As you hold your finger down the button grows. The designers considered that to be an affordance, whether successful or not (the swiping between tabs mentioned in the OP also has a fairly obvious affordance IMO)
The search discoverability nfw2 brings up is fair but has been entirely fixed in iOS 16- a prominent search button was added to the Home Screen (thankfully can be disabled if you prefer the old way)
Something like a progress bar going around the button in a circle, I could give them a pass for - at least you get the indication of beginning and end, and a suggestion that letting it fill would make something happen.
Truly brilliant. On a touch UI, the visual feedback is on the thing your finger is currently obscuring!
I've seen this sort of long-press safety feature a couple of times, and elsewhere it's been accompanied by a helpful message which appears if I try to short-press the button.
Why does the flashlight button need the safety feature anyway? It's not a self-destruct button, if I turn it on I can turn it off again with no ill effects. That was a rhetorical question, nobody knows why.
So you don't turn it on accidently and burn out the lamp/burn through the battery. It's really not that hard or obscure. Tap and hold has been a 'thing' for a long time. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Literally everyone I know personally groks this particular feature. It's not nearly as unintuative as you attempt to make out.
I'm not making a mountain out of anything, I'm drive-by commenting on a particularly amusing Apple UI feature I wasn't previously aware of. Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect, and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works.
Apple's design approach has been totally _un_intuitive to me for at least 20 years, and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.
> Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect
You’d be surprised.
> and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works.
The information is out there. When you first run, when you upgrade, there are numerous prompts to show you “what’s new”. Many ‘power users’ (I really dislike that name) arrogantly dismiss these. Then there are the online guides, the offline guides (book in the books app, Tips app). If the user pays attention, there are affordances everywhere — the safari tabs example in the article being a perfect example.
> and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.
This is testament to the point I’m making. Sure some of it isn’t completely obvious, but this ain't one of them, and discoverability isn’t about obviousness. If that were the case, we’d still be hunter-gatherers.
Yous said all that, and it's still not a justification to introduce a non-obvious and unique UI/UX paradigm just in one place that prevents user from accomplishing the task they need to do.
It's obvious. As soon as you touch the flashlight button, there is haptic feedback along with the button growing, exactly like the camera button on the other side. And yes, the button grows beyond the size of a 95th percentile finger. Now, whether or not you pay attention to the physical and visual cues is up to you. The cues are there. The instructions are in the official online guide as well as "About 3,020,000" other pages. They are in the official user guide in the books app. It's 'discoverable' without much of cognitive load for anyone that has used a phone in the last 20 years, not 'immediately obvious'.
Hmm? If you accidentally turned on the flashlight and it was left on, you would be bummed to find out your battery had drained next time you picked it up.
The reason it’s the same there is that that screen looks exactly the same as the Home Screen. So, if you know how the Home Screen works, you know how this one works. Making it different would be non-discoverable.
But, personally, I’d rather a UI that’s convenient to use rather than discoverable. Discovering a feature happens once, using happens forever.
The poster you’re responding to said “essentially” on the floor. Having stayed at a traditional ryokan I’d say that’s an accurate description. It’s a very comfortable floor! But very different from western beds.
6 months from now Apple might have used WWDC to completely flip the table on VR/AR. Extremely interested to see what they have coming and I don't think it's going to be a way to manage traditional flat applications. This doesn't take away from how awesome Simula One looks but it's still an elephant in the room.
Yep, Apple's power is controlling their whole stack. I won't be surprised at all if the main draw for their XR headset is specialised integrations with Logic, Final Cut, or even their Office suite with new ways to interact with the interface in an AR environment and not just a 2d window projected into a 360° view (although that has its usefulness too). Apple tends to target creatives and prosumers in media production so I'm sure they have some special software in the works to complement their hardware.
Having hopped jobs every 1-2 years for the last decade, I don't think I've ever been honest when asked my current salary. Never bit me. It would be quite shocking (would it be legal?) if an offer was rescinded based on this data.
I wouldn't frame it like that because now you're bargaining over what percent Y you deserve over your old salary--they are always going to try to push that down. Frame it as, "an engineer with my skills in this market is worth $Y, let's close this deal now". Remember they have a budget for how much they can spend for a position and you're trying to put yourself into that bucket.
Sure but my philosophy is all companies are lying to me during "negotiations" so fair is fair. I guess you could say that means it's also fair for them to further cheat and buy my info ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
•Boston area
•7 yoe
•Staff level
•Full remote
•Co is SF-based
•$250 total comp
I expect a promotion and ~20% increase next cycle. Interview was no leet code (I’m terrible at it!) - my strategy was to interview at public companies with levels on levels.fyi but not FAANG
7 yoe at FAANG is double that and they're all permanent remote now (except Apple). Diminishing returns n all regarding TC but you didn't hack the system or anything with that strategy.
But how is an alternative? It's half the money. Reminds of a Russian joke: daughter asks mom for milk. Mom says sure there's a pale of water underneath the bed
The person you’re replying to has nearly 3x the yoe and significantly lower TC, pretty simple. And like you say, there are always people in these threads saying “good TC doesn’t exist where I am.” Finally, you’re assuming everyone wants to work for FAANG.
Steam controller suffered from doing too much, I think. People want plug-in and go from their couch games, having a fully programmable all-singing all-dance super controller turned out to be more effort than most wanted to deal with.
The main value-prop for the steam controller was its touch pads, which allowed you to play mouse-based games from the couch (in an era when controller support for PC games was spotty). They were a cool idea, and they worked, but what ended up happening is all the games just added support for regular controllers, and that was just a better experience.
Steams built in controller customization features are worth it alone - for every controller.
No digi pad makes them bad for retro games but I have others for that.
From my perspective, the controller was never sold. I could not buy it anywhere, I am assuming they were only made in a relatively small batch and sold mostly in mainland US.
I had been looking since it was released for a place to buy it at a reasonable price, but could only find exorbitantly priced resellers that would ship from USA.
They sold at least 1.3 million steam controllers [1]. That's relatively small compared to the 3 major console's controllers, but it's still a lot. IIRC the only place Valve officially sold it was on Steam itself. Based on forum posts from the time and Valve's Index shipping FAQ, they could ship it to the USA and Europe. While you can't buy it there anymore, its store page is still up [2]
The search discoverability nfw2 brings up is fair but has been entirely fixed in iOS 16- a prominent search button was added to the Home Screen (thankfully can be disabled if you prefer the old way)