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Phelinofist
hombre_fatal
Amazing. That’s a feature you’d expect at the top of an HN brainstorm for comically bad, far fetched phone ideas.
_yb2s
The next version: When you touch an item in a photo you automatically buy it. There is supposedly a way to see that this is happening and cancel it, but that part of the interface isn't intuitive and attempts to cancel more often result in additional purchases.
This cannot be turned off, and the new phone can't be used in the first place until you set up credit card billing. It also seems to trigger "automatically" and "by accident" very frequently.
PebblesRox
It's already bad enough that my toddler can order photo canvases of a picture of himself getting ketchup out of the fridge via the Google Photos app. (He even chose expedited shipping . . . to our old address!)
Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone, which was the only way I could see to enforce that he couldn't do it again, but then someone made a payment and ended up saving the payment method again.)
I feel like it's only a matter of time before it happens again; at least the address is correct now so we'd actually receive the item if we were unable to cancel/refund.
politelemon
Next: if you look at someone's comment on HN, you get automatically subscribed to their medium newsletter.
ClassyJacket
Amazon was trying to get here with Dash buttons
ulam2
That's not a smartphone, it's an oversmart phone
oefrha
I’ve witnessed a good number of online interactions that went like “where do I buy your blouse/dress”, “I don’t recall, just use <app>’s AI feature to recognize it”. I’ve witnessed it once or twice in meatspace as well. So it’s absolutely a thing that real people find useful, especially among women who are into clothes shopping.
Neekerer
Taobao's image search is excellent. I haven't had a need to use a western service but Taobao can find just about anything via a picture search.
uo21tp5hoyg
sure, but only because HN is mostly men working in tech. these types of features are far more popular among women. (not all women of course)
iamacyborg
Citation needed
shostack
Aka "every time you touch something registered as two fingers, that gets phoned home to Huawei and likely incorporated into an ad signals database.
danpalmer
Ad signals? More like social credit profile.
langsoul-com
Doesn't that solve the problem of where can I buy this? Similar to social media containing links to purchase advertised wares.
Sounds pretty neat if it's accurate.
wraptile
Google lense can do that! I actually shop a lot through various apps with reverse image search (in SEA both Lazada and Shopee support this) and the results are alright at best but it can be a major time saver. It's often the only way to find the thing you're looking for as every e-commerce platform seems to be gamed to death these days.
awestroke
The solution is to not "buy this"
Fnoord
Sounds like you got some nice spyware for the Chinese government.
somedude895
Does it create affiliate links? That'd be genius and absolutely pathetic at the same time. Either way I wouldn't be surprised.
xnx
I like Android, but I would never ever recommend anyone buy anything but Google Pixel phones because of nonsense like this.
dhosek
At some point, the reverse image search on Google started doing this, which was really annoying. Although I kind of would like it to see if I can find a replacement for a pendant lamp that I accidentally broke one of the glass cylinders that surround the light bulbs on, but I can’t find any photos of the non-broken light fixture.
mgbmtl
Android (on my Pixel6) does this in a more subtle way, which I think is Ok:
Swipe bottom to up, to show the list of open apps, it will detect the images on the app preview. Click on an image, and there is a "shopping" option (part of Google lenses).
genericuser256
Seems like this was made by Craig Kaplan (https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/). Had him for graphics while at school there, and he was a fantastic professor
tobr
His work on aperiodic monotiles has been in the news very recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36119920
thefringthing
Just the other day he posted about how they were able to modify the one member of the family identified in their paper which is not an aperiodic monotile into one that tiles without reflections.
ahmedalsudani
+1 csk is as good as it gets. Had him for my first CS class there and to the end of my time there, that class stood out both in terms of quality and enjoyment/engagement.
If you're at Waterloo and have the chance to be in Craig's class, jump at it.
kelseyfrog
Unconventional, but I played this both solo and with my kiddos. As a multiplayer co-op game it really shines. Granted it's easier than solo, but maneuvering multiple people around a tiny phone was absurdly funny.
pluc
Twister but for fingers
Alifatisk
Oh, I thought this was meant to be played solo. No wonder why my fingers got so twisted.
Rotating phone solved it but that’s against the point.
themeiguoren
I wouldn't say that rotating the phone is against the point! I found it an interesting subversion of the idea that a phone is only ever used in landscape / portrait mode.
propter_hoc
Made it to 3 fingers and then couldn't advance as my phone interpreted a 3 finger swipe as a screenshot. I'm counting it as a win since I learned a new feature of my phone!
