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Comment by aroman | Hacker News Reader

Have you actually used 3D touch? Because I use it just about every day, so much so that it's one of the biggest things I miss when using phones that don't have it. It also isn't touted as a major selling point anymore -- it just quietly exists, serving an extremely useful purpose as a better "right click" for touch screens.

The touch bar I agree is major marketing hype.

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Have you seen non-technical people using their devices, particularly older people? Every button press they make is a force touch and if that doesn't do what's expected they'll press harder. It's hard enough getting them not to long press or double click and now the company known for making things easy to use is making things even more confusing for lay people.

They stopped caring about those people when they dropped skeuomorphic design. They expect their users to have some experience with phones.

The number of "non-technical" people is only shrinking every single day. Why would they continue to design hardware for everyone just to cater to a constantly shrinking minority demographic?

It's not shrinking and it's the majority demographic.

I'd say it's growing in fact, younger people growing up with the internals of their devices more hidden from them than ever, they will have less technical literacy than their older peers.

3D touch isn't supported on the iPhone SE or on any iPads. Given that it's not supported across the iOS hardware line, it's not assigned any essential functionality.

I expect that it'll play a larger role after the next major redesign of iOS in a couple years.

They've started faking 3D Touch on iPads - see e.g. the new control center, which will respond mostly the same as it does on a modern iPhone if you use a similar "force touch" action (even though you're really just holding it for n milliseconds).

I'm betting on a force-sensitive iPad sooner than later, probably the next-gen iPad Pro.

Can't you just detect force, because the surface of the touch increases slightly, due to your skin being flexible? Seems like a feature you could emulate anyway.

I'd imagine that would result in a slew of false triggers, because one can slightly vary the angle or pressure of their touch without intending to invoke any kind of secondary action. One of the reasons I like the implementation of 3D Touch versus e.g. long press on Android is that it's a deliberate, positive input.

But, to the parent's point, right-clicking is never (and should never) be assigned any essential functionality. Everyone agrees that the hockey-puck mice were terrible but their initial goal was admirable, IMO - new users should always be able to find commands with a single click of a button or in a menu. More advanced users could do a secondary click for quicker access to commonly used features. That seems like a great design paradigm to follow for any alternate clicking.

It can be useful and still be terrible interaction design - it's uses are entirely lacking in discoverability

Something can lack obvious discoverability and still be good interaction design. In fact, I'd argue it's beneficial in this case, since it's generally an advanced/power user feature.

Right-click on Mac laptop has the same non-discoverability.

I'd argue force touch is more discoverable because it's very common for new users to press hard enough to accidentally activate it. Then you kind of play around for a few second until you realize how to do it intentionally.

A couple Macbook users I know have never once right-clicked and are amazed at how handy it is once demonstrated to them.

What do you use it for?

Number one thing I use it for is on the keyboard. While typing, you see a mistake you did or need to change something. Press hard on the keyboard (on the iphone) and you get a cursor you can drag around, as if the keyboard becomes a trackpad.

Android let's you touch & drag the spacebar for this - thing is, it works just fine on my cheap old phone, no pressure-touch required.

android doesn’t however do the drag selection like ios does:

hard press keyboard to get a cursor ->

drag around keyboard to place cursor ->

hard press on word to start selection ->

drag around keyboard to place end of selection

it’s a phenomenal way to select text, and everyone i know that i show it to uses it every day from them on. it’s not discoverable, but DAMN it’s handy

I'm not sure I understand. To drag select text on android I just long press on text and drag my finger. It leaves little control points on each side to adjust to the character level (otherwise generally snaps to whole words). The first two steps seem unnecessary - why not just press on the word to start with?

Because pressing on words involves taking your finger off the keyboard, and the text is anyways often too small to be precise. You can fix it with the control bars on the sides, but it's more finicky and more interaction and requires you to move your hands.

But the description already included

> hard press on word to start selection ->

Perhaps I misunderstood though - is this hard press when the cursor is on the word.

I guess I just don't really see the problem it solves, it's just moving my thumb over the text I want rather than three distinct actions just to start the selection. Then I guess two more to change the selection and end the selection process? Whereas to select text I just long press -> move. Or for one word, long press.

Precision seems fine as I test it here, and if I want sub-word selections (rare) then adjustments seem like a reasonable approach. If the selection on iOS snaps to words anyway (second force press selects whole word?) you'd need this on both platforms.

I don't really understand how the android approach requires more interaction. Press & drag is surely less interaction than press (get cursor), drag (position cursor), press (select word), drag (move cursor), press (finish selection).

The only selections I generally want without moving "off" the keyboard is deletions, and that's accomplished just by dragging from the backspace.

Guess it's just me, but I find the regular text selection tool a lot quicker and more intuitive. Also, I wonder how many people that haven't read about it somewhere know the feature even exists.

BTW, I have 3d touch on, just don't ever use it. It's on because I'm preparing myself for the inevitable future of variable force touch gestures.

You mean holding the touch for a second and then manually moving the markers?

Yes. And on a similar topic, I find the loupe effect a lot more intuitive than the android bottom of cursor handle too

Better than android, likely, but I seriously can't edit a word file due to this. A mouse/trackpad is so much better than ios.

flashlight and camera on iPhone X homescreen. 3D touch on music in the control center for more controls.

I'be yet to discover a single use case where it might be useful. And it's nightmare on laptops

3D Touch on the keyboard to move the cursor or make text selections

This could be accomplished just as well with long taps.

I was a heavy force touch user, but I did not miss it on Android. Oreo even shows it's possible to have jump lists without force touch (gasp!) which was really the only particularly useful feature.

Here's the top things I use force touch for -

- Moving the cursor

- Opening Incognito mode for Safari

- Requesting Desktop version of a site.

- Turning on/off tethering from the control center

- Setting brightness on the flashlight

I use most of these without the force touch :)

Some of them are not even force touch, but a long press :)

And funnily enough the most useful feature for the control center, turning Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off, are not even available there.

So all in all force touch is next to useless (and it's nearly impossible to discover what it will do or not do in different situations)

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