you into cursor mode. I've found this to be 100% reliable.

wow, this works.

The 3d touch 'trackpad' thing on the keyboard is great, but i could never get it to reliabily work... but i think using this (slight push, then harder again) makes it almost completely usable.

I don't have a 6s but I think you could tweak a little bit in the Keyboard settings under _Accessibility_.

It works every time. Just wait for the cursor to start blinking and then deep press. It takes a while to get used to but then it just works.

It's not odd at all. PEBKAC is tough to solve with the constraints of a mobile device.

Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by "keyboard trackpad"? Is this on iOS or what?

Edit: HOLY WHAT!?! How did I not know that this exists?!?! I just figured it out. If you didn't know what it is, like me, then pull up any place where you can input text. Type something in and then Force Touch anywhere on the keyboard while it's showing. Your cursor will move with your finger like a trackpad. That's amazing.

I'd like to take the opportunity to point out that when people talk about how mobile touch interfaces have "low discoverability", comments like this are exactly what they're talking about.

But it should also be noted there's a difference of importance between the discoverability for basic functions, like opening apps or moving the cursor 'regularly' in a text field. Then you have the discoverability of the shortcuts, or 'power user' features which you can do without

Of course, this is all on a grade. Control Centre has a medium-low discoverability (given only a visual hint on the lock screen), and is more vital to the iPhone. The 3D Touch cursor movement is a lot less necessary (I know about it but never use it), and is a lot less discoverable. The 3D Touch-from-edge-of-screen-to-switch-between-apps gesture is there as well, but make slightly more discoverable as its easier to accidentally trigger it to learn about it for the first time.

An aside, I actually find the 'advanced' cursor movement, in both the 3D Touch form on iPhone 6s Plus and in the long-press form on the iPad Pro, to be next to impossible to use. I can never reliably figure out what triggers the different modes of it (cursor movement, text selection, etc) and thus barely ever use it.

Deep pressing on the keyboard triggers a cursor movement (keep pressed to continue moving the cursor). Press deeper to toggle cursor selection.

DAMN IT. I knew about the cursor movement but not about the selection!

This keyboard movement business is far from less necessary -- moving a cursor in text the traditional way, with that wonky magnifying glass and terrible snapping precision, can be borderline infuriating.

They could pop up a suggestion/tutorial the first time a user tries to refine a selection repeatedly?

Something would be nice.

Pop-up tutorials always make me feel somewhat intruded on and break the transparent assimilation between me and the tech; being reminded you don't completely control this thing in your hand (or on your monitor -- websites fall in the same boat) dampens my trust of a tool.

Maybe including it in tutorials in the system app. But, yeah something would be nice.

http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

Wow. +1 for having no idea I could do that. So much easier than the old way of trying to hunt and peck the right spot with the magnifying glass.

You can do the same thing on iPad using 2 fingers.

Test

This isn't even the end of it. Just to clarify, besides moving it like on a trackpad, you can force touch the "keyboard" while still holding down your finger, and it'll select the word underneath. Force touch again and everything will be deselected. All while you're still in the "trackpad mode".

I know, HOLY! As soon as I received my 6s I started pressing on everything and found this amazing feature. People bag on 6s force touch but I use it often and I'm a happy messenger for it.

I just wish this worked on third party keyboards, I can't force myself off Swiftkey to Apple's keyboard at all.

This app also exists for all jail broken users. A swipe over the keyboard controls the cursor, and can select, move, erase, etc. Very smooth and natural.

The keyboard trackpad almost always lands me off by one character however. Something about releasing pressure changes how my finger contacts the screen. I love the idea, but I usually end up needing to do the long press after trying and failing 3 times to position my cursor where I want it.

It's not the killer app. Blackberry devices (e.g. Passport) have had this for ages.

(Not a problem that Apple's copying tech, it's just not unique)

If by ages you mean a little over a year, then yes. But just because another device had it first doesn't mean it's not the killer app for 3D touch.

Sorry I thought you meant that 3D touch made the keyboard selection the killer app for the iPhone platform.

It seems like a year and a half is a long time in mobile phone tech. Google apps have already said that the browser that Blackberry is out of date (which speaks about both the release cycle of Blackberry for a newish phone and Google).

Either way, the touch interface is very cool on Blackberry.

Yeah, kb trackpad is pretty much the only thing I knowingly use 3D Touch for. I randomly discovered it months ago, thought it was some confusing but at first, then realized what I'd done. The accuracy has always been slightly disappointing, though. As well as a few other little quirks, like losing its place in long text, getting stuck at the top/bottom without scrolling upward/downward, etc. but overall, pretty handy.

It's nice, but it could've been done in software. In fact I've used that on my iPhones since probably 2013/2014.

For me and my stubby wildly uncontrollable fingers, this is worth the upgrade to the 6S almost all by itself. I use this multiple times a day and it's beautiful.

(I do use 3DTouch shortcuts as well and they probably save me a whole bunch of minutes over an entire day.)

It's a nice feature. However, I found it's hard to get it right to use kb as a mouse with 3D touch. Sometimes it just wont' register no matter how hard and fast I press down. Very frustrating.

Apple, are you listening?

As a person writing a lot of non-english text, I hate this feature with a passion because I constantly trigger it by accident when I'm trying to press-and-hold over a key to get to an alternate letter with some diacritics on it.

With my muscle memory, I end up marking parts of the text and overwriting it afterwards instead of inserting that one letter with the diacritics.

I think 3D touch is a lot like a right-mouse click in the desktop environment, in that there is rarely anything to indicate where you can do it. You basically have to read about it or just try.

That said, I don't personally care for it. I also feel that iOS is getting too complicated.

A right-click equivalent already existed: a long press.

