In spite of the manufacturing drama it introduced, 3D Touch was an insanely great feature for editing alone. Push a little harder on the keyboard and have a cursor to easily place where you need it.

I was real grumpy when they took it away. Editing had only become even worse since. I’d love to know what they’re trying to achieve.

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mrguyorama 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

"3D touch" was always marketing wankery. Every capacitive touchscreen and touchpad can sense pressure.

No android phone needed a trademarked name to have that feature. If modern iPhones no longer allow you to easily move the cursor around for editing, that's a software engineering decision. Android's implementation was not as nifty, you could only move "linearly" along the text input, rather than freely in two directions, but the intent is you just place the cursor roughly at the place you want and drag the space key for exact placement, though IMO it's too sensitive. Constraining axis in that context is a good thing.

Meanwhile, my Mac's "3D touch" keyboard functionality only results in it insisting to show a dictionary definition for most of the words I click and making it so "drag this file onto an app to input it" doesn't work half the time because dragging a file from Finder just doesn't work sometimes!

"Mac touchpads are so much better than everything else" people tell me as I yet again cannot do the one interaction that is the killer app for multi-window graphical workstations and that we figured out in the 80s on computers that couldn't even do color.

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embedding-shape 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not just grumpy, I'm baffled. Suddenly, when there is an URL or number input, when the hold-on-spacebar UX doesn't work because there is no spacebar, how could you even move the cursor left or right? Tapping in-between tiny letters is borderline impossible, and it isn't always in the right place to do the hold-and-slowly-move thing either, because the magnifying glass doesn't show up, so you can't see where you end up... It seems to me like for the last 5-6 years, the people who do decisions at Apple doesn't actually use the products themselves, or actually understand functional UX. Jobs would be ashamed.

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majjam 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Mine still does that, I just press and hold on the spacebar and can move the cursor around, are you sure its no longer available on your phone?

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snailmailman 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

This was changed, and it is pretty easy to think the feature got removed.

When it was pressure-sensitive, you could push harder anywhere on the keyboard. But now that it’s tap-and-hold, it only works on the space bar. Most other pressure-sensitive actions just got replaced with tap-and-hold with no changes. But doing that on any other key brings up letter-specific accents, so they moved it down to spacebar.

It also used to be faster. Now you have to wait, but before it was pressure sensitive. You could trigger it instantly with more pressure. Edits were so fast and convenient, but now it’s a slight pause each time

	▲	9dev 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can still tap and hold in the text itself to bring up the magnifying glass gizmo, but yeah the experience is awful

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n8cpdx 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Doesn’t work If the keyboard doesn’t have a spacebar - happens with numeric input. IIRC the old 3D Touch version worked on any key.