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I was so confused and panicked once I accidentally overwrote some text from an important note on an iPhone.

For a few minutes I desperately searched for any menus, long presses, weird nearly hidden menus, finger gestures etc. but couldn't discover anything. Apparently there was no way to undo!

After some googling I found out you have to shake the phone a few times. Seriously?

I think there must be a lot of people who simply lost their notes due to a small mistake.

I once shook my phone because I was annoyed by autocorrect repeatedly messing up. The shaking undid more than half the text I had written. I couldn't find a way to redo.

"I'll show him to shake me..."

I know this is HN and not Reddit. But this made me lol.

I tried it and got an “Undo Typing” confirmation. Did you?

You get that and then accepting it deletes a large portion of the text.

That's what Undo Typing does...

He's complaining that Undo is overly agressive, given that there's no (obvious) redo function.

Just shake it backwards of course.

Huh? It usually pops up a message asking if you want to undo, which you need to tap. I'm pretty darn sure this is how the feature has worked since it was introduced.

Probably, but you do not necessarily expect half your text to disappear when you click accept right?

When a message pops up asking me if I want to undo my typing and I click yes, I do in fact expect the text I typed to disappear.

He's complaining that Undo is overly agressive, given that there's no (obvious) redo function.

That's not the question that was asked.

The question that was asked was obviously hyperbolic as the undo function doesn’t just delete half of what you typed.

You are right. I hadn't used this in a long time. Did it always pop up the dialog? I could have sworn it didn't.

As I said, I'm pretty darn sure it has always popped up a dialog. Certainly, the dialog has existed for a very long time, I recall seeing it on my first gen iPad, when I was in High School. (I graduated college three years ago.)

Shake once more, it'll offer to redo.

The gesture is now a two-finger swipe back. For some reason Apple couldn’t be bothered to add an “undo” to the cursor dialogue though.

Thanks for the two-finger tip, just lost a whole block of text in slack ;)

Slack has the worst text editor under iOS 13. I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated by the keyboard disappearing when I want to select and copy or paste text... If the keyboard stayed open like in every other sensible app, I wouldn't have such frustrations editing text, but leaving text edit mode, Apple makes it impossible to edit text with touch at that point...

I think it's a three-finger swipe, isn't it? Though while trying it out, I did discover that a three-finger tap now shows another menu that makes undo/redo a little easier.

ah, you’re correct!

And so this thread has highlighted the issue nicely

OMG! Thanks!

Let's not pretend this is a matter of how Apple "couldn't be bothered". Everything like this is an affirmative choice. All such choices (or their alternatives, like what is being asked for here) have both costs and benefits.

How do we really know this was a deliberate choice? There isn't enough information to discard the "Apple couldn't be bothered" hypothesis in this instance.

Starting with iOS 13, it’s a three finger left swipe. To redo, it’s a three finger right swipe.

Did you google on a separate device or was it able to preserve the undo stack even through app switching etc?

Yeah, luckily I had also an Android flagship device with me. Didn't indeed dare to switch apps at that point!

Android is even worse in this regard. There really is no way to undo changes in text fields! I'm generally a happy android user, but I find it absolutely infuriating that this hasn't been implemented. Text editing on phones is fiddly, and I've lost quite a few comments/messages due to this issue.

I have one of the few Android phones with a physical keyboard and I have the dollar sign key mapped to ctrl. I was pleased to discover ctrl-z works the way it should. This doesn't help the vast majority of users, I know, but it's one more thing I love about having a physical keyboard on my phone.

Oh nice! Mine has left-shift and right-shift, I mapped right-shift to ctrl long ago (so I can use screen when ssh'ing from my phone) but never thought to try - undo (and redo, ctrl+y) both work here too.

> I have one of the few Android phones with a physical keyboard

What phone? Do you recommend it?

BlackBerry KeyOne or Key2. I have the KeyOne and would recommend the Key2. Typing is not any faster than on glass, but it's purposeful and generally error-free, which is a much better experience in my opinion. Also, you don't need to look at the keys.

Not having to stare at the screen to type is such a huge thing for me, also I've completely disabled auto-correct.

I'm really sad that it feels like we're dwindling down on physical keyboard phones.

