That was a rule for very good reason, and it will take some time to erode, but it’s definitely not as true today as it once was. It’s no consolation, but the first iPad - from the era of usable Apple design - was much better. Not in terms of power or weight, of course, but the OS didn’t have all these weird mystery-meat controls, gestures, broken multi-windowing etc.
Swiping isn't even a great gesture for most uses. Earlier today, I had to delete maybe 50-100 downloaded podcasts from the Podcasts app (there is seemingly no way to do this en masse). The quickest way to do so is with repeated swipes, but it's almost impossible to be consistent with your swipes over 50-100 items: sometimes the swipes 'stop short', sometimes they just fail for no obvious reason. A swipe is also a LOT more physical effort than a tap — if I could have just pressed a "DELETE" button 50 times, it would have been a lot more palatable (still short of a proper multi-delete, of course).
Some kind of data-selection mode where I can drag across all the elements I want to select would be awesome.
Individual app’s capabilities also vary based on whether they are windowed or not. For example, you can’t airplay out of YouTube unless the app is full screen (even though once you’ve moved it to your Apple TV, you can switch away freely).
Discoverability is also crap. You have to dig into the manual (which you have to “buy” for free) to get the full details of the feature.
You'll love this one: to undo (don't think it works for everything, but it does for typing), shake your device rapidly from side to side.
uh...they all make more sense on an iPad than the phone though lol.
Considering that command-Z is not discoverable either, it’s not too bad, especially as there are undo/redo/clipboard buttons on the keyboard in most cases.
Traditionally, the keyboard shortcut for undo has been listed next to undo on the edit menu. That's pretty discoverable...
Ever time you manually click edit → undo, you'll see the shortcut. It’s not invasive—it’s not some big popup that takes over the screen, or even a neon-colored tooltip that commands your attention—it’s just there, in the background, in case you happen to notice it. Maybe you’re not sure what it means at first, but if you keep seeing it every day, you just might try hitting the sequence of keys at some point...
The best UIs naturally help you progress from a basic user to an advanced user, without you even noticing it. I'm not saying the traditional desktop UI paradigm is the best that can ever possibly be done, but it has had 30 years of evolution at this point, and it's pretty darn strong.
> Many apps allow people to shake the device to undo and redo certain operations, such as typing or deleting. When initiated in this manner, an alert asks the user to confirm or cancel the undo or redo operation.
Ah this brings back fond memories of Windows 8 :-)
I had to google it, obviously whilst cursing profusely the whole time. Microsoft have a lot of UI/UX people - it boggles the mind that someone thought this was a good idea!
Helpfully, choosing Help crashed the system, which accomplished my goal.
Gnome shell does some of this stuff well, but try using it for real work on a tablet and you start needing those arbitrary gestures again. Need to invoke the on screen keyboard? View the app overview? You're going to be searching the web for those gestures, guaranteed.
There’s also an iPad User Guide you can download in the Books.app.
I actually recently got my first personal iOS (okay, iPadOS) device and this is how I feel about many of the UI features. Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature and I'm struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business. Maybe what's needed is good old RTFM, but having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use, it's kind of unexpected that so much of this stuff is not that discoverable.