Well, swiping up and to the right didn’t work. But it did cause me to investigate further and try to note just what I did that succeeded. For me, what seems to work is to swipe up quickly and then slow down or even stop without lifting my finger. Hope this helps someone.
Apple has documentation that tells you how they designed it to work.
Open the App Switcher. Swipe up from the bottom edge, pause in the center of the screen, then lift your finger.
1 Like
Ah! Good to know—I guess my “up and to the right” simulates the pause while moving to the right.
I feel smart for having (eventually) figured out how to make it work, but I would feel even smarter if I had read the documentation. Really, I used to do that, back when there was paper documentation. (Too often, electronic documentation takes me in circles.)
This may or may not be the right place to ask this question but here goes: I have an iPad Air 2. I realize that I won’t be able to use all the new functions of iPadOS 15, but will hurt if I upgrade from iPadOS 14.8? Should I up grade for security reasons or will it brick my iPad? I would love to easily multitask on it. If I really feel that I need to multitask, I use my Mac.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I agree on the first category: there are functions which do exist, would be used infrequently, but are either not discoverable or not memorable; so they might as well not exist (except for that tiny fraction of users who will go searching for documentation).
The other half is really the guts of the problem: there are functions which would be used frequently but are not used at all, because the interface obscures them. So, they are not easily picked up. Eg several of the people who contributed to this list had decided that a particular feature just didn’t exist in iOS — eg “you have to open mail on the laptop to search for things.”
As someone that people come to with questions about iOS, one of the most frequent is ‘how do I go back to how it was’.
So, I think undo of this type is actually frequently needed. But because Apple did not force it to be implemented even in its own software, users gave up. This is part of why people do things like force-quitting apps, and restarting the whole device.
Interesting. I just tried it on my iPhone and iPad; on both, at the All Inboxes screen, Search only appears if you pull down past the first item. Maybe it is device or version dependent.
Once I had accidentally discovered ‘pull down to search’ in mail, I try it randomly in other situations where search might exist. This is how I discovered Search in settings. So in this particular instance, a small amount of interface consistency worked as a discovery tool. Perhaps that was Apple’s intention; or maybe it is accidental.
Once discovered, it is a simple enough gesture to be memorable. So, 1/10 for discovery; 9/10 for memorability.
If people don’t discover it, they do not even know it exists. So, they go to the Home Screen, open Settings, and scroll through. Erk.
Except it doesn’t always work: (sometimes?) there is some combination of dragging and pausing that is required, otherwise it pushes the other apps along and drops the dragged one there. And then there is no (apparent) way to undo that.
I disagree. Because dropping pushes all the icons along - including onto the next screen - and this is not undoable, the liability is high. So I just gave up trying to organise the screens. Maybe this is Apple’s intention.
Perhaps that is the actual confusion: notifications appear because you did something (we often don’t know or remember what our last action was, particularly if it was accidental); but then it is not at all clear whether to swipe up or down to undo this.
Strong disagree. Unless there is a way to ‘go back’, force quitting an app is the only way out. ‘Working against iOS’ is inevitable when iOS is working against the user.
For each particular issue, like the ones I listed, there is often a solution of sorts; or even a reason for the current behaviour.
Some sort of consistency in gestures would help: eg pinch out might mean enlarge, or paste — perhaps that depends on the number fingers, who knows?
But overall, I am disappointed that Apple has gone so far backwards over the last few years in terms of users being able to actually find and use features, even as those features and their underlying hardware and software have got so much better.
The new multitasking UI is a small but commendable example of a step back in the right direction.
I think the new Quick Note feature falls into this category.
(Apple continues to add functionality to Notes but I still find myself not using it. I should probably experiment with it.)
How is this different from hot corners on MacOS?
Some functions are just something you learn about from some sort of investigation - probably mostly hearsay (e.g., somebody may watch you tap the heart icon on an Instagram post and explain that you can just double-tap the photo to like it), but for Apple’s OSes, some of us watch the WWDC keynotes where a lot of this is introduced and:or actually read the documentation.
If there was an on screen prompt for every single possible action we wouldn’t see anything else.
I’m not sure that’s the same thing. Hot corners are a simple gesture that allow you to do something you normally do in other (well documented) manners. It’s a convenience thing—AFAIK they don’t include critical functionality. And best of all, if you just browse Sys Prefs you’ll learn about it all on your own. But where would I browse iOS to learn that I have to scroll above and beyond to find search (to just use a simple example, there are certainly others and likely better ones too)? On iOS I get the impression that hidden gestures are often the primary way to do something in a reasonable fashion. I usually know these gestures, but I wonder how many regular users are aware and how they’re expected to learn about all this considering how hidden some of it is. I’m not saying iOS is bad or doing it wrong, but I believe I see substantially more “secret handshake” attitude there than on macOS. Perhaps indeed because hiding things is the only way to leave enough space for content. But even if that’s true, it leaves me with a kind of feeling of “ok so then they need to invent something new that really solves this issue because this cannot be it”.
1 Like
This particular item isn’t, but a lot of these items (including swipe from bottom right for Quick Note) are in the Tips app. And the tips app is offered to everyone when they first update to a new major release of iOS or iPadOS, or set up a new device.
And this is the problem in a nutshell.
I can eventually learn an arbitrary gesture like this (and the App Switcher is one I use all the time, so I have internalized it), but spatial symbols are just freakin’ difficult to learn in a block.