It must be a KeyTwo - Currency as control key isn't an available option on my KeyOne. Agreed about error-free typing, as well as it's usefulness for SSH.

I use right shift as the Control key on my KeyOne. The Key2 has the quick-switch key in place of right shift, so the extra options were moved to the currency key.

Sorry for missing this, but as other commenters noted, I'm using the Key2.

I can't recommend it for everyone, but since you're reading HN here's the hacker pros/cons:

Pros:

* Every physical alphabet key can be mapped to two app/action shortcuts (long press/short press)

* Good construction, satisfying to use

* Great battery life

* Great security and permissions management

* Unlocked version is more or less bloatware-free (bundled BlackBerry software is there but is either useful or easy to disable/ignore)

Cons:

* Due to hardening, not all apps are available (I do miss Ruboto)

* Due to hardening, root is not currently possible (I'd like to root my device but I appreciate the security of BB-hardened Android)

* Camera isn't up to iPhone standards (I don't care as much about this and find it kinda nifty that the camera app allows fine control over shutter speed, etc even though I rarely take photos)

* Some of the BlackBerry-specific features are pretty poorly documented (there's a hover gesture that's only available while the phone is charging which shows the charge level as a line extending around the edge of the screen. It's difficult to Google and not very useful, but I got it disabled.)

All in all, I'm happier with it than I've been with a phone in a long time. It's got two SIM slots if you care about that kind of thing. It hits a particular sweet spot for me. Ymmv.

> What phone? Do you recommend it?

I have a Cosmo Communicator. No comment yet on recommendation (or not). F(x)tec is another one.

No need for a physical keyboard -- if you have Hacker's Keyboard installed it comes with a Ctrl key, and Ctrl-Z works as expected.

The Klaus Weidener Hacker's Keyboard?

I'm not the parent, but yes. It's basically the keyboard if you want to ssh or run a Linux distro in userspace.

flow typing wasn't possible last time I used it, however.

This is the main reason why I use Hacker's Keyboard[0] when writing notes, because it has a full on functional keyboard with all modifier keys. Especially CTRL-Z and Arrows keys.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...

And when you shake it, in russian language it asks “Don’t apply typing of text” with buttons “Don’t apply” and “Cancel”. Years before its title was “Don’t apply (Input)” with same buttons.

Maybe because in russian Undo == Cancel and they had no courage to make it “Undo”: “Yes” - “No”.

Apple think if people panic they will shake they phone. Really clever

It seems to be pretty pervasive everywhere. I'm a longtime iOS user, but have been helping my mom with some stuff on her Android phone. Most of the things I have been helping her with involve me working in the phone settings or Google apps. I've found them very confusing to navigate, and there's little clue as to what should be clicked on. It took me a while to realize that what I was looking at wasn't a list of feature names with their description under them, but the place I should click to make changes to the features. It was all just black text on a white background. How did someone think that was a good idea?

As a long time Android user, I really like that on Apple you can go to Settings app and have a list of settings for all installed applications. Settings on Android can be confusing, especially when it comes to things like the "Google" app.

This is a great idea, but so often it’s just one of multiple locations where app settings are located.

This is true, for some crazy attempts at 'minimalism' companies will hide all settings in the OS settings app settings directory, which involves sorting through a very long list of apps and other menus to find it.

The amount of designers who abuse minimalism because they misunderstand Apple's industrial design and other great design companies, because they only have a surface level grasp of Human Computer Interaction and the wider UX of accomplishing tasks, really bothers me.

It's a menu. The items in a menu don't usually look like buttons on any platform.

And I happen to like the gray text underneath the setting name that tells you the current value of the setting. It makes it clearer what the setting does, and saves you a tap if it's already set how to want it.

To be fair, many people don't really know how to multitask on Windows or Mac OS (alt-tab, cmd-tab, etc.) either. It's not like the buttons have icons or anything on-screen to emphasize the key combo can be used to multitask.

Not trying to defend Apple, but really just that interfaces in general haven't always been perfect and still have issues, not just one (mobile) platform.

People can still multitask using mouse only. It’s ok to have a hidden fast interface if you have a discoverable slow interface.

Sure, and you can do the same on your iPad by going through the home screen.

