> Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement.
How is that an improvement? I get that the shaking gesture is horrible, but this one is not better: a three finger swipe is unusual, impossible to discover, hard to do. I don’t get why swiping left, usually associated with going to the right (= forward in Western cultures), is here used to undo (= going backward).
> I don't understand how 'swipe from the left' can be used as a universal back gesture. Isn't it the case that most apps use that gesture already to open a menu?
That's also discussed in the blog post I linked. tl;dr: Only a small subset of users (3-7%) uses a swipe gesture to open these menus (all others use the hamburger menu) and these users have to adapt now to do different kinds of swipes for opening the menu and invoking the back gesture.
I think it's a three-finger swipe, isn't it? Though while trying it out, I did discover that a three-finger tap now shows another menu that makes undo/redo a little easier.
> Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.
I mean, maybe that could be an indication that cryptic and completely arbitrary swiping gestures without any sort of discoverability or visual feedback might not be the best interface for fundamental user actions like navigating the history.
The way you wrote this makes it seem like swiping up instead of left or right is really horrible and confusing. Why? Previous versions of Android had a totally different lock screen design, so I honestly do not know why you feel so confident that the correct swiping direction should be left or right. Because Apple did it that way?
> Lately some weird new copy and paste bar appears, no idea how I’m triggering it.
iOS 13 added a whole set of gestures that all key off of three-fingered interactions with the screen. Just tapping with three fingers shows that bar, which is probably all you're managing to do accidentally.
The rest: three-fingered pinch-closed to copy ("picking up"); three-fingered pinch-open to paste ("putting down"); three-finger swiping left/right for undo/redo... and three-finger double-tap for an undo shortcut.
Totally agree this is undiscoverable, but it's also fairly well gated behind a single root gesture so once you understand the trigger it's memorable.
> having a back button where I expected it but after a few days got used to it.
Dont forget that iOS has an almost universal left swipe gesture that doesn't require acknowledging the top left-back chevron
It also has an optional swipe down gesture at the very bottom of the screen to cut the screen size in half, useful for hitting the back button if you have to
> To get back to Home from any app, swipe from either side of the screen.
I don't think it's a great idea to reserve the "swipe from side of screen" gesture for the OS. Especially the left-swipe is used in many apps to reveal a menu, which is a UI-pattern I like a lot.
Anyway, looks interesting, would love to try one out!
> and telling them that they could by hitting Cmd+up arrow ... was deemed the most hidden thing thus far.
That's one of the oldest and most uniform/predictable ones, though—Cmd+up means "navigate out"; Cmd+down means "navigate in" (which translates to "open" for documents and "launch" for apps.) It perfectly lines up with movement within the (implicit) tree that backs the spatial-navigation metaphor.
When Safari was introduced, we also gained Cmd+[ to universally mean "navigate Back" and Cmd+] to mean "navigate Forward." These tend to be recapitulated lately by left/right swipe gestures, but not all the time. You can't swipe in Preferences.app, but you can Cmd+[. (And you can Cmd+up, too!)
Do you mean on iOS? Because on Android, both swipe from edge rightward and swipe from edge leftward both mean back when using the default gesture navigation settings, regardless of the RTL/LTR direction of the content or device locale. This is a side effect of the fact that Android does not have a notion of forward. I'm not convinced they should have done this, but eh.
Kinda unfortunate that phones have made basic workflow gestures like this so obscure. Let's not even get into how "undo" is accessed by shaking the whole device
I really think it helps that the three-finger swipe is interactive, i.e. you can swipe at your own speed and even decide to go back in the midst of the gesture. I often peek at the adjacent spaces only to come back to my current space - it feels like looking left and right without moving my eyes. Using non-interactive keyboard shortcuts is much more disorienting IMHO.
How is that an improvement? I get that the shaking gesture is horrible, but this one is not better: a three finger swipe is unusual, impossible to discover, hard to do. I don’t get why swiping left, usually associated with going to the right (= forward in Western cultures), is here used to undo (= going backward).
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