Shake to Undo (for Mac OS X) | Hacker News Reader

Shake to Undo (for Mac OS X)

natestedman.com

71 pointsjparise55 comments

Oh my. The internet is a strange place. Digging up things weeks after they were made in an hour, sent jokingly to a few close friends, and mostly forgotten, and throwing them all over Twitter and the Apple blagoblag.

My only disappointment is that they didn't report on Shell of Disapproval instead, which is a program that I actually use daily.

http://i.imgur.com/qjPSR.png

https://github.com/NateStedman/shell-of-disapproval

I like it, but my tastes prefer something a little more subtle: https://gist.github.com/1199925

my favorite part is the "optional confirmation overlay"

Is it just me or is Shake to Undo one of the worst features of iOS on the iPad? You are happily typing an email on the train and then you screw up and delete a bunch of text. To undo it, you have to pick the iPad up off your lap or off the table and shake it pretty damn hard.

You end up looking like an absolute maniac.

Agreed, and I constantly trigger it unintentionally.

Few people know this, but you don't have to pick it up off your lap to trigger the redo action. There's a redo key on the #+= page of the iPad's keyboard.

I know that this isn't particularly great design on Apple's part because it's not intuitive or easily discoverable, but once you know it it's quite handy and better than nothing.

Funny joke and all, but it got me thinking. Why not some sort of gesture for undo like a multi finger scribble (similar to 'rubbing something out' with an eraser)?

Then I tried a bit harder & thought why not just use cmd-Z ;)

Hmm. Shake to undo, drop to delete? :-)

Hi five to save :P

Throw to share ;-)

Does anyone know if this will work with my 27" iMac? ;-)

Joking aside, the shake-to-undo gesture in iOS is one of the worst things about the platform. It's either not sensitive enough or too sensitive, and either way makes you look a bit odd

It's either not sensitive enough or too sensitive, and either way makes you look a bit odd

Plus it makes you lose eye- and finger-contact with the screen.

I just hope this doesn't inspire people to really shake the macbooks so hard to cause a disk problem or any other hardware issue.

I advise you add a disclaimer for this? ;)

That's actually why the sensor is in there in the first place: to let the hard disk shut off if it detects that the laptop is falling.

It actually makes the HD parks the heads out of the platters in a really mean way. It's better than having heads collide with the platters but it's a wear sensitive operation designed as an emergency countermeasure. Doing it repeatedly on purpose is certainly a bad idea.

I am guessing this is a nice little joke, BUT...

If the sensitivity was just right, and it only measured a shake like smacking the monitor on the side, it might actually make a nice UX.

Think of typing away at this message and then deciding, "never-mind", and reaching up with your right hand and smacking the screen on the edge. Could be a very natural feeling undo.

I'm pretty sure there was a virtual desktop manager for OS X around 10.3 or 10.4 that, in one fork, supported smacking each side of the laptop to cycle left or right. I also recall being able to use the ambient light sensors under the speaker grills for the same thing: Cover one with your hand, and the desktops move that way.

It was pretty fantastic.

Yep! Here's some instructions on how it was done. The underlying app, ScreenKnock, still works on Lion.

Instructions: http://maketecheasier.com/smack-your-mac-to-switch-spaces/20...

ScreenKnock: http://welcometochrisworld.com/2008/10/02/screen-knock/

Thanks for linking that, really neat. I just ran it, and after configuring to use command-arrows to switch spaces, it works really well on my MacBook.

In fact, rather than hitting the side of the screen, just a gentle tilt to the left or right is enough to switch spaces. The dynamic feels really good.

Ah ha! Yes, I knew it must have been a residual memory and not my own idea.

Hehe, I remember trying out the predecessor, SmackBook: http://blog.medallia.com/2006/05/smacbook_pro.html

I also remember installing a bunch of similar little toys built around the same time using this sensor - MacSaber: http://blog.isnoop.net/2006/05/20/macsaber-turn-your-mac-int... SMSRotateD: http://osxbook.com/software/sms/smsrotated/ SeisMac: http://www.suitable.com/tools/seismac.html

(Amusing to look back on this since I work on Cydia now, which is all about non-app software like neat accelerometer toys [one of the more popular packages is Graviboard], just on little bitty devices I wouldn't have imagined back in 2006.)

It was called SmackBook:

http://blog.medallia.com/2006/05/smacbook_pro.html

Surely smacking the left hand side of your monitor should produce a line return, typewriter style? :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A-R1koiUv4

Or a carriage-return gesture, typewriter style?

[EDIT: someone beat me to it]

While the idea is interesting, this is probably not something I would use on a laptop. Picking up and shaking a laptop while it's open and running goes against all my "protect fragile and expensive equipment" instincts. Tablets and phones are normally held in one's hands anyway, and weigh much less and are better balanced.

Agreed, with pure solid state though its not as big of a deal. But I remember having to manually park hard drive heads before moving desktops. Shaking anything that spins activates my spidey sense that I will cause head crashes.

Now you can spill your coffee and erase your work at the same time!