But you will never learn how to use the most important features of iPad OS without knowing the split screen gestures.

Using the mouse to switch to a given program in the take bar isn't necessarily slow. It's actually faster if you have a decent number if windows open; clicking on exactly the right one straight away is faster than repeatedly pressing Alt-Tab and seeing if the new window brought to the foreground was the right one.

Im sure you know this but in Windows 10 if you hold down Alt after hitting Tab the first time it’ll display which windows you already have open, and hitting just Tab again will cycle though them. You can even hold down Shift as well to cycle through the list of icons but in reverse.

I'm sure you know this, but, I think at least since Windows 7, while having the Alt+Tab "popup" open, you can use the arrow keys while holding Alt down to directly navigate to the window you want to open. Very useful if, like me, you have 20 windows of browser tabs open, and the application you want is in the middle of the list.

Yes - and you can also mouse over them and click now too. All three of these interactions are, imo, very intuitive and easy to do.

After the first Alt-Tab you can also use the arrow keys to navigate to the window you need.

One of the things that made multitasking on Windows much better for me was discovering that:

1. win+<number> opens the <number> program on the taskbar from the left. So having a bunch of pinned programs makes opening them very fast and easy.

2. Holding the windows key down then pressing the number multiple times allows switching between multiple instances of the program, similar to holding alt and hitting tab multiple times.

For example, chrome is the tenth icon pinned to the taskbar (counting from the left). So win+0 open chrome or if already open switches to the first window. Holding the windows key and hitting 0 allows me to quickly switch between multiple chrome windows.

So I don't have to mentally keep track of the current alt-tab order to switch between the second putty window and third chrome window. I just hit win+77 for putty and win+000 for chrome.

Perhaps so, but Apple _is_ the one consistently touting their design, UI, UX strengths. “It just works”, “we made it better”, etc.

I wouldn't necessarily call that a blanket statement, though. I'm sure they don't mean power user functions are easy to learn. I think at that point there's just a general expectation that those who will be power users / need that type of functionality will be more than capable of figuring it out.

I was lucky to have a book which introduced Windows 95 and 98 before I got my own computer in 2005. It never occurred to me that a total newb might not guess about alt+tab.

Way back, a long time ago, software came with large, detailed, paper manuals. The quality varied, but a well written manual was a godsend. I guess the constantly updating that goes on with current software does not allow for such a thing these days, but it sure was nice when you could get a version of some software and use the same thing for 5 years without learning new tricks all the time.

One basic rule of UI design is that the state of the application, and what you can do to it should be VISIBLE.

The rule works great and is easy to follow. But first you have to know it :)

Sadly, the company that taught me this in a previous century, now no longer follows it.

> Due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut off icons to the right, I had no idea that scrolling horizontally was possible.

This appears to be fixed on iOS 13. Actions are now arranged vertically. The app bar above the actions still scrolls horizontally but it now hints at that by cutting off icons.

Now due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut-off list items to the bottom, people have no idea that scrolling vertically is possible

https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/

But at least we've rotated the problem by 90 degrees :P

Oh I see. Didn’t occur to me because I discovered the list by coincidence. Apple indeed overdid it with all that minimalism.

Man, that was an infuriating read

Yes, and since there are so few varieties of screen size, having it cut off perfectly with no ugly hints (scrollbar, cut-off icon, or even off-centered item) is no accident and shows much higher they prioritize better-looking over more-useful.

When I got my first iPhone, my first touch screen device, I noticed their beautiful little slider switches for all the settings. They didn't work very reliably, though. I would use the touch interface to drag the slider, and it sometimes worked but often failed. Well, touch screens aren't perfect, right?

Until someone eventually saw me doing it and said, "You can't drag it, you have to just tap it." It turns out to be just a checkbox. A real slider switch has to be dragged and won't work if tapped, and an on-screen checkbox is the reverse, and they decided to use an image of the former as their standard implementation of the latter on a touch screen. Someone at the very top very deliberately decided that was what they wanted most.

UISwitches can be dragged by design. Prior to iOS 7, when dragged they followed the position of your finger directly, like physical switches. Post-iOS 7, they only animate after your finger has moved past a threshold, but the toggle graphic expands when held to indicate that it is still draggable.

