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Comment by cjsawyer | Hacker News Reader

I was shocked when I accidentally selected text out of an image. You’d think they’d make a bigger deal about cool changes

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For that specific feature they did/do highlight it quite a bit:

- it was shown off at the keynote last year https://youtu.be/TfRMXk53wPY

- I believe the tips app will mention it to you

- they have support articles describing it https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212630

- any text field you're in will let you scan text directly from the camera.

Granted, maybe they could go further to show people when they go into the photos app or something, but it's definitely a very highlighted feature relative to others.

It's pretty amazing how Apple does incredible stuff on the down-low, without lots of marketing.

Their Google-street-view-like feature is just an unobtrusive link that says "look around" or something like that in their maps app on the iphone. Never mind that this is a massive amount of work, and that they're in the process of mapping all of Europe, and I assume the US.

Apple likes end users to discover stuff like that on their own. They hyped it up a ton at the WWDC keynote before it came out, but only a small % of mostly developers see that. Part of their philosophy is to delight users along the way and maybe finding things like that is delightsome?

They rarely throw "check out the new features!" dialogs on upgrades. (Sometimes they do, but it's rare relative to the # of new features.)

This is one of these things that has kept me an Apple user all these years. It's been a core part of their software philosophy for a very long time. One of the first of these moments was when on early Mac OS X versions where you could drag and drop almost anything into anything, and it would consume it in some way. For example, dropping an image into any text box would either render it as an embedded image, paste it as a hyperlink, or paste the filename, depending on the context. And these things applied to so many different metadata and media formats that everything just moves around easily. There's always been so many little great features that you just discover through the process of using the software.

They had it as a flagship feature one year, and I was notified in-app after upgrading.

It’s also in the Tips app, which is great to go through from time to time!

Thanks, I didn’t know they had a Tips app either.

It pops up on screen via notification without consent on upgrade, like an ad for Apple software you can't turn off.

Hilariously, bringing up search on iPadOS (tap on empty desktop space) shows Tips in its best-guesses, but typing “tips” into search hides it.

I hate that feature. It breaks double tap to zoom for me at the most frustrating times. I am yet to need to copy text from an image. Funnily enough I think this should be less discoverable.

I've actually found myself using this feature a lot, probably almost daily.

BTW, you can switch it off globally easily - it's in language/region settings on both iOS and Mac.

It was a pretty big part of the keynote where they announced it, I think it’s just that they don’t really do in-product promos for new features in iOS.

It is a big feature on macOS and I remember them announcing it. I use it sometimes, though I do wish it worked in Chromium-based browsers and supported Cyrillic alphabet.

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