For a few minutes I desperately searched for any menus, long presses, weird nearly hidden menus, finger gestures etc. but couldn't discover anything. Apparently there was no way to undo!
After some googling I found out you have to shake the phone a few times. Seriously?
I think there must be a lot of people who simply lost their notes due to a small mistake.
flow typing wasn't possible last time I used it, however.
What phone? Do you recommend it?
I can't recommend it for everyone, but since you're reading HN here's the hacker pros/cons:
Pros:
* Every physical alphabet key can be mapped to two app/action shortcuts (long press/short press)
* Good construction, satisfying to use
* Great battery life
* Great security and permissions management
* Unlocked version is more or less bloatware-free (bundled BlackBerry software is there but is either useful or easy to disable/ignore)
Cons:
* Due to hardening, not all apps are available (I do miss Ruboto)
* Due to hardening, root is not currently possible (I'd like to root my device but I appreciate the security of BB-hardened Android)
* Camera isn't up to iPhone standards (I don't care as much about this and find it kinda nifty that the camera app allows fine control over shutter speed, etc even though I rarely take photos)
* Some of the BlackBerry-specific features are pretty poorly documented (there's a hover gesture that's only available while the phone is charging which shows the charge level as a line extending around the edge of the screen. It's difficult to Google and not very useful, but I got it disabled.)
All in all, I'm happier with it than I've been with a phone in a long time. It's got two SIM slots if you care about that kind of thing. It hits a particular sweet spot for me. Ymmv.
I'm really sad that it feels like we're dwindling down on physical keyboard phones.
I have a Cosmo Communicator. No comment yet on recommendation (or not). F(x)tec is another one.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...
Maybe because in russian Undo == Cancel and they had no courage to make it “Undo”: “Yes” - “No”.
The amount of designers who abuse minimalism because they misunderstand Apple's industrial design and other great design companies, because they only have a surface level grasp of Human Computer Interaction and the wider UX of accomplishing tasks, really bothers me.
And I happen to like the gray text underneath the setting name that tells you the current value of the setting. It makes it clearer what the setting does, and saves you a tap if it's already set how to want it.
Not trying to defend Apple, but really just that interfaces in general haven't always been perfect and still have issues, not just one (mobile) platform.
1. win+<number> opens the <number> program on the taskbar from the left. So having a bunch of pinned programs makes opening them very fast and easy.
2. Holding the windows key down then pressing the number multiple times allows switching between multiple instances of the program, similar to holding alt and hitting tab multiple times.
For example, chrome is the tenth icon pinned to the taskbar (counting from the left). So win+0 open chrome or if already open switches to the first window. Holding the windows key and hitting 0 allows me to quickly switch between multiple chrome windows.
So I don't have to mentally keep track of the current alt-tab order to switch between the second putty window and third chrome window. I just hit win+77 for putty and win+000 for chrome.
The rule works great and is easy to follow. But first you have to know it :)
Sadly, the company that taught me this in a previous century, now no longer follows it.
This appears to be fixed on iOS 13. Actions are now arranged vertically. The app bar above the actions still scrolls horizontally but it now hints at that by cutting off icons.
https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/
But at least we've rotated the problem by 90 degrees :P
When I got my first iPhone, my first touch screen device, I noticed their beautiful little slider switches for all the settings. They didn't work very reliably, though. I would use the touch interface to drag the slider, and it sometimes worked but often failed. Well, touch screens aren't perfect, right?
Until someone eventually saw me doing it and said, "You can't drag it, you have to just tap it." It turns out to be just a checkbox. A real slider switch has to be dragged and won't work if tapped, and an on-screen checkbox is the reverse, and they decided to use an image of the former as their standard implementation of the latter on a touch screen. Someone at the very top very deliberately decided that was what they wanted most.
«ng the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank. Of course, in later years, the check was replace by a credit card, and check clearance was replaced by the 15-day return period, but Steve’s and Apple’s focus remained the same.»
This, of course, was a long time ago. My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS. At the time this was simply hilarious.
In terms of iOS, the overloading of buttons and gestures makes for a situation where most users don't use any of that stuff. The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not. I know about it and never do it. In fact, when I do it is because I pressed it by accident and end-up unintentionally taking a picture or more.
I have another example that is unrelated to computers. We have these dimming light switches in several areas of our home. If you want to turn on the lights to the pre-established dimming level you single-click the switch. If, on the other hand, you want to go to full intensity, you double-click them. Despite having explained this, everyone uses the little tiny dimming lever on the side of the large push-button plate to go up to full intensity. And visitors, of course, have no clue because the feature isn't discoverable except for a fortuitous accident.
Progress isn't without side effects I guess.
A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:
It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!
What's sad in this little sub-thread is to watch people down-voting and taking this too seriously. These are healthy jokes, just good fun. Nobody is saying Macs are bad or inferior in any way. Heck, I own a bunch of them, PC's as well. Lighten-up people!
...and then there was this time when I spent a full hour with an x-acto knife above the dropped ceiling carefully, silently, carving a hole right behind one of my co-workers to drop a firecracker right behind him. Yeah, that's how we rolled.
