Edit: it's the equivalent to not putting keyboard shortcut keystrokes into pull down menus.
There is definitely room for improvement though. There are some regressions that are too obvious. The recent regression that comes to mind is forcing the end user to go through extra taps to switch the camera between front and back during a FaceTime call when previously it was a one-button click
I seriously doubt there was a groundswell of users complaining they could swap cameras with a single tap.
The other annoying change was putting the End Call button in a panel the bottom right. Regular users have muscle memory, and suddenly they have to relearn one of the main features.
Changes like these are superficial tinkering and make work for the sake of appearances rather than considered, focused development.
While 'desktop mode' is super useful the HN crowd, I don't think most users would benefit from it.
A non-technical user is probably only minimally aware that mobile and desktop sites might have different features at all. And even when you do use it, it might not have the desired affect. I might have been browsing around on "mobile.site.com" for a while and repeating my request with a desktop User-Agent is still going to get me the mobile version. (this happens to me on m.facebook.com) To fix this I have to know how to modify the URL to point to the non-mobile-only version...easy for this crowd, but not for the average user.
Certain CSS @media queries also don't seem to be affected by "Desktop Mode". (It only changes the User-Agent I believe?) So in other situations, it won't work no matter what and that's pretty frustrating/confusing/inconsistent if you don't know the details.
Even if I do succeed, a desktop webpage on mobile can be a pain with all the zooming and zooming out needed. Sometimes desktop sites don't even work properly on mobile browsers! Now...we understand the constraints, but all these details come together to make it a pretty confusing feature for the average user.
I think most users wouldn't get value from this so it's obscure by default...but for the technical types that love this, it's not too hard to figure out how to move this feature to a place where it's convenient to access.
Overall I think the current design is a pretty good balance all things considered.
(though I do wish the ability to move the desktop mode button to the 1st slot was more obvious. Definitely took me a while to figure this out)
It took me a second to realize that "Request Desktop Site" is available in the Share Sheet. I use it by long-pressing the refresh button.
Long pressing there also gives me a "request without ad blockers" button which I've found super useful as well. A bit weird this option isn't in the Share Sheet like desktop mode is...
also isn't it weird that this is called the "Share Sheet" but has lots of buttons for non-sharing related things?
The whole "Share Sheet" is rather confusing. It has three categories of actions in one screen. Potentially useful options are hidden wayyy down the list (like this Request Desktop Option). Even more options are hidden inside "More" menu all the way at the end. Which is also where the re-ordering controls are – although I just realized the icons can be reordered with drag-and-drop.
All in all, not very discoverable for a feature with such high utility.
That doesn't make sense at all to me: The right click button on a mouse is visible.
The Mac way of hiding it behind the ctrl key was non-discoverable and non-obvious to me.
Force touch just seems like a different form of right mouse clicking.
E.g. to delete you didn't need to "right click, send to trash". You dragged the item to the trashcan.
You're probably thinking of either discoverability or affordance.
The problem with Solaris, Windows, and other desktop workstations at the time was that the second (and even third) mouse buttons were required for many workflows, especially in applications---i.e. a lot of functionality was only available from the right-click menu or via the middle mouse button. This introduced a lot of unnecessary complexity to computer use, especially for new users, because of low visibility and discoverability.
Even today, Mac hardware never has a visible 2nd mouse/trackpad button. Sure, you can click a trackpad with 2 fingers or tap on the right side of a mouse to get a context menu, but keeping the buttons invisible forced these shortcuts to remain just that, and not an essential requirement to get the job done. Windows apps today follow this rule as well -- never make right-clicking the only way to execute a particular function.
Damn the little tip about tapping the clock to jump is so handy, I have actually searched for how to do this and never came across a description of this feature.
Easter eggs?
Actually, I wish any modern smartphone OS had half the thought put into it that Palm had 20 years ago. After all this time, nothing even comes close for contact and calendar management, as well as actual phone use!
Whenever a key feature in iOS seems missing I just google for where it went. iOS search is so essential that I couldn’t see it ever removed...
This reminds me that several versions ago, Windows stopped underlining the shortcut keys to the menu items by default --- taking away the only affordance to discovering that the keyboard can be used to more quickly activate the menus. I learned by accident long ago ("what's the Alt key for?"), and have used it since. In contrast, I remember trying to operate a Mac the same way but gave up experimenting with the Alt key and such to try to get the menus to show (I know about the shortcuts, but they are not easily discoverable/explorable in the same way that menus are) --- and only later found out that trying to operate the menus on a Mac from the keyboard is... not very intuitive and disabled by default (why!?!?):
https://superuser.com/questions/117549/use-the-keyboard-to-a...
https://superuser.com/questions/504111/how-to-select-file-me...
(I'm not sure if the above even apply to pre-OS X --- when I discovered the function of Alt and the underlined keys in Windows, it was the Windows 3.1 era.)
Well, that's not a dictum to design UIs by. This way everything becomes "critical".
At some point you just use statistics, and if something is critical to fewer people, you can give it lower priority anyway than what most want to use everyday.
This is not so nice when you only want to reload the page while clearing the cached files.
Could have been something like a long press or double tap on the refresh button.
Not a single time in the past 5 years or so. What's your point?
I thought cool, I'll try it with the nyt - It'll be like the original iPhone demo again but no - it goes to a pay screen. Mercury Browser kind of worked though which is an app that "can spoof the UserAgent string to trick websites into thinking the browser is a desktop browser."
Added to this is the obvious point that with a touch interface on a small screen, you cannot make everything obvious. It's impossible.
Yes, why not? Tons of PC laptops had it that way as well, even industrial-style all-function PCs.
Perhaps they should be located in the middle of the screen? ;)
I'd rather present all of the options and let the user learn what options are there even if they never use them.
Personally, I prefer the Android ecosystem, and honestly I'd very much prefer even more control than that. In fact, I'm really excited about the Librem 5 project, which is pretty much the exact opposite of Apple. However, many of my friends prefer the Apple experience.
A product doesn't have to cater to everyone. If it tries to, it ends up alienating everyone.
I've always found the Apple-way, wrt UI, to be different; more confusing for me because I'm used to a different paradigm. But, there's some lock-in effect there, if you start with Apple, you become accustomed to their way and then other "ways" seem more complicated. In practice it seems largely to be just familiarity.
I like Apple's design, but that's...definitely not true. You could charitably say that Apple's goal is a seamless marriage of form and function, and they do that better than most. But they have always cared more about aesthetics than any other important developer, of hardware or software.
Meanwhile a function-motivated Finder in MacOS would not look anything like the clunky dinosaur we seem to be stuck with.