My issue is that the two have always been connected. :-(

While a pretty funny article, I disagree with the underlying message that Apple is making Lion too similar to iOS in ways that decrease its functionality.

For me, launchpad has been perfect for organizing my apps because just clicking the applications folder presents me with too many unrelated options. For example, my second launchpad window is only apps I've downloaded, so it's obvious to me how I would launch Starcraft or Braid as opposed to TextEdit.

Launchpad may be useful (though between Stacks and Quicksilver, I don't need it), but there are other areas where Apple made changes that they shouldn't have, even by their own standards. For example, the new full-screen mode nice on a small screen, but is detrimental to anyone who has multiple monitors, and Apple didn't even ensure that the transition animates smoothly with their own apps. Mission Control is at least an understandable attempt to integrate Spaces and Expose, but the new layout mode for Expose that lets windows overlap by more than 80% is a pretty big sacrifice that doesn't seem entirely necessary. They also removed several features that were mostly harmless or completely harmless to noobs, but useful for power users (eg. the mode-switch button on Finder windows, or the ability to browse a PDF in two-page mode with continuous scrolling on.) Simplification is good, but there's no reason to remove features that don't get in the way or make things cluttered.

I don't mind Apple experimenting and iterating with their UI, but it feels like with 10.7 they took things too far and were too single-minded about it. On the other hand, I've only been using OS X since 10.3, so I missed out on all the early roughness, and almost all of their changes from 10.4-10.6 turned out to be for the better.

I'm actually a big fan of the full screen mode. I spend about half my time on a 13" screen, and the other half on 22.

I actually like the auto sort mode for fullscreen/desktops as well, which surprised even me. But I like being a swipe or two away from my browser or email or vm.

That said, I am frustrated that I can't bend the rules a little and bring a terminal up on another app's fullscreen. Many times I'm following an example and have to take whatever browser I'm using out of fullscreen. Dterm helps a little.

I like launchpad, but I don't use it much. It does a good job of staying out of the way.

I do miss the old expose, and mission control's reduced expose is not adequate to replace the old. I almost never need the single app expose, if anything I wish they had dropped that and kept the 10.6 expose as well as mission control.

Launchpad could be pretty nice but it’s half-baked. One big problem is that it ignores OS X conventions. Organizing it is a pain. One example: It makes sense that iOS only allows you to drag one app at a time. Making it possible to select more than one app would only complicate things and confuse. It absolutely doesn’t make sense to have the same limitation in Launchpad.

Didn't the old iMacs have a "shake to shutdown" feature? Or was that just some weird configuration I had at the place I worked?

I can't recall the number of times I adjusted the position of the monitor only to find the computer shutting down...

Nice one. :-) Very soon, I'll be playing games that needs me to shake my Mac violently, twist, turn and sometimes requiring me to flap the screen repeatedly to ward off the lazer guns of attacking Stormtroopers.

Windows should have a similar feature. "Throw on the ground to fix BSOD"

Linux's would be "Toss machine at nearest dev for assistance."

It doesn't seem to work on my 2010 MBA... perhaps due to the SSD?

Yeah—the new Airs don't have Sudden Motion Sensors. Which makes sense, since there's no hard drive to stop, but it breaks all the clever hacks that used the accelerometer.

It's not really a clever hack, just an undocumented IOKit device.

`ioreg | grep Motion`

The twisting motion illustrated is more dangerous to hard drives than a simple up and down or side to side shake; the heads are being pushed into the gyroscopic platters. [citation needed]

Finally! My least favourite feature on iOS, available on the Mac!

Bringing features from a cut down mobile OS released in 2008 to a full blown desktop OS with 20+ years of UX development behind it was the best idea we've ever had!

"Mission Control removes the confusing grid that previously plagued Spaces. Where a user with four spaces could previously end up on any of the other three with a single keystroke, he or she is now presented with a much less confusing choice between one or two."

I liked the ability to traverse a 2x2 grid of Spaces with a single keyboard stroke. Now, if I set up four screens with the new Mission Control in Lion, I have to press the right arrow four times to move from screen one --> four. The result is I only use two screens at most, meaning they get quite cluttered.

You can still jump directly to a numbered space by pressing "control" and any number key. This is default behavior as far as I know, but I might have switched a setting for it.

For consistent behavior, disable "Automatically rearrange spaces based on most recent use" in the mission control system preferences.

I use three spaces. From left to right, browsing space, then Xcode space and finally gimp and inkscape space.

Control and an arrow key moves me to either of the other two. Sadly, Lion doesn't seem to wrap around, so this isn't supported.

It's been a while since I tried Lion, maybe I should give it another shot.

Ugh, it's not sensitive enough. I don't know how sensitive the HD shock sensor needs to be though... but I wish I could just tap the edge of my monitor.

That would be a fun feature for passing colleagues to make use of.

Meh. Punch to Undo!

AppleCare should sponsor this product.

What if you have a SSD installed?

it's like an etch a sketch :)

Is this a joke? I'm really, really confused.

I'm pretty sure it's a joke

There's another library called smslib which does a totally unrelated thing - send sms. http://smslib.org/

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