This issue has been getting worse in OS X, too. I find myself continuously finding hidden functionality by holding in the option or command button while clicking or dragging.

Frankly, and this may just be cynicism, I speculate that these hidden functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform. If someone spends a few years learning all the idiosyncrasies of OS X and iOS, they may be too intimidated to switch to another platform, since they've invested so much time into learning Apple's OS.

Nah, the original Mac had all that too. You'd select multiple files by shift-clicking. Command-option-escape would force-quit an app. Numerous corruption & crashing issues would be fixed by holding down Command-option-P-R on startup. MacOS 8 gave us Ctrl-clicking to pop open popup menus. Option-click would often do a number of strange app-specific things.

I suspect it's more that you're becoming a power user. Power users have always had a lot more functionality available at their fingertips, in exchange for investing time learning a platform really well. It's just market segmentation: you don't have room to put all the functionality that everyone might need on screen, so you put the stuff that most people need all the time on screen, get them hooked, and hide other stuff in an obscure reference manual so it can spread through tips & tricks blogs.

I don't think so. The functionality is hidden on purpose to keep from distracting novice users. Every program's basic functionality is accessible without any modifier keys. If you're "finding" new features, it simply means that you're past the stage of a novice user. Most of these hidden commands are variations too, so they even make sense logically. I'm curious if there's a specific "hidden" function that you're referring to that doesn't logically make sense as a modification of an existing function.

I think something has happened at Apple. I would consider a playlist or dynamic filter (eg. Rock songs or Beatles songs) would be a beginner's desire. It's one step beyond "play". Yet, the new Apple Music app is highly cryptic. It's been engineered to steer you toward the new subscription service. Usability for novices and pros has been crippled. I could say similar about Apple maps. It just doesn't work properly. Google has really taken the crown here. It's sad to see Apple lose focus when they've held the benchmark so high for so long.

I've been using Mac OS since it was System 6, and I feel like power user features have been commonly hidden behind things like "hold option" for about that long. The difference now seems to be that it's not always power user features.

Example of a good feature to hide behind "hold option": removing the "..." from "Sleep...", "Shut Down...", etc. in the apple menu, meaning that selecting them won't prompt you before executing the command.

Example of a bad feature to hide behind "hold option": clicking the green window button to maximize instead of going to full screen.

Why is that a bad feature? It seems pretty logical to me that clicking "Option" would give you a variation (another Option) of the chosen operation. In that case, clicking the green "full screen" button gives you a "full screen" on the current desktop instead of creating a new one.

Because requiring the use of two hands on two different input devices to access a feature that is not advertised to the user in any fashion is completely and utterly unintuitive.

Two hands? The alt-button is 3cm from my trackpad.

The first is a power user function that few people will want, and those who do will know to go looking for it. The second is a function with common utility, arguably more utility than the default use of that button,* and most people who would want to use it will never know it exists.

*Especially on recent versions of MacOS, where fullscreening an app moves it to a different desktop.

> I speculate that these hidden functions are a way for Apple to hold consumers hostage to their platform.

Whether on purpose or not, it's definitely a form of switching costs. It's the same reason I stay on windows. Though windows 8 changed so many things I basically had to learn all over again. I can't do basic tasks at times and have to Google instructions for how to do them. Simply because they changed the interface.

The company that didn't want the second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality in context menus always hid the functionality behind a keypress-mouseclick. How this was ever better for the end user is beyond me.

My theory has always been that Apple liked the design aesthetic of a single mouse button and and aesthetic won out over actually good design. From my experience this is the Apple way.

I came to this conclusion after buying my first Mac about 10 years ago. It had a corded mouse which plugged into the keyboard. A nice aesthetic, though I questioned a corded mouse on a $1500 desktop in 2006. Upon my first navigation across the screen, it was apparent that the cord on the mouse was too small to cover the area of the screen. Very poor design, but the shorter cable didn't leave a mess of cable on the desk. Good aesthetic, bad design.

Control-click didn't exist until System 8. There was a good decade of zero contextual menus on Macintoshes before that.

As someone who's spent some time doing pixel-perfect graphics work, I would have never considered a cordless mouse ten years ago. I'm not even sure they were bad ten years ago, but the ten years leading up to 2006 taught me to avoid them.

>The company that didn't want the second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality in context menus always hid the functionality behind a keypress-mouseclick. How this was ever better for the end user is beyond me.

It was done to force developers to expose actions through the menu bar and thus be consistently discoverable to the user.

I would have thought graphic artists were using tablets by then? But it is a perfect example of Apple knowing their customer, and me not being it ;).

I disagree a bit with this assessment of Apple's intentions. It wasn't that they didn't want a second mouse button because they didn't want to hide functionality because you could always hold down the Control key and click to access those functions, even on a single button mouse. The issue (and where I think the design is really thoughtful) is that it's never required to use that second mouse button (or Control) but that it's there for people who are comfortable using it.

Apple is and has always been about a tiered learning curve for their devices and I think your point about the mouse is a great example. If you put 2 buttons on a mouse, it complicates every interface element by two-fold. Every item that can be clicked can now also be clicked with a 2nd button. For a brand new user, keeping 1 button basically forces them to look at what's on the screen and assess what they're doing rather than needlessly right click everywhere searching for a context menu. People who tend to right click on things (when they understand what a right click does and intentionally perform the action know what they expect to be behind that right click.

I feel like iOS is the same way, and intentionally so. A novice user can get by doing all of the basic commands with swipes, pinches, and taps. A more advanced user can do rotations, shakes, and multi-touch swipes. An expert user can access every feature of every application.

Problem is the novice-expert transition in Apple devices is nonexistant. To become an expert you basically have to read a manual, or do things that a) have no affordance, b) have no clear feedforward, c) have an unknown effect and may be destructive, with no clear undo.

It's very poor design.

>It's very poor design.

No, it's Windows/Linux-bias on your part. In the old time, every (and I mean every) medium-level Mac user knew that you can unlock a lot of additional functionality with the option-key. People today just seem to assume the Mac UI is built on the absolute same principles as the Windows UI, which is not true.

> read a manual

Quelle horror!

Heh, I should qualify that to become an expert some manual-reading is required. But the interface should at least help you with the transition.

> you could always hold down the Control key and click

maybe this is showing my age, but that came relatively late in the history of Mac OS

But I otherwise agree and do like the approach of basic/necessary UI as simple as possible, optional/advanced UI gracefully hidden

You forgot about the alt button. You have Left Click, Right/Ctrl Click, and Alt Click. Without Alt Click, you end up missing out on features you need.

I remember discovering the iOS calculator has a lot more features when you rotate the device into landscape orientation: http://osxdaily.com/2011/12/29/iphone-scientific-calculator/ I haven't tried recent iOS versions so I don't know if it's changed. According to the comments there, everyone and their dog knew this from birth, but I think it should count as "hidden" functionality, and rotating to landscape is kind of like right-clicking.

Well I didn't know this until now so I would agree its somewhat hidden.

Funnily enough, it resulted in the functionality being even more hidden, because the context menus were harder to summon: requiring both the keyboard and the mouse to be depressed in a dance.

There has always been a degree of promotional fiction to the ‘nothing hidden’ story. The Macintosh brought us the now-ubiquitous Cut/Copy/Paste paradigm using an fragile invisible clipboard. (Fragile because Undo has never restored clipboard data lost to an accidental Cut or Copy.) The Xerox Star didn't do it that way; it had Move and Copy to an explicit destination, with no hidden state.