I have a feeling that today's workplace has become far more rigid and intolerant of, well, being human. People would get fired for probably every single thing we did back then...like wiring-up a fire extinguisher to discharge into someone's crotch (male coworker, 'cause someone is likely to assume the worst) when they sat at their desk. Or how about jumping out of the bushes with two water hoses to hose down someone when they got to work? There's more...we had lots of fun and worked 14 to 16 hour days. That was twenty years ago, we are still good friends.
Oh, I have to mention one more. I bought a new car and proudly showed it off to everyone in the team at the time. One of the other engineers rented a crashed version of exactly the same car from a junk yard. He had the tow truck swap my car for the utterly destroyed car in the parking lot. He also swapped the license plates. My car was towed and parked around the corner. Imagine my reaction when I came out of the office to get lunch and my car looked like Optimus Prime stomped on it! It was absolutely hilarious beyond description.
I wrote a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in 6502 assembly on the Apple ][ to drive my brother crazy.
Here's a quick one: One of my coworkers watched my frustration level rise throughout the day as I was debugging one of my hardware designs. The thing was failing intermittently and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Being a hardware + embedded software project made it that much more difficult.
At the end of the day he calls me over to his workbench. He doesn't say a thing. He opens a drawer, grabs hold of a large knob on a variac, turns it down and all the alarms on my workbench --at the other end of the room-- go off. He turns it back up to 120 V, looks at me and smiles. The SOB got me good. Brilliant!
My go-to pranks on Magic Mouse users are to turn the mouse around or cover the laser. Righting the mouse is usually only the second or third thing they try.
Not for everyone. I could probably get by fine, if slowly, if you took away my trackpad. I can navigate with full keyboard access and shortcuts, and VoiceOver if necessary.
> The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not.
I do :( It give me feedback on whether I took the picture or not.
I don't mind this that much. It just shows that Apple elevated the mouse to an essential input system that must always be available, as opposed to being an optional accessory, and designed the system around that requirement.
You can make the same argument about not being able to do anything with a mouseless computer if the keyboard was disabled too.
In fact, even if the keyboard was unavailable, you could still use a computer with just a mouse + onscreen keyboard ...or a touchscreen. :)
So a physical keyboard is actually more expendable than a mouse.
This doesn’t sound right. I once installed a corrupted version of OS 10 Jaguar on my laptop that resulted in a non-functioning mouse and touchpad. I managed to reinstall the old OS using only the keyboard. Prior to the post-Snow Leopard era when they started stripping down the file system and muddying the navigation, OSX’s interface was really easily navigable.
As a side note, this was also the pre-Google Internet era, with super early Linux (can't even remember the version). I remember using NCSA Mosaic!
On your Linux setup, could you do just fine without a mouse AND without a keyboard?
Why is it OK for the keyboard to be an essential required device but a mouse should be optional?
The key is flexiblity. On Linux, I could avoid my mouse or my keyboard or my entire graphical desktop if I wanted to and still be productive. Macs don't have that flexibility.
I single out a mouse because it is a very low information density device. It doesn't really do much, so it is the low hanging fruit. Whether a mouse is required by an OS is like a litmus test of "can the user configure the OS the way they want, or does the OS dictate how the user will use it"
Requiring a mouse and assuming it to always be present is not a bad thing; it's progress.
macOS has good accessibility features, so you can set it up to use it without a mouse if you really need to.
Glad my work isn't impacted by such pranks!
I had to use the key map once to type without a working keyboard. That was bad.
I think, at least in Word you could Cmd + Tab (or pressing "." on the numeric keypad) to transfer focus to the menu bar. (Then simply navigate by cursor keys and use Enter or Space to select an item.)
However, Mouse Keys may be generally of help. I think, in System 7, they are part of the "Easy Access" system extension (be sure to have this in your system folder). Mouse Keys are activated by Cmd + Opt + Clear and allow you to navigate by the numeric keypad. (Up, down, left, right, diagonally, 5 is equivalent to a click, 0 to holding the mouse button pressed, the decimal point [dot] to releasing it.) On a PowerBook, you probably have to use the function key as well. (Using Mouse Keys, you may activate a menu by the 0 key. Normally, once the menu bar has focus, you can navigate by cursor keys and select a menu item by the space bar.)
This gets worse whenever I see new Apple keynotes about their latest iPad gestures for multitasking or text editing. On the computer I have visible menus where I can peek the shortcut for each action but is there anything like that on i(Pad)OS? Just adding more and more gestures without giving the user some intuitive hints/signifiers seems like a degradation of usability. The scrollbar tells me that there is more to show and auto-hiding it was a first step into the wrong direction.
I am glad that Android got rid of the dedicated menu button which only worked in very special places without showing any on-screen indication for its availability and I feel like the Option key on Macs is still hiding important things from their users.
The now deprecated(?) 3D Touch on iPhones also seems to suffer from this issue. I was expecting some sort of visual clues to the user (like differently colored buttons) that certain elements offered special actions with a harder press but instead the 3D Touch-enabled elements continued to look the same and mostly the tech-savvy users kept up with where this feature was enabled and where not.