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Comment by Esau | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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