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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

> we just learn them by... querying how to do things when we need them.

The problem with this is that you don’t learn any new features that you wouldn’t have come up with on your own.

I loved reading the well-written manuals and “on-line” (integrated into the software) help of the 90s (and 80s) that explained all the concepts and features of the particular software. You’d learn a ton of new ideas and possibilities. It was really fun and exciting, and it gave you the perception of a well-designed and well thought-out whole. You built up a consistent mental model of the software, and you thus ended up with the feeling of mastery and control over the software.

Nowadays it feels more like poking the software with a stick in an attempt to build a mental model and discover its capabilities by trial and error, often remaining in doubt about the actual intent of how exactly things are supposed to work.

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As annoying as they can sometimes be, the little tips that pop up every now with "Hey did you know you can do this?" are a neat little solution to this. Really like the unobtrusive ones like the GitHub "ProTip!" at the bottom of the pull requests page

It does get a bit ridiculous though. There's entire sites and content creators focused solely on VS Code tips. At what point are we gonna end up with engineers working on adding a feature to VS Code that they didn't know already existed?

does vscode not have something akin to the apropos command from emacs? that tends to help quite a bit

The tips aren’t really a solution to this, because they don’t give you a general introduction and big-picture explanations about the system as a whole, and about the individual features in context. They are useful to inform you about the presence of a new feature when you’re already familiar with the software overall. Even then, they don’t go into any depth about the various aspects of the feature and how it interacts with other features and in different configurations, etc. In a good manual, you would get a whole short (or long) chapter about the feature.

> the little tips that pop up every now with "Hey did you know you can do this?"

I don't think those have ever come up at the right time, usually only when I'm halwfway in the middle of an action, and not in the headspace for a tutorial or tip.

And that tiny little tooltip, that offers no screenshot or example gif isn't going to get me to learn.

Sounds like clippy. No thanks. Maybe something that was available when you wanted it, but that's not it..

I swiped up to dismiss the Safari browser on my iPhone this morning and accidentally invoked a half-hight bookmarks view. I wasn’t sure if it’s a new gesture in iOS 16 or if it’s been there for a while. I wasn’t able to reproduce it and a brief web search didn’t find mention of it in the first few hits. I didn’t really care, so I gave up looking.

If anyone knows how to invoke this feature, I’d love to know. Just not enough to try to find out from checking more than about three search results. Anyway, ahhh discoverability. I remember you…

I believe the bookmarks panel just defaults to half-height now. You can pull it up to fill the screen, but otherwise — tapping the button opens it at half-height for me.

It’s resizable by dragging the top of the drawer.

You tapped the button that looks like a book, I'm guessing? It's full height in the "address bar at the top" design.

A related story, shortly after upgrading to the new iPHone. I noticed while driving I got a big album art preview on the Lock Screen while I was driving. However, after customising my Lock Screen it’s gone back to the small activity preview. I have tried a few changes to back, but no dice. New versions of iOS have been successively making the album art smaller and smaller, and i thought this was a return to form, but I guess it must’ve been a bug.

Just press on the small album art, then it’s big again.

I can't decide which is worse, undiscoverable software or software that always changes its behavior from what you just learned.

Haha, yes! I'm a software engineer and it took me a decade of smartphone usage before I realized that long-pressing various keys (e.g. vowels, symbols) shows a pop-up allowing you to enter related characters (e.g. á, æ, ¡, ₹, ±, ·, ½, ²)†. Blew my tiny little mind! If I were using a language that required the variants menu in its native keyboard layout, I might have discovered this a decade before by explicitly searching for how to enter certain characters.

† Typed these on mobile, of course. Android, in case you're wondering.

If I remember correctly, early Android versions (or it could have been HTC specific) had a tutorial for this, as part of the new phone setup process. I guess they removed it when most buyers owned a smartphone before.

Around the time of the first iPhone, Apple also had a long video on their website (it must have been 30-60 minutes) meticulously going through and explaining every feature of the iPhone. No idea if something like that still exists.

Maybe related to being a SWE myself, but usually the first thing I do with any piece of software is go to the settings. If you do that with the Google Keyboard you'll see "Preferences -> Long press for symbols".