Tistron
Had the same problem at first, but moving one finger before the others made it work. At four fingers my phone can't do it anymore. It seems that it can only detect 3 pressure points at a time.
jmtucu
The same, my S23 doesn't recognise 4 touches.
MaxikCZ
Does it really not? I remember a lot of years back everyone was boasting how they can recognize 10 touches at the same time. Perhaps try an app, to see if the limitation comes from hardware or software?
My Note9 is able to register at least 10 separate touches in Chwazi app (just tested). Seems weird a newer phone in the basically same line would downgrade to three.
Culonavirus
[dead]
fsckboy
quit at 2 fingers because, why am i doing this? (i've actually commented before on HN about my dislike of all the sliders in the iOS UI, what an annoyingly difficult specialized skill to have to say up on just to hit what should be very fast and simple radio buttons or checkboxes)
xp84
The slider-style switches are dumb eye candy, I agree, but you don’t have to treat them as such, they toggle when tapped.
My big annoyance is how these massive balls of JavaScript and images and crap have infected UIs of web apps everywhere, as though people couldn’t understand a checkbox or something. Silly “UI designer” fad, and quite pathetic for a designer really, to just copy whatever Apple did.
kristopolous
You could probably run a successful "ai design" scam where you ask your mark a bunch of psychographic details about the customer and product, then ask them for their website url.
You discard all the psychographic data and blindly apply let's call "apple-ify.css" where you change the fonts, colors and contrast to just knockoff apple and then charge something like $499 for it with an elaborate pitch using buzzwords about machine learning and big data on how you're doing the latest in analysis driven design with cutting edge AI.
Meanwhile it's just a stupid static css file.
It'd probably work frighteningly well
rkagerer
What's annoying and counter to popular convention / user expectations is that you have to keep your finger in the established path to keep grip of the "ball". (S'pecially given your finger often blocks the view of it).
James_K
I'm not sure that the game would work without this restriction. If you kept grip of the ball regardless of if your finger was on the path none of the game's puzzles would work since you could just move your fingers wherever you wanted without losing the ball.
gffrd
Why is it annoying?
The feedback is immediate and highly discoverable.
The Lock Screen on your phone has totally different criteria (ease, muscle memory) than a toy that uses the same metaphor (fun/challenging)
Also: isn’t it more fun this way??
rapind
I actually liked it, but my daughters immediate reaction was “This is so annoying” (but in all caps).
Meanwhile, I find typing anything on my phone very annoying.
version_five
That's the whole point of the game, no? It was what I expected. Are some slide to unlock bars "ratchets" that stay where you left them?
lofatdairy
For me it wasn't that the slide doesn't stay in place (that much is expected), but that if you deviate from the path it immediately slips back to the beginning. That's a bit anti-pattern w.r.t. typical slides that either have a forgiveness zone around the element or update to the point on the slide nearest to the gesture point.
londons_explore
I think it is less intuitive to non-iOS users... Android has "swipe up to unlock" and there isn't really a UI element.
_popcornLurker
Uhm haha. On behalf of our community I would like to say that I was perfectly capable of understanding this mechanism thank you. Pretty sure the reason for the unintuitiveness for some people must rely on something else entirely.
vilunov
iOS has been "swipe up to unlock" for some time now, as well as Android vendors had "slide to unlock" lockscreens earlier.
TeMPOraL
Android stock maybe. Android as delivered by various vendors? It depends. I've seen variations of this mechanism pop up - including ones requiring to keep the finger on the path or else you "lose the ball", and that one was in the phone UI, where you needed to swipe to accept or reject a call!
rkagerer
Not a ratchet, but an imaginary rubber band.
1123581321
Definitely one of the core challenges of the game, and understandably not to everyone’s taste. I learned that I inadvertently swipe in a slight arc on the first puzzle and enjoyed learning to move precisely.
underwater
It's the same as a one of those games with the wire and the buzzer, just with a different interface.
xg15
I think that's the first nontrivial use of multitouch that I have seen in the wild (i.e. that is not basic "pinch to zoom" stuff).
Really cool!
omnibrain
How about touch instruments like GeoShred? https://apps.apple.com/de/app/geoshred/id1064769019
archagon
Or Seaboard 5D: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/seaboard-5d/id1173937855
(This was extra cool when iPhones supported 3D Touch.)
