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Comment by varunsrin | Hacker News Reader

It's cumbersome because you have to navigate through a bunch of menus - however, its easy because you have a finite, visible set of actions to look through those menus (tap, swipe, repeat) and a finite set of menus themselves.

In a desktop OS, you have a seemingly infinite set of modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Double click, click, right click, Ctrl + Shift), which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.

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Tap, swipe, draw apart, draw together, click home button, double click home button, click headset button, double click headset button, triple click headset button, Press external volume button, flick mute/screen-lock button, press lock button, hold lock button.

I'm sure there's a few more buried in there that I haven't discovered. (Like swipe backwards to delete an item from a list)

Don't forget "tap and hold" on Safari. Found that one by accident.

Are you referring to tapping and holding images to save them to the library?

It works on links too, allowing to open them in a new tab or copy the link.

I was referring to this. Didn't know about the other.

Except that those boil down to a couple of basic gestures: tap, pinch, swipe. The hardware buttons are irrelevant in this case. Oh, and swipe to delete? That's in the "manual" that comes with the device. It's smaller than a dollar, for god's sake.

Wonder how many iPhone users have read their user manual, I sure threw out the manual on day 1.

which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.

And now even those are getting out of control:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html

Pretty soon I'm going to run out of fingers, and these certainly aren't easily discoverable.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but the 'pinch with 3 fingers and thumb' gesture seems to be practically impossible on the older macbooks with a separate pad & button - there just isn't the space.

That's completely okay because those older touchpads don't support gestures beyond two-finger-scroll anyway.

No, it supports both 3 finger swipe (fwd/back in browsers), and 4 finger swipe (change Space), as well as, iirc 3 finger touch & click (although I haven't got this working since I installed Lion)

Yeah, because those gestures are more akin to keyboard shortcuts, i.e. something for power users. OS X is perfectly usable without complicated gestures. Two-finger scrolling is the most complicated thing an average user has to learn.

This same pattern continues on iOS devices. They don't ever use complicated gestures, certainly not as the only way to accomplish something. The most complicated gesture you need is pinching.

The new iOS 5 has gestures to switch apps and get home, but those are really like keyboard shortcuts since the home button is still there and offers a simpler alternative.

There is still a problem when you accidentally trigger gestures. All my friends are scared to touch my Mac because they'd trigger hot corners all the time. With 10.7, you can easily trigger gestures even on default settings. I am worried the iOS5 gestures will have the same problem.

its easy because you have a finite,....

Easy? Maybe for some. I bet the same people who have to be told to right-click also have to be told how to work their bluetooth/wifi connection (and never bother to turn it off to save battery).

But I'll grant you this point if s/easy/possible/

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