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I've found this to be nearly useless in practice because it fails to register the back taps accurately enough to be reliable.

Which is probably why Apple isn’t pushing hard for everyone to know about it.

You have to adjust your grip so that you can robustly tap the back with your index finger (holding the phone firmly between the other four fingers and your palm/base of your thumb). I agree that it’s not really practical.

Is this a reference to "You're holding it wrong"[1]?

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=You%27re%20H...

It wasn’t my intent, but yes that’s vaguely similar. :)

i just enabled this to try it and agree

> I think Apple does a decent job telling people about iOS features across the User Guide, Tips.app, and the Apple Support YouTube channel.

I have a nit-pick with the article, because all of the listed features are features where an obvious, more intuitive interface exists, but may be clunkier.

Eg. Calculator: the way “real” IRL calculators change the number you type is with the “clear” button. IPhones support that. Personally, i didn’t know about the swipe, and I think they should add a backspace button because swiping is confusing and younger people may not understand clear either. But you don’t need to swipe to use the calculator.

Keyboard cursor: This feature was demo’ed live when it was released, and it added a more dexterous way to position the typing cursor besides just touching the text where you want (old way, still works). Touching the screen where you want to type is pretty discoverable, and has been a stable feature for a while. It matches how mice and word processors on desktops would work, and seems intuitive to just tap on screen where you want to type anyways.

Safari Tab Change: You can just go to the safari tab page, available by touching a permanent on-screen button. Also, the swipe to change tab feature mimics the operating system’s swipe to change app experience, where the URL bar is indicative of the system’s handlebar. (Also demo’ed live when the feature was launched).

> Eg. Calculator: the way “real” IRL calculators change the number you type is with the “clear” button. IPhones support that.

The screen recording of the calculator app seems to just have "C", which I would assume deletes the whole number, not one digit. That's not the same action.

The Android calculator has a backspace button, that removes a single digit. It's clearly recognizable as a backspace, just like on any other on-screen keyboard input.

> The screen recording of the calculator app seems to just have "C", which I would assume deletes the whole number, not one digit. That's not the same action

Correct. That’s how “irl” calculators work. You can retype the number easy enough, its not going to be more than a few characters long, but technically yes its a different action. To my point, you can still achieve your goal, through more discoverable means, but it may be more clunky. They should also have a regular backspace here imo.

That's a vestige of history, and not some innate property of a calculator. I went through school with a calculator that had cursor positioning, insert mode, and so on, and mine was definitely not the fanciest in class.

The idea of holding a computer calculator app to exactly the limits of a historical four function calculator is skeuomorphism at some of its worst.

* 2. Move the insertion point by dragging around the keyboard.*

Anyone know how to go down doing this? Left, right, and up are all good, but I can’t figure out how to go down consistently. The 1.5mm below the space bar is really fiddly.

You don’t have to keep within the keyboard once you’ve got the insertion bar thing on screen and in your control.

You can whip it upwards to the top of the screen which then gives you the entire screen to scroll down (precisely).

What do you do when you are using a traditional laptop trackpad, you're dragging an item downward but your finger is already at the bottom of the trackpad?

(Hint: the amount the cursor moves does not only depend on the dragged distance on the trackpad.)

Now do the same thing for the on-screen virtual trackpad.

Curse, press Esc and try again?

Place another finger on the pad, higher up, and release the first. That doesn’t seem to work here.

I’m assuming you mean swiping your finger quickly across the pad to the top and then moving slowly down again, as yes, that’s working.

Alternatively, you can also directly drag the insertion mark (tap-and-hold near the insertion mark and drag it).

Is this to work around the way Apple has utterly and bafflingly broken the insertion-point handling in iOS?

It worked fine for years, and now suddenly it takes five tries to invoke the "select all", "paste", or whatever menu. And moving the insertion point? Cumbersome shitshow.

Why did Apple remove the cursor keys that would appear in landscape aspect? There’s still plenty of unused space for them. Thankfully there’s the long press on spacebar gesture but I only recently learned about that.

The PlainText app would show cursor keys in its customer keyboard but that’s long gone from the app store so I’ll lose it at my overdue upgrade.

P.S. Restore the 3.5mm TRRS headset jack.

Amen to all that, especially the headphone jack. I'd respect the company more for these anti-customer moves if they'd be honest about it or just say nothing.

But the stupid excuses for removing the jack are insulting to consumers and make Apple look like assholes.

I wonder what motivates the on-going degradation of UI that was sorted properly for years. The insertion-point and keyboard failures mentioned here are examples, and then there's the (widely scorned) new notification UI on Mac. Half the time you can't even dismiss a notification because the peek-a-boo X disappears when you roll ONTO the dialog. And the "snooze," etc. options are often missing. And if you have more than one notification, they're shown as a stack and the only dismissal option is "dismiss all." There's no way to just dismiss the top one and see what the next one in the stack is.