CharlesHorsey
If you like this, there’s a great early iPhone game called Eliss with similar finger twisting multitouch. There’s an Android version now too.
zuprau
Early iPhone/iPad games were really creative with this before everyone just settled on making candy crush games.
grishka
Doesn't work well on phones though, you really need a tablet. When you get to 4 fingers, it starts randomly losing track of a finger or two when fingers get close to each other. I tried two different Android phones and an iPhone.
bsimpson
Won't even let you start on a computer with DevTools and touch emulation.
beAbU
I was unable to get past the second 3 finger one. It kept glitching out when I put down my third finger.
Samsung Galaxy S20
nabakin
Yeah phones are hard mode but still possible. I did it on a 5 inch screen
_nalply
or a laptop with touchscreen
max0563
This would be a fun game with some UX improvements. It's extremely frustrating when the reason I can't finish a puzzle is because my finger slipped off the line and not because I just don't know the solution. I stopped playing because of how frustrating that was.
Eater_of_food
It's a dexterity game. Think of it like Jenga, even if you know which block to pull out, the tower can still fall if you don't do it cleanly.
At least with this you don't need to rebuild the whole tower!
lennxa
Totally agree, the dexterity is what makes it fun. I was thinking about how a larger screen would help, or if I had longer fingers, or if I cut my nails it'd be better. The annoying fails build me toward a sweet victory. good rush.
Also, the cost of failing is not much, quick iterations. You just have to remember what you did.
mikepurvis
Twister is the metaphor for me. I had to lock my orientation so that I could rotate the phone around to untie some of two and three finger ones.
max0563
No, they're not the same. In Jenga you usually lose in a way that you know could have been avoided. "If I had just held my hand still" or whatever. That is not what this is. This game is frustrating because it was poorly designed not because it is "hard".
exclipy
If only you didn't let your finger slip off the line
undefined
fowl2
Errors in Firefox 114.0b9 (Windows), both using mouse and touchscreen:
Uncaught TypeError: can't access property Symbol.iterator, _0x2129b3.changedTouches is undefined touchEnded https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/slide/slide.js:1 _onmouseup https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/p5.js/1.6.0/p5.min.js...
Fatnino
Doesn't work on Firefox for android either.
ThePowerOfFuet
Works fine on Firefox 113.1.0 on Android 13 (GrapheneOS 2023052900).
codethief
It does for me.
justin_oaks
How far does it go? I hit some really hard ones with 3 fingers. I think my phone gets confused if my fingers are too close to each other, which makes it especially difficult.
This also feels like playing a game of Operation [1]. The author just needs to add an annoying buzzer sound whenever you fail.
jumploops
Spoiler Alert
There are 31 levels, though I didn't personally finish. Proof [0]
yccs27
It goes up to 4 fingers, and the last one is 3 fingers again but basically impossible without switching fingers. Edit: nvm its possible without cheating
zokier
I got to four finger ones, but they are bit much to me.
I wonder if there is optimum phone size for this, mine might be smidgen too small
TrianguloY
At least 4 fingers!
ben-schaaf
Some frustrating with this game comes from the slider resetting when moving too fast. With debug touch points enabled I can see that I never leave the path, but it still resets. This is exasperated on Firefox where rendering seems to be slow resulting in constant resets.
tgtweak
You should be used to high difficulty if you're using Firefox on mobile.
nine_k
No, I'm used to low difficulty, high speed, because I can run uBlock Origin on mobile Firefox. It makes the web so much easier and snappier, compared to Chrome, even on a fast 5G connection.
wpwpwpw
For years I've been using it (fennec), happy with it in a slow phone (redmi note 7) with dozens of tabs open.
hereonout2
Nope, I don't get it sorry, this is so infuriating. A gamified version of all the frustrations I have with mobile UX and my fat fingers.
phh
I get it. A gamified version of all the frustrations I have with mobile UX and my fat fingers exaggerated to absurdity. Personally I take it as art, not as a game. I won't play it for more than 3 minutes.
hn_throwaway_99
Whoosh!
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This helped me to find out that my Huawei phone had "AI Touch" enabled. That apparently is a feature to touch any image with two fingers and the super smart AI finds out what is shown in the picture and where to buy it.
Goes without saying that I immediately disabled this. /shrug