Which I found flabbergasting at the time, because it had been a standard feature on PDAs ten years prior. I only bought an iPhone once it gained cut&paste support.
Cut and paste is a sort of obvious miss, but in general, I think Smartphones benefitted from not taking for granted the features of PDAs. There was always something deeply niche about the things.
I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I think it's a huge regression.
I can't wait until somebody dusts off the design principles of Windows 95/2000 or Mac System 7 and will sell this as the new UX paradigm.
> I think in general we are losing a lot of functionality especially since the phone UIs are slowly creeping into the desktop. Discoverability and consistency are simply horrible compared to how things worked around 2000. I think it's a huge regression.
Indeed. Remember when every icon had a tooltip that told you what it would do? Remember when it shipped with a book that also told you what each thing did?
I recently used an app that was a unified phone/pc interface and I was pretty sure that somewhere in a list of icons was a thing I wanted, but wasn't sure which. I picked the wrong one and then had to figure out howto undo what I had just done.
Who needs to waste time with manuals when you can just Google what you want to do and watch a teenager deliver a three-minute monologue with 15 seconds of actual (but incorrect) content?
There are more misses. For example I found it surprising that they didn’t include a universal “context menu” equivalent (long press would have been obvious) and a universal menu bar equivalent (like Palm OS did). Stuff like this is why we still have an awfully complex and inconsistent UI landscape on mobile.
I think I lightly disagree. Phones are just not good for complex use-cases. I don’t want a context menu on my phone, the depth of interactions in a browser for example should be… slide the webpage this way, slide it that way, poke a link (or, I guess, to be leave room for what I’m doing now, poke a text box to write in it). Dumbing down the UI was a good idea.
We do have all sorts of inconsistent “context menus” now on mobile. Sometimes after you select something, sometimes as items under the share button, sometime when you actually long press, sometimes a menu appears when you tap an item, sometimes as action items that appear when you slide an item to a side. And even for a single of those variations, different variants with different looks exist, etc. A uniform way to “show me all actions I can perform on this item” would be greatly beneficial.
Actually, this conversation has made me realize I only do this sort of “give me more options” interaction in Safari (long press) and Panic Prompt (double tap). I think I hadn’t noticed the inconsistency because 2 is not very many, and also the Panic Prompt behavior is a sort of nice analogy to the typical Linux terminal behavior.
Still though, only two programs and the inconsistency is immediate, haha.
webOS, the poster child for simple and consistent UI, did all of this.
Much like the Amiga, this OS is always imitated, never copied, even though Android should have thrown out everything after Honeycomb to adopt what it brought to the table.
