How so?
One of the key points of the article is that the the perceived intuitiveness, especially among expert users, doesn't extend to people unfamiliar with the interface. I have seen my own folks struggle with iOS, especially recovering from accidental taps as the article mentions. My mom hits the home button on her iphone whenever she hits the wrong UI button. On her laptop, that happens much more rarely. I forgot who said this first, but I firmly believe that software developers should personally watch non-expert users interact with their UI before shipping.
Your point about toddlers being able to scroll and zoom, applies to most things kids do. They can pickup a remote and turn the TV off, or unlock doors, play handheld video games, etc, etc.
I mean come on, what could possibly be more intuitive than dragging a photo or screen to the right when you want it to move to the right? Barring mind-controlled computers, I think this is as intuitive as it could possibly get.
Keep in mind also that mouse controlled computers introduce a whole level of indirection.
Stuff like this should be simple. On android it is connecting the cable and copying the pics. The only reason you are not able to do this is, that Apple values lock-in over good design. And I do not trust a company with these values to store my pictures indefinitly, sorry.
And no, lock-in is not what drives design at apple.
Design is always about solving problems. Toddlers wiping screens is the equivalent of toddlers smearing paint. They explore, they don’t solve problems.
IOS might be the better thing for a certain class of problems, but for other classes of problems it can become a burden very quickly, even to undemanding people like my father.
Truly good design would grow with the user and give each person the level of control they need. OSX works much better in these regards IMO.
Inconsistent and not discoverable, which isn’t anything like a right mouse button at all.
You even had stuff like the puck mouse, which didn’t support the feature.
Ditto the similar force-press thing on the newer Macbook touchpads—my file drag-and-drop operations drop to a success rate of about 50% with that enabled. Took me a while to figure out what was wrong with my new laptop first time I used one, because I'd forgotten about that "feature".
Also I agree that mouse has tactile feedback. Even if I wanted to experiment with 3D Touch, I can never know whether there's nothing 3D-touchy under my finger or I just did not apply enough pressure.
IMO they should have some standard UI idiom for 3D-touch enabled regions and they should have negative feedback (like some vibration) when user pressed 3D-touch on unsupported region. But in its current iteration 3D touch is almost user-hostile. I can't imagine why Apple released it without better polish.
The number one way I would want to use my iPad daily is to have it in portrait mode with a book or video on the top half and my note book on the bottom. This cannot be done. The only way to split the screen is side by side (which I have never found useful for anything), and only for a couple of predefined widths. Further, I had to go online to find out how any of that worked since it was completely undiscoverable for me. Even further, when switching between apps, they regularly lose state (e.g., Apple's Notes jumps to the top of the document so I have to scroll all the way down to continue).
These issues make multitasking on iPad a completely frustrating experience for me. While all of these things were worked out in the very first multitasking graphical user interfaces, where multiple windows would just open and I could move and resize them at will.
The best example of this is Undo. Shake to undo is the dumbest thing ever (well, dumbest aside from Google's "shake to leave feedback")
I knew IOS was nothing for me when I couldn’t access a file system, there was no way to switch between open applications and the backups were not backups of my photos, but some special format only meant to be played back onto another iphone.
Things might have changed since, but the iphone I had never felt as if it belonged to me, it felt as if I belonged to the phone.
And it might be the case that app switching was possible (I cant really remember) but either it didn’t convince me or I didn’t find out how it worked.
I think it was true in the very, very early days of the iPhone, where the only way to switch apps was to go home then tap on the app you wanted, internally it was switching between suspended apps, but to the user it felt like you were closing and opening a new app each time.
> What an absurd and tiresome article.
> IOS is significantly easier and more intuitive than any PC ever was, including the Mac.
> The only people who could possibly find iOS unintuitive are those whose minds have hardened in a PC shaped mold.
Sounds like he has no place for alternative opinions of any form.