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Comment by Cwizard | Hacker News Reader

I agree. When I was a kid I had a camera that had an 'easy mode' in software. If you turned it on, the software would disable most advanced features and the UI would be something incredibly simple. This allowed me a complete novice to get started taking pictures. After some experience I turned the setting off and started to experiment with more advanced features without getting overwhelmed. I always wondered why not more products adopted this type of UX.

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Raymond Chen, a Microsoft blogger, has posted[0] about why Windows doesn't use an expert mode.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030728-00/?p=43...

They do kinds of have an Expert mode though; all of the original menus and options that they hide behind frustratingly glib, to the point of being useless, "modern" menus, with plenty of whitespace.

A recent Windows update even went so far as to proudly boast about how they were adding back menu items that had disappeared in this drive for stupidification of the menus. Hardly progress.

It's an old post, they have in Windows 10. Kinda. Many sections in Settings have options for advanced settings that would take you to the old Control Panel.

That's a bit different though. They're rebuilding the airplane mid flight. The long term goal is to replace the Control Panel entirely, it's just a multi-year and possibly multi-decade effort.

That's why they keep linking to the Control Panel, they're not there yet. I think they'll soon be done with the System page, for example.

it's getting less and less. well in H20 or however that is called, I had trouble to finding the dialog to join a computer to a domain.

Also nice how the built-in Iphone calculator app is plain and simple in portrait mode, and rivals a scientific calculator when rotated to landscape mode.

The problem is that this is only discoverable by accident in specific circumstances.

I almost never hold my phone in landscape.

Apple did the same thing with undo. Such a commonly used feature, hidden behind shaking your phone? That’s not even an interaction. They’ve slightly improved it with three-finger swipe to the side, which at least is a bit like a gesture, but again completely undiscoverable. Apparently under no circumstances will we just be getting an undo button.

It’s not just Apple, though: there’s a whole page of useful settings for Instagram’s Hyperlapse app. Guess how you open it? You tap the screen four times with four fingers. Why on earth did they build and maintain a settings page and then hide it like that?

You just blew my mind.

It should go RPN when holding the phone upside down. ;)

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