3D Touch is the long press controlled by finger pressure instead of time pressed. It took an already hard-to-discover feature and made it more nuanced (that is, more complicated).

Except when you're on the home screen; long press will let you wiggle icons and force touch will let you get app shortcuts.

Why couldn't long press do both? Make "wiggle icons" the top app shortcut or something. ("Move icon" would probably be a less silly name.)

You don't see how what you just wrote is drastically more complicated to the average user? Tiny differences in time and pressure determines two different features when pressing an app icon.

Don't invoke "the average user" when you only have data on one user. We measure things these days.

>It took an already hard-to-discover feature and made it more nuanced (that is, more complicated).

I would argue that it fixed the long hold, honestly. Waiting for long holds is a total pain. Being able to reach the same level of contextual menus instantly without long holding is a huge source of relief for the user in apps that rely on that kind of interaction.

You can't really argue that if it doesn't do the same thing, though

It also doubles the bandwidth of that interaction. You had one slow and one fast interaction, and there now are two of each.

Big question seems to be what the best mapping between those interactions and commands is.

You want to map the most frequently used interactions to the fast interactions, but you also want the mapping to be learnable (consistency across applications likely is needed there), and 'intuitive' in the sense that the mapping starts feeling normal relatively easily.

From what I read, it seems it isn't even clear yet that there a good mapping exists under those constraints.

I do look forward to more experiments here, though. Multi-finger force touch? I can't imagine how that would work on an iPhone that you hold with one hand, but on an iPad, there might be some really useful application.

Cameras in the LCD screen that allow non-contact interactions? Apart from the "screen is a copier" use that Sun predicted in project Starfire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_video_prototype), it seems hard to envision uses, but who knows? Signing to your screen could be easier or faster than typing.

The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

Please no wave-at-me interfaces.

Yes, that would be part of the challenge. A safe way would be to require some comtinuous physical interaction to activate the mode. More sophisticated would be a neural network that decides whether you are trying to communicate with your phone. Also note that it doesn't directly have to be an interface that allows you to accidentally detonate a nuke while you think you are waving to a friend passing by. Limited versions of this have been proposed for cars and trucks in the form of detectors that detect whether the driver is awake and attentive to the road.

> I can't imagine how that would work on an iPhone that you hold with one hand

I wouldn't mind those, especially if it relates to multitasking. Sometimes I hold phone with two hands.

Force-swipe to switch tabs on Safari, force-swipe two fingers to switch apps.

Long-hold was always one of the most annoying parts of smartphone interaction in my opinion. 3D Touch means you get instant feedback, which is more useful both when you know that a UI element supports it (so you don't have to wait when you know exactly what you want to do) and when a UI element doesn't support it (so you don't have to wait to find out).

The problem with a long press is that you don't need new hardware for that, so there are no new phones that people "need" to have. ;)

I think 3D Touch is where Apple "samsunged".

The overlap with the long press, and uses they got for it are not compelling.

It should be a way to displace content and move it to other apps, for example. Or to pierce through the lock screen to command a running app (like Spotify). Or to pierce the simple interface of an app to access advanced features or something. Just thinking out loud.

The worst thing is that 3D touch made the iPhone 6s very heavy. Hopefully they get rid of it in an upcoming iteration.

It's most useful implementation is peek and pop, to preview something without committing to going into that screen. That's nothing like right click. The only place it's at all similar to right click is on the home screen, and even that is totally different than any right click implementation I've ever seen. The most similar thing is right clicking an icon on the OS X dock and seeing recently modified documents relating to that app.

The only time I remember is when I tap a link just a hair too hard and it doesn't open because it went through a fraction of a second of the force touch action. I've never "hated" a feature on the iPhone. I very strongly dislike this one.

I had that problem and almost turned it off before noticing that you could adjust the pressure sensitivity. At the maximum setting I never run into the issue anymore.

I dislike the 3d touch on the new macbook trackpad for the same reason. i try to move something but it decides to show me a dictionary definition of that word. does anyone use the dictionary that much for this to be the default behavior?

You have to press pretty hard to trigger the second click... Once you feel it click the first time, don't keep pressing harder?

Assuming you haven't set this already, you can go into Trackpad preferences and change it from Medium to Firm. That'll switch from "you have to press pretty hard" to "goddamn dude, are you trying to break the trackpad in half?" If you're still doing that by accident, you can disable it completely.

If anybody has a force meter handy, I'm curious what the actual numbers are on these.

EDIT: QuickLook is the more useful function than Dictionary, IMO. I use it regularly.

I turned it off on my Magic Trackpad 2. It absolutely breaks drag and drop for me -- nearly 90% of drag and drop operations result in unintentional force click (which never does anything useful)

Yeah, the timing is definitely something that could use feedback.

I think they should have at least done something similar to the pull-to-refresh animation (where the shape isn’t “complete” until you’ve pulled far enough). Why couldn’t they pop up a tiny circle or something under your finger that turns like a clock and shows you how much longer you have to press to activate a 3D Touch?

Re: a lack of indication where it will work, maybe it will be address in a future device that has an actual 3D display, where some UI elements hover over the "surface" closer to the user, apparent that they can be pushed in deeper. I wonder if Nintendo will implement that in their next handheld. :)

Cursor navigation with 3D touch is very nice, and a long time coming. Tap and hold the keyboard when typing to move the cursor around.

Before I learned the keyboard-trackpad thing, I just used it for that annoying Safari bug where you tap a link and it doesn't open; for whatever reason push-popping it with 3d-touch works.

If it's the quirk I think it is, you can also tap and hold the link and drag down a bit. The link often then activates.

I use the 3D Touch all the time, new email message, quick contacts, preview emails or photos. I love it.

I discovered 3D Touch after watching an Apple commercial on TV, 3 months after I got the iPhone 6s Plus.

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