Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

It's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click.

Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.

I agree, and like the right click, force touch options were always accelerators for more confidant users (rather than being the only way to complete some task).

Personally I loved force touch and a few months on iOS 13 I’m still struggling with transition to long press gesture instead.

The problem with long press as an accelerator is that it’s triggered by a deliberate pause. It might just be a few hundred milliseconds but the perceived time is very frustrating.

Opening a Context menu was never a destructive action though, so you could click that other button on your mouse all day without risk. You have to be taught that a context menu exists once, but it's safe & consistent from then on

Force touching an item to see if there is a contextual menu isn't a destructive action.

That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.

But if you "hard-press" a button that doesn't support hard-pressing, won't it just detect a normal press? Depending on what the button is, that might be destructive or at the very least time-consuming.

Newbie Windows 95 users would quite frequently hide the entire start bar because they accidentally moved the mouse while trying to click on an item, and the system interpreted that as a drag intended to resize the start bar to a zero height.

At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.

You still see a small bar even with "zero" height.

Which was of absolutely zero use to them now as it remains today; they don't understand what happened.

There is a different cursor when you hover it. At some point you can't help people anymore.

Um, ease of use has little to do with discoverability. Two buttons are there in front of you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com