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by geoelectric 2418 days ago
In iOS 13 it's worse, because they just changed all of it up. Now shaking and the old gestures for moving the cursor or getting the copy/paste menu don't work either. Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot.

There are a couple of problems with that. One is that now instead of coordinating one finger you have to coordinate three, which may not be as easy for someone older. To be fair I think all of the gestures do have a simpler secondary alternative somewhere, but that brings the next issue.

iOS (and everyone else) quit documenting stuff a long time ago aside from in help snippets, over the idea that everything was "discoverable."

Aside from the core issue of expecting a user to "discover" complex and rarely-used gestures with no affordances, what happens when you "discover" they don't work anymore?

I guess you get to discover the help entry via Google, or find it in a Tom's Guide "35 things you didn't know you could do..." type article...once you finally realize they changed and that it isn't just you screwing it up.

We really need to create the equivalent of CUA for phone interfaces. Prior to that being broadly adopted, we had to deal with all kinds of variant menu structures and shortcuts in DOS-based and early GUI apps. After that, it was easy to move between things and (eliminating the entire freaking menu bar aside) things have stayed pretty stable since.

1 comments

> Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot.

Wait hold up. I've been on iOS13 for months now and been super frustrated with what I thought was a buggy copy/paste.

Are you telling me I was just doing it wrong?!

https://www.imore.com/how-use-text-editing-gestures-iphone-i...

Afraid so, but there you go. Only reason I found out earlier is I lucked across it in my news feed so don't feel too bad. It's pretty obnoxious they didn't have a transition period where both sets of gestures worked.

Most of the changes seem intuitive but the cut/copy/paste do not.

I’ll have to give it a shot once I upgrade.