I think apple stopped designing for our generation a while ago. When I see my young nieces using their iPad, I’m amazed at how easily and fluidly they navigate the device using all the extra gestures that seem unintuitive to me.

Can't help but quote:

«ng the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank. Of course, in later years, the check was replace by a credit card, and check clearance was replaced by the 15-day return period, but Steve’s and Apple’s focus remained the same.»

https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/

A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.

This, of course, was a long time ago. My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS. At the time this was simply hilarious.

In terms of iOS, the overloading of buttons and gestures makes for a situation where most users don't use any of that stuff. The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not. I know about it and never do it. In fact, when I do it is because I pressed it by accident and end-up unintentionally taking a picture or more.

I have another example that is unrelated to computers. We have these dimming light switches in several areas of our home. If you want to turn on the lights to the pre-established dimming level you single-click the switch. If, on the other hand, you want to go to full intensity, you double-click them. Despite having explained this, everyone uses the little tiny dimming lever on the side of the large push-button plate to go up to full intensity. And visitors, of course, have no clue because the feature isn't discoverable except for a fortuitous accident.

Progress isn't without side effects I guess.

> My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS.

Not for everyone. I could probably get by fine, if slowly, if you took away my trackpad. I can navigate with full keyboard access and shortcuts, and VoiceOver if necessary.

> The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not.

I do :( It give me feedback on whether I took the picture or not.

> couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled.

This doesn’t sound right. I once installed a corrupted version of OS 10 Jaguar on my laptop that resulted in a non-functioning mouse and touchpad. I managed to reinstall the old OS using only the keyboard. Prior to the post-Snow Leopard era when they started stripping down the file system and muddying the navigation, OSX’s interface was really easily navigable.

"Couple of decades ago" could mean Classic MacOS, which is indeed mostly unusable without a mouse

I don't remember the OS version at the time. I do remember it was the PowerPC era.

If there were pinstripes and candy colored buttons it would have been OSX. If the windows were boxy and square it would have been one of the “classic” OSes.

That's like saying you took the pedals out of a car and people couldn't drive, it's to be expected unless they are driving a Flintstone's car.

Perhaps you lack context. At the time navigating and running almost anything under Windows without a mouse was not a problem at all. Being that the OS was relatively new and evolving (transition from W3.1 to W95 era I believe) most everyone using these machines were used to learning and using keyboard shortcuts for everything. So, yeah, Windows users at the office had no problem if we removed the mouse. In fact the prank was pointless because it was almost a challenge to show us they could still function. With Mac users --again, at that time-- they just crashed and burned.

As a side note, this was also the pre-Google Internet era, with super early Linux (can't even remember the version). I remember using NCSA Mosaic!

You've missed the point. For Macs, the mouse is the pedals of the car because you absolutely need the mouse yo do basic things. On my Linux setup, I could do just fine without a mouse because I have multiple ways of doing the things I need to do

Yep, this is why so many cars come with a backup set of pedals in case the first set is disabled in a prank. Great to have multiple ways of doing the things that need to be done.

> On my Linux setup, I could do just fine without a mouse because I have multiple ways of doing the things I need to do

On your Linux setup, could you do just fine without a mouse AND without a keyboard?

Why is it OK for the keyboard to be an essential required device but a mouse should be optional?

A keyboard is not strictly required either. You can use an on screen keyboard with a mouse, text to speech, etc. And on anything that doesn't require text input, it's easy to avoid the keyboard.

The key is flexiblity. On Linux, I could avoid my mouse or my keyboard or my entire graphical desktop if I wanted to and still be productive. Macs don't have that flexibility.

I single out a mouse because it is a very low information density device. It doesn't really do much, so it is the low hanging fruit. Whether a mouse is required by an OS is like a litmus test of "can the user configure the OS the way they want, or does the OS dictate how the user will use it"

Computers didn't always have visual displays either; shouldn't they always be able to work with paper printouts?

Requiring a mouse and assuming it to always be present is not a bad thing; it's progress.

macOS has good accessibility features, so you can set it up to use it without a mouse if you really need to.

Yeah, if you break a machine it will stop working.

Glad my work isn't impacted by such pranks!

There's a much more evil prank than that:

A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:

It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!

