Hacker News Reader

Comment by jahbrewski | Hacker News Reader

My favorite unintuitive iOS feature is “shake to undo”

For some reason this always accidentally triggers when I’m using the ‘Mail’ app. After opening an email, it offers me the opportunity to ‘Undo Read’. It means ‘leave the email you just read marked as unread for now’, but somehow instead the displayed confirmation modal implies that iOS can reach into my brain and take back the information imparted by the email.

Perhaps you are always unknowingly shaking with anger whenever you read emails?

Ha, yep I feel like an absolute idiot doing that in public. My genuinely favourite hidden/unintuitive feature is the force-touch on the on-screen keyboard to see a little cursor you can scroll around the text field you are using. I hate that it's so unintuitive, but it's incredibly useful

and i hate that they removed it in the latest generation! i know you can do the hold down on space instead, and i know that you can then tap with a second finger, but there’s so much more you could do much quicker with the force touch keyboard!

You can also do it by holding down the caret :)

On many Android keyboards you can hold and drag on the space bar to do the same. You can also drag back on backspace to delete whole words/sentences. Similarly unintuitive though, I only know about it because I saw someone else mention it on the Internet.

I enable the arrow keys row on SwiftKey and move with them. Phones are so tall nowadays that a few extra pixels in the keyboard mean nothing.

For me personally it's a coin toss whether it moves the cursor or inserts a space.

Gboard also now comes with an "arrow keys" panel that you can access by clicking the Google logo.

See: https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/04/gboard-te...

I would love to have this, but when I click the logo I just get a search box??

I was out with a group of friends last night and had an interesting conversation when no one else realized you can search iMessages.

From the main Messages window, swipe down and previously hidden search bar appears. There's no indication this is an option or it exists.

As far as I know it's been there since at least iOS 9.0 (probably longer) and 6 people hadn't found it yet.

This is a common iOS design pattern now. I'm sure there are lots of search bars you are missing.

The visual cue that one exists is, let me check my notes, oh here it is "go fuck yourself."

The #1 thing that drives me crazy with phone UI is the huge amount of hidden functionality that you'll only ever discover if you find an article online or just randomly tap and swipe everything in the app until things happen. And then you have to remember that all in your head because there are no reminders anywhere about the functionality.

And what do they do with all of the space they save by not having indicators? Absolutely nothing at all. Tons of whitespace is added to the app so you are always scrolling around anyway.

I've been using an iPhone since 2010 and I had no idea

They replaced/depreciated it in iOS 13 with some crazy three finger swipe thing that for the life of me I can’t remember, so I still shake my iPad or just hold down backspace.

They need to rebuild their software development team.

These are PM/Design flaws, not software dev flaws.

The standardized 3 finger swipe thing is great on iPad

I think you mean “shake them up”

iOS 13 just added a delightful feature where long press on a web browser link it opens on Safari, even if you are in Firefox, and even if you are in private browsing. It pops up a split screen window that has no close-window button. The only way to close the pop up window is to exit your browser and go Home, and then go to Safari to clean up.

I too found that annoying. If I understand correctly what you’re referring to, if you notice closely, there is a “Hide Preview” on the top right of that Safari popup. Tap that once and you’ll be back to just seeing a nice menu of what to do with the link and no more opening the link in a Safari popup.

Has anyone ever used that on purpose?

Yes, often, it is such an odd manoeuvre that it is hard to forget, like dragging an ejectable to the trash.

But I feel like I look stupid. And it does not always work.

There has to be a better way.

> it does not always work.

Just keep shaking until you see the popup appear. The phone also "thumps" (with the vibration motor) to let you know it felt what you were trying to do.

Disclaimer: I am not trying to posit that this is a better way.

I do! I don't like that it happens accidentally more than it should, but otherwise it's fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com