Oh yeah, and while we're on this, how about the suddenly asinine Groups functionality in your iOS contacts? You used to go into Groups, pick the type of contacts you wanted to see, then go back to the list. For example, let's say you have a group called Doctors. You'd go in there, press Doctors, and boom you're browsing your doctors.

Now when you go into groups, you have to manually scroll through them and hunt down and un-check whatever group(s) you're currently viewing, and then select the one you want to view. Who the hell manages categories like that? It's especially stupid when you consider that you can put people into more than one group at a time.

Note that enabling "Back Tap" will cause a daemon to run in the background all times taking a couple percent CPU (to detect this action, of course). I don't have very good numbers of the battery life impact but my guess is that it's perhaps half an hour or so. Might be worth keeping in mind when deciding whether to enable this feature.

> Note that enabling "Back Tap" will cause a daemon to run in the background all times taking a couple percent CPU

Is this true? I was under the impression that iPhones (and most modern high end devices) had dedicated hardware to monitor these sort of features, and triggers a system event in the OS (the same way you don’t need a daemon to check for a keyboard or power button).

It is, the process is named "AccessibilityUIServer". There is a dedicated motion coprocessor but when the events come back the are plumbed through CoreMotion to a framework called Phoenix, which runs a ML model on them.

Source?

This sounds like bullshit to anyone that knows how interrupts work.

This is a primary source :) Something needs to handle those interrupts. Perhaps this stack trace from the profiler may be enlightening as to what that thing is:

  810 -[AXPhoenixClassifier _handleAccelerometerData:withTimestamp:] 
  563 -[MLModel predictionFromFeatures:error:] 
  561 -[MLNeuralNetworkEngine predictionFromFeatures:options:error:] 
  542 _dispatch_lane_barrier_sync_invoke_and_complete 
  542 _dispatch_client_callout 
  541 __62-[MLNeuralNetworkEngine predictionFromFeatures:options:error:]_block_invoke 
  521 -[MLNeuralNetworkEngine evaluateInputs:options:error:] 
  519 -[MLNeuralNetworkEngine evaluateInputs:options:verifyInputs:error:] 
  491 _dispatch_lane_barrier_sync_invoke_and_complete 
  491 _dispatch_client_callout 
  491 __67-[MLNeuralNetworkEngine evaluateInputs:options:verifyInputs:error:]_block_invoke.195 
  491 -[MLNeuralNetworkEngine evaluateInputs:bufferIndex:options:error:] 
  363 -[MLNeuralNetworkEngine executePlan:error:] 
  359 espresso_plan_execute_sync 
  358 EspressoLight::espresso_plan::execute_sync() 
  351 EspressoLight::espresso_plan::dispatch_task_on_compute_batch(std::__1::shared_ptr<Espresso::abstract_batch> const&, std::__1::shared_ptr<EspressoLight::plan_task_t> const&) 
  296 Espresso::net::__forward(std::__1::shared_ptr<Espresso::abstract_batch> const&, int, int) 
  294 Espresso::net_compiler_segment_based::__forward(std::__1::shared_ptr<Espresso::abstract_batch> const&) 
  290 Espresso::ANERuntimeEngine::compiler::__forward_segment(std::__1::shared_ptr<Espresso::abstract_batch> const&, int, Espresso::net_compiler_segment_based::segment_t const&) 
  254 -[_ANEClient doEvaluateDirectWithModel:options:request:qos:error:] 
  247 -[_ANEProgramForEvaluation processRequest:model:qos:qIndex:modelStringID:options:error:] 
  221 H11ANEProgramProcessRequestDirect 
  214 H11ANE::H11ANEFrameReceiver::ProgramProcessRequest(H11ANE::H11ANEFrameReceiverRequest&, H11ANESharedEventsStruct*, bool) 
  201 H11ANE::H11ANEDevice::ANE_ProgramSendRequest(H11ANEProgramRequestArgsStruct*, unsigned int, bool, H11ANEReqCallbackDataStruct*) 
  200 IOConnectCallAsyncMethod 
  200 io_connect_async_method 
  199 mach_msg2_internal 
  199 mach_msg2_trap

Oh wtf, back tap is implemented with the accelerometer? I assumed the back logo was a touch sensor.

This would make for a really good blog post if you can measure the impact. "Enabling back tap in iOS reduces battery life by half an hour"

I had screenshot function mapped to back double tap when I attempted to use iPhone last year, result was a gallery full of screenshots triggered by putting the phone on a table.

I just tried this on my Pixel 6 Pro and it unexpectedly worked (by defaulted to showing the notification pane). Hidden indeed!

Wow, these are great! The back tap feature seems really handy, and it even worked with my case on. I guess they're doing it by sensing phone movement/rotation rather than some sort of touch sensor on the back.

The accelerometer (the one that knows your phone is rotated) is watching in three dimensions.

A tap on the back looks like a very brief acceleration on the axis coming out of the screen. Like a reverse free-fall.

Back tap is nice, but seems to completely not work if you have a moderately thick case (I have kids, it's mandatory).

I was very excited when I learned about it until I realised that it doesn't work very well with a magsafe wallet.