Our variation swapped the m and n keys to the same effect.

My go-to pranks on Magic Mouse users are to turn the mouse around or cover the laser. Righting the mouse is usually only the second or third thing they try.

That's hilarious!

What's sad in this little sub-thread is to watch people down-voting and taking this too seriously. These are healthy jokes, just good fun. Nobody is saying Macs are bad or inferior in any way. Heck, I own a bunch of them, PC's as well. Lighten-up people!

...and then there was this time when I spent a full hour with an x-acto knife above the dropped ceiling carefully, silently, carving a hole right behind one of my co-workers to drop a firecracker right behind him. Yeah, that's how we rolled.

I have a feeling that today's workplace has become far more rigid and intolerant of, well, being human. People would get fired for probably every single thing we did back then...like wiring-up a fire extinguisher to discharge into someone's crotch (male coworker, 'cause someone is likely to assume the worst) when they sat at their desk. Or how about jumping out of the bushes with two water hoses to hose down someone when they got to work? There's more...we had lots of fun and worked 14 to 16 hour days. That was twenty years ago, we are still good friends.

Oh, I have to mention one more. I bought a new car and proudly showed it off to everyone in the team at the time. One of the other engineers rented a crashed version of exactly the same car from a junk yard. He had the tow truck swap my car for the utterly destroyed car in the parking lot. He also swapped the license plates. My car was towed and parked around the corner. Imagine my reaction when I came out of the office to get lunch and my car looked like Optimus Prime stomped on it! It was absolutely hilarious beyond description.

The crashed car prank is epic! Sounds like something Bertram Gilfoyle would do to Dinesh Chugtai's Tesla.

I wrote a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in 6502 assembly on the Apple ][ to drive my brother crazy.

All of this definitely required everyone to have a sense of humor. It developed over years of working together. The participants could take it as well as they dished it out. It sure makes for a lot of great stories to remember.

Here's a quick one: One of my coworkers watched my frustration level rise throughout the day as I was debugging one of my hardware designs. The thing was failing intermittently and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Being a hardware + embedded software project made it that much more difficult.

At the end of the day he calls me over to his workbench. He doesn't say a thing. He opens a drawer, grabs hold of a large knob on a variac, turns it down and all the alarms on my workbench --at the other end of the room-- go off. He turns it back up to 120 V, looks at me and smiles. The SOB got me good. Brilliant!

Actually, you could always access and navigate menus by the keyboard on Macs (Ctrl + F2 nowadays). It's just that this was/is a relatively unknown feature.

How do you do this on System 7.5? Would actually be super useful on a PowerBook I have where the trackpad goes wild on cold days before the machine warms up.

Actually, I don't remember how this really worked in System 7. :-(

I think, at least in Word you could Cmd + Tab (or pressing "." on the numeric keypad) to transfer focus to the menu bar. (Then simply navigate by cursor keys and use Enter or Space to select an item.)

However, Mouse Keys may be generally of help. I think, in System 7, they are part of the "Easy Access" system extension (be sure to have this in your system folder). Mouse Keys are activated by Cmd + Opt + Clear and allow you to navigate by the numeric keypad. (Up, down, left, right, diagonally, 5 is equivalent to a click, 0 to holding the mouse button pressed, the decimal point [dot] to releasing it.) On a PowerBook, you probably have to use the function key as well. (Using Mouse Keys, you may activate a menu by the 0 key. Normally, once the menu bar has focus, you can navigate by cursor keys and select a menu item by the space bar.)

I’ve had to navigate windows without a mouse a few times while troubleshooting a problem. It’s not too bad with the windows key, tab and arrow.

I had to use the key map once to type without a working keyboard. That was bad.

> A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.

I don't mind this that much. It just shows that Apple elevated the mouse to an essential input system that must always be available, as opposed to being an optional accessory, and designed the system around that requirement.

You can make the same argument about not being able to do anything with a mouseless computer if the keyboard was disabled too.

In fact, even if the keyboard was unavailable, you could still use a computer with just a mouse + onscreen keyboard ...or a touchscreen. :)

So a physical keyboard is actually more expendable than a mouse.

I mean you went from never having owned (and presumably used) an iOS device to figuring out the task in 10 minutes. Seems pretty good to me.