If you enable that, each key on the keyboard now shows an additional symbol you can get to by long press, for example, 'a' now also allows you to type '@'. If you try and long press for 'a' you'll suddenly see that accented versions of 'a' are also available. And that's the story of how I "naturally" discovered that same feature.

I feel like I’m reading more manuals than ever. Libraries, CLI tools and other specialized software have well written and very useful docs. Same with pro camera software, music gear software, and more.

For “consumer” software I usually don’t need manuals, I can find what I need via poking; this often includes power user features (when I use something sufficiently often).

Is it possible that what you’re feeling is nostalgia? Have you actually read the manual for your phone?

> Have you actually read the manual for your phone?

I have, and it’s abysmal, because it doesn’t make any attempt at explaining anything on a conceptual level, or even explaining basic UI elements. It doesn’t teach you how to interpret what you see on the screen. It does the bare minimum of enumerating the steps to activate a given feature, presuming that you are able to match those descriptions to what you see on the screen (there are barely any screenshots) and that you know why you would want to use that feature in the first place. It also doesn’t address any failure modes, and doesn’t discuss relevant considerations regarding the use of the given feature.

I see your point better now, thanks for explaining. That makes sense.

Then again, today’s smartphone operating systems are as popular as home appliances in the 90s.

Maybe if we took something modern that is as niche as software in the 90s then it might come with a manual with a mental model too.

Home appliances also used to come with detailed and easy-to-understand manuals, and mostly don’t anymore. It’s mainly that manufacturers stopped caring, due to accelerated product cycles and globalization, because the products sell regardless.

I recently bought a new washing machine. It has a mode with an odd name that turns out to be tied to a cleaning product from another company. The manual doesn’t have any information on what the mode does or why it exists. The manual is a generic manual for like 5 or 10 models, and seems to only include the functions common to them all. Any function on a higher-end model that’s not included on the lower-end model is just not documented. I guess if you want to use those, you’re on your own.

But of course, there’s a phone app you can download and give the company a bunch of personal information to connect your washer to your home network so you can get notification when it’s done with its cycle.

Companies used to provide manuals that'd include part numbers and even schematics!

Now they're developing products for themselves. No customer ever asked for a TV that plastered the screen with ads every time they adjusted the volume, or a lightbulb you need some shitty app to turn on and off, but now it seems everything comes with some kind of hidden monkey paw style gotcha attached to it.

What I'm trying to point out is the shift in complexity and similarities between the areas of the same complexity. Check this out:

- 2020s appliances (throw away manuals) are like 90s hardware toolbox (throw away manuals)

- 2020s smartphones (easy to understand manuals) are like 90s appliances (easy to understand manuals)

- 2020s specialized tools (manuals with mental models) are like 90s computers (manuals with mental models)

There was a book series called “The Missing Manual – The book that should have been in the box®”:

https://www.oreilly.com/search/?query=missing+manual&formats...

Those manuals from good old times came with introductions and basic training chapters. Manuals for music gear software don’t come with composition crash course, do they? In 80s and 90s they would have.

Because modern software engineering ( cough ) doesn't do well designed or well thought out software any more. It is all about "Move fast and break things", while the phase was coined by Mark Zuckerberg, ( or attributed to him ), that mentality or philosophy largely came from Google during the Web 2.0 era.

This make some sense for Web Product development where you want to find a market fit, VC and media were all over it. But it doesn't work as well for Desktop and other type of Apps. Or in System Programming.

And it is funny we start seeing push back against it 10 - 15 years later.

> And it is funny we start seeing push back against it 10 - 15 years later.

Except we’re really not. Tools like container registries, software dependencies on remote repos, and cheap infrastructure have brought the fast half-baked iteration to systems programming, desktop apps, etc.

You're right and now I'm existentially upset

Well I should say some push back. I mean I have been complaining ( or ranting ) about it since ~2005ish and I would only get downvoted into oblivion in nearly all major forums, with little to zero comment ever agreeing. At least now we see some agreement with that on HN. So that sentiment is growing somewhat, no matter how small it is. It then takes more time until a large enough force to recognise it as a problem, and even more time for people to actually do something about it.

Shout out to Ableton who has a really well-written online and pdf manual for what is a quite complicated piece of software.

https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/welcome-to-live/

Wish more software companies were this thorough.

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