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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

I love Apple, but this is so Apple: hidden powerful functionality you'll only know about through word of mouth or intentional exploration in the UI.

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It’s also documented in the iPhone User Guide.

You can get it through Books or on the web:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphf2746307f/18...

No one reads the manuals these days.

Apart from me apparently.

I work mainly with undocumented stuff. That taught me to appreciate when there is manuals and documentation for anything and I read them. I don't watch YouTube videos, I read the manual. Of course until I can't figure it out and then still look into YouTube anyway.

Exploring the UI is a perfectly valid method of discovering functionality. What’s the alternative? The phone interrupting you every 2 steps saying hey by the way, you can also do this and this from here?

Valid, yes. But this should never be the sole method of discovery.

Good UX provides clues to discovering additional functionality without intruding on the user.

What’s the alternative? That’s a question for a UX team - something Apple can certainly afford.

Clicking on a kebab and getting a clearly-labeled “scan document” option seems like an eminently followable clue. It’s not like it’s a minuscule inscrutable icon three levels down.

> Good UX provides clues to discovering additional functionality without intruding on the user.

This does that. It's behind a button that means "click this for a bunch of stuff you can do here"

Now, I’ll probably ask Siri. “How can I scan a document with native iOS functionality?” Hopefully I get the right answer back from the LLM!

(Admittedly, I have never read the manual for any iPhone I’ve owned; mea culpa)

It also shows up as a shortcut in spotlight if you search for “Scan Document”

Same with number-range call blocking. Gotta pay $4 but it saves you from scammers and other serial callers

...or the manual.

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