Does the iPad Have One Button Too Many? | Hacker News Reader

Does the iPad Have One Button Too Many?

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13 pointsdanso21 comments

"the bezeled edge seems a bit overkill for a company so obsessed with understatement"

This is silly. How else are you going to casually pick it up, with your thumb and forefingers of a single hand, without accidentally clicking on areas of the screen? The bevel is quite "functional".

This whole article feels slightly ridiculous, almost like the author is trolling.

People need to stop harping about the damn bezel. It's there for a very good reason. The iPad would basically be useless without it.

Plenty of sketching and writing apps already have really good wrist-detection. It shouldn't take much effort to extend that to assume a pseudo-bezel if you enable it in Settings.

Or the iPad could normally work in bezel-mode, but allow a separate "fullscreen mode" to take advantage of the whole surface area for some uses cases.

If Apple gets rid of that button, they would be sued for copying the look and feel of almost every Android 4.0 tablet manufacturer.

When Samsung sued them for look and feel infringement, the entire court system would be in danger of dividing by zero and suffering gravitational collapse.

Apple's design of the single button is really smart, and I doubt they'd abandon it any time soon.

Why is it smart? Because it allows people who have no prior knowledge of an iPad (or iPhone) to understand how to work it immediately.

The fact it's a hardware button is a bonus, because people know how to work those who've never used a touch device before.

The problem with gestural interfaces is that creating affordance is difficult. It's the reason that draggable things on iOS usually still have drag handles.

When there's a single button that brings you back to a predictable state, it's impossible to get lost.

Yes, though I wonder if the power button could conceivably fit that role? Pressing it once returns you to the home screen. Holding it down powers the system off.

I do prefer a physical button over the gestures...there are many apps that use multi finger touches and those sometimes are interpreted as iOS multi-tasking gestures, which interrupts the app.

I'm a little bit paranoid about physical buttons breaking down over time, so if the power button got increased usage, I'd probably get a bit worried.

That is the reason I dislike the idea of a physical home button, but at the same time, it seems like it's the best idea right now. A friend didn't know gestures existed on the iPad until I showed her recently and she is by no means not smart. I also know many people who didn't know about gestures on WebOS and instead used the flimsy home button on the TouchPad.

For now, I think Apple's home button is the best solution, but I'm constantly hoping for a better way to do it without getting ordinary users confused.

Totally agree. When you give people only one way to proceed, they will try it, even if they don't know what will happen. (Which doesn't preclude five-finger pinches and other additional gestures -- people just won't realize they're there unless they read some manual.)

I think some of the other hardware buttons could be removed from the iPad though, such as the volume buttons.

The problem is discoverability. I've had an ipad since 2007 and had no idea about most of the gestures he mentions. Novice users would get horribly stuck without the one no-brainer emergency exit that the physical button offers.

Even the home button doesn't have very good discoverability, between the long press and the double tap and the triple tap. Those are the kind of thing you do accidentally, and then can't figure out how you did them to do it again.

I've had an ipad since 2007

The first iPad was released in 2010 and these gestures are only for iPad2 and up (unless you jailbreak).

uff. complete brain meltdown. I meant 2010.

That is no longer the case. I have an unmodded iPad 1 and I can do the Grab to close, 4 finger app switch, etc. Just enable them in the settings. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/how-to-activate-ipad-2-mu...

Thanks for this.

If they must have a bezel, it should at least disappear when the device is sleeping/powered-off. Why not extend the screen fully to the edge and instead illuminate a bezel with the screen itself. You could even allow users to customize it a bit. Then you could gasp remove the Home button for a soft button or buttons.

Soft buttons are possible and sexy, really. Just because they are executed poorly on second-rate Android devices does not mean that they are all bad and impossible.

After all the hurdles they've crossed, do you really doubt that Apple can solve that UX problem?

One reason why I bet this won't ever happen is because it would create an inconsistency with how we use the iPhone. You can't do a five finger pinch easily on the iPhone, so you would then have two different ways of 'going home'. This is one too many for apple. Remeber how they changed the rotate lock to a mute switch even though it didn't make that much sense to do so? THey did it /just/ to create consistency with the iPhone. There will be better iPad-centric ways of navigating iDevices, but a pure gesture based one is unlikely.

Is there a way to return to "normal mode" in the home screen after being in "edit mode" (moving, grouping, removing) that does not involve pressing the physical button? I seemed to have tried all "obvious" attempts of doing so with no success.

I had always assumed that the home button was designed so that if an app locked up or something, there would be an immediately obvious way for users to get out without powering down the device. Does anyone know if this is the case?

Is it just me or using more than two fingers at the same time on that screen feels wrong? The way to go is webOS-like gestures. I don't think I used my TouchPad's home button ten times in one year.

On the other hand, I wish more Android phones would return to using real physical buttons instead of unreliable haptic soft keys, or the new on-screen buttons like in ICS.

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