I suspect this is one of the reasons that Steve Jobs ordered Newton to die when he returned to Apple (that, and bleeding beige-colored money). Newton was a gesture-based interface, and when I was 25 years younger I could sort-of pick up what I needed to know to make it run. Today, not so much.
If I need to know how to bring up another window, split one, or otherwise manipulate the interface, and one answer is to “find this button and tap it,” I’ll know the next time that there is a place on the screen where there is a button that does what I need.
Being told “[put your finger somewhere along the bottom and] swipe up from the bottom edge, pause in [the place where you think] the center of the screen [is], and then [when the time feels right] lift your finger” is so vague that it takes several trials to get it right. And if I miss just once and the interface doesn’t behave the way I expected, as a user I can be expected to lose confidence in what I thought I had learned.
Hand-eye coordination is all about targets. Just sayin’.
1 Like
This is true. Another aspect is that the pens were very easy to loose and to break. They weren’t cheap to replace.
I suspect that Steve also realized that the pen dependent Palm Pilot was wiping the floor with Newton. It had a smaller and easier to handle form factor. And I suspect he had iPod and iPhone in back of his mind.
1 Like
Indeed—there’s no question that touch interfaces suffer from discoverability problems. The tradeoff is that, particularly on small screen devices like the iPhone, it can be really, really hard to make them discoverable without drastically reducing the amount of screen real estate that’s available for actual use.
Interesting! I’m in much the same boat in terms of people asking me questions, and I’ve never had anyone ask about Undo.
Curious! I wonder if there’s a state issue in play, since now I’m seeing what you are, where the Search field appears only after scrolling. It does appear with nearly any scrolling and doesn’t need the same sort explicit action that I’ve seen in other places, so perhaps inadvertent scrolling made it appear before.
Arguably, the widgets in the upper-right corner are the reminder—swipe down for Control Center and you get more battery info, more Wi-Fi controls and so on. So I think that is discoverable, though because it came after the widgets, people may not think of them like that. In essence, they learned those widgets were static. And I will say, Apple made a big deal of Control Center when it came out, so there was plenty of coverage.
Agreed that it’s fussy—I think folders are a somewhat failed UI approach in iOS. The App Library and Search are more effective.
I cannot think of a situation where force-quitting an app because I did something and couldn’t get back would have made any sense at all. But then again, I’ve never found Undo to be necessary for anything other than the occasional text mishap. Force-quit should be as hidden as possible because you shouldn’t ever be doing it unless an app is truly frozen. Using it as a way to simulate Undo is the best way to lose data in iOS, something that’s normally very, very hard.
I suspect there is consistency here, but without sufficient usage, we’re still not going to remember. 
I always tap in text and then tap Paste rather than using the gesture since I can’t remember it. And I can’t remember it because I need it maybe a few times a month, compared to many times per day on the Mac.
But here’s a suggestion. (Not that Apple will listen, but whatever.) What if there was a help mode that could be invoked (with Siri too) that would show faint ghost outlines for gestural reminders available on a particular screen. Then you could see what was available before turning it off again. The argument against this is of course the fact that balloon help was a failure.
It certainly isn’t discoverable, but I think it falls into the category of being a shortcut to start with. You can always just switch to Notes and create a new note instead. And no, I don’t really use Notes either.
Yes. I was forever paranoid that I would lose that little piece of plastic. It’s still slotted into the MP100 that is in my closet/Museum of Abandoned Apple Tech. (Safely ensconced in the black carrying case whose brand name I forget at the moment but it included a little turtle toy to keep the MessagePad company.)
I later went through three Palm Pilots, including one that was a clone, because the entry price was so much lower (not to mention they were available and Newton was dead) and the gestures were mostly easy to understand. I even learned the weird proto-alphabet that Palm used for text entry, which was much faster than Newton’s cursive handwriting recognition and (to keep this relevant to the topic) took place in a context that was simple, repeatable, and had some relation to the outcome I wanted.
Which brings me back to my point: If you ask a user to draw an inverted V when they want the letter “A” to appear, that’s learnable because it’s not entirely arbitrary. If you ask them to imagine pulling a non-existent handle to an undefined point on the screen and it might or might not work, your interface has failed.
Which is why I like having a small widget on the screen that shows the user both that a multitasking operation is available, and how to accomplish it.
2 Likes
Well, once again, there’s a surprise. I did not know and did not care that there might be a Paste gesture. Tap and hold until a contextual balloon comes up, and then Paste, is what I have always done. And I’m with you—I don’t think I’d remember a gesture, either.
I think the desire for an Undo function comes from MacOS usage. Back to Lisa, the Edit menu was one of the first conventions I learned: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, along with their shortcuts COMD X, C, V, and Z. Even in apps that were poorly written from Apple HIG point of view, they were still ghosted at the top of the menu.
I expect iOS to bail me out the same way MacOS bails me out, I guess.
No question, but most of what people use Undo for on the Mac is when working with content. In iOS and iPadOS, the conventions that different apps use for that vary widely, and thus the approach they use for Undo does as well. And in many, many apps, there’s just no need for Undo because actions aren’t destructive of previous content.
Apple added a short video showing the new slide over gestures to their YouTube channel.
That’s a doozy, so congratulations on finding and remembering it! I think I might have been trying to triple-tap with two fingers…
Yeah, shaking an iPad is dangerously close to ‘hurl the device across the room’!
1 Like