A bug which affected only left handed users
shkspr.mobi118 points by sixhobbits 20 hours ago
118 points by sixhobbits 20 hours ago
Reminds me of this old youtube bug where some of the videos that were uploaded ended up upside down because of a phone orientation during recording:
https://bruteforceswimathon.medium.com/youtube-help-my-video...
I'm righthanded and I usually hold my phone in my left hand so I can do clicking and typing with my right hand, but I often do basic scrolling with my left thumb.
I'm a man with typically sized hands. I can barely do anything one-handed on a phone. Phones are so big they basically require two-handed operation for me. Like you, I typically hold it in my left hand, so I can use my right hand to tap stuff.
There’s at least 3 of us still on iPhone 13 Minis, and I plan to keep it going until Apple caves and makes a sensibly sized phone again.
There’s at least 3 of us still on iPhone 13 Minis…
You, me, and my wife. I’m just waiting for my phone to hit 79% battery health so I can take them both in for battery replacement.
It’s gotten to the point that I frequently get asked, “what phone is that”. I imagine because all phones are the size of aircraft carriers now, and an iPhone Mini really stands out.
Will the do a batter replacement for a 13mini? i just cracked my last new-in-box fore battery issues.
If you have Apple Care, I assume Apple will. They’ve done it before, but not on something this old. If not, there’s always DIY or 3rd-party.
They will still do it if it's below 80% on Apple Care, or $119 if you just want to do it out of plan.
Then I guess there is me with my iPhone 12 Mini. Replaced the battery some months ago, Apple techs broke the screen, so got a free new screen too. It's starting to get very slow though, every update it gets worse. I can feel that just running Spotify and Waze over CarPlay is starting to be too much, add in sending live location via Telegram at the same time and the phone almost grinds to a halt.
god, I have a 12 mini and I don't know what I'm going to do when it dies. my attempts at finding a vaguely modern name-brand android phone that's a similar size have concluded in zero phones and a sense of overwhelming dread
This is totally not "vaguely modern name-brand" but I've been using the e-ink Mudita Kompakt and it's more or less the same size, but a bit thicker. It's Android but no Google Play Services but probably doesn't tick your box
Vivo X300 and Oppo X9S Pro are both very compact(6.3") and still pack great cameras and insane battery life thanks to the Silicone carbide batteries.
I don’t think you realise how massive the two phones just suggested are: https://phonesized.com/compare/#1863,2767,2760
(For reference, I would really like something a little bit smaller than the Mini, but there’s nothing remotely modern that exists.)
Correct, they are still bigger than the mini. But compared to what seems to be the industry standard of 6.8" they are positively miniature.
They’re considerably bigger than even the normal non-Mini iPhone. They’re only just smaller than the iPhone 17 Pro Max: https://phonesized.com/compare/#1863,2767,2760,2738,2736
You're comparing wrong models though? X9 and X300 Pro are both much larger than the phones I mentioned.
(I've just noticed you also used wrong models in your original comparison - while both phones are larger than the mini, the difference isn't as large as your link suggests)
They're also bigger than the base Samsung S26. They're not small even in comparison to other Android phones.
Base S26 is almost exactly the same size though?
https://m.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=14456&idPhone2=...
The X9S Pro is half a milimeter taller.
Hey count me in, I am on iPhone 12 mini, so I guess you didn’t count 4 because of that ;)
I agree that phones are too big. I refuse to switch to two-handed phone use. I used the Palm Phone PVG 100 with a 3.3" screen as long as I could, but software got too slow and battery-hungry, and my now-wife was annoyed when my phone would die halfway through our text based conversations lol. Used a chunky 3.5"er (Soyes S10Max) for awhile but it died after a year.
Now I use the Motorola Razr 2025. 90% of the time I just keep it closed. The outer screen is 3.6" and a square, but the screen doesn't extend all the way out if you keep the hinge on the side. It's kinda heavy at 6.6oz (compared to the Palm Phone's 2.2oz), but with a ring, it's super easy to use one-handed. And it has battery life and compute power to handle today's unnecessarily compute-heavy apps. You can also split apps in half when it's open so you can just use them on the bottom half of the phone.
Pictures:
https://www.middleendian.com/phone.jpg
https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg
Main disadvantage is that when it's closed, you only have a "selfie" camera as the back camera is facing you and the front camera is inside. So it's hard to quickly take pictures of things I see outside (usually funny birds). Other annoyance is that if you open the phone, use it, and then close it, the outer keyboard resets to the default keyboard and you need to "change the keyboard layout" to get it to use your preferred keyboard (Microsoft Swiftkey in my case)
I can't find it now but I'm sure I saw some people cutting samsungs in half to get something similar. The only one I could find was this: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/A_Modified_zFlip...
On the topic of the thread, I am left-handed. When I tried to resize the keyboard while it was closed, it constantly glitched out. Could not figure out what was going on until I rotated it 180° and tried it with my right hand. Resizing worked perfectly lol. Something about coordinates I imagine. I hear left-handed phone users used to have their horizontal photos come out upside down until someone figured it out.
On the other hand, I'm also a Dvorak user, and the Dvorak layout in SwiftKey has the delete key on the left, which is super convenient. Shown here: https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg
If you have an iPhone, enabling reachability is very nice [1].
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...
I have a regular pixel 10, and I can palm a basketball. But I can't use this phone one handed.
Same here, I suspect the majority of people with average to small hands could never really one hand phones (with a good enough screen size) in the first place so it makes less difference to them.
I’m 196cm tall and can’t use one handed. It is ridiculous.
Bring back normal sized iPhones.
Why do you mention your height but not the size of your hands? Maybe you just have small hands?
Get a ring for the back of your phone. Makes one handed use much easier.
I’m a guy who’ll leave his laptop on the floor and will bend double from a chair to use it, on the floor, because I have forgotten I can pick it up. I am ergonomically insensitive.
Anyway, I use my phone in my left hand, my right hand, or both, pretty much equally.
Right-handed, and I run into this bug constantly.
The worst curse put upon us is XNA games engine, which was unable to distinguish primary from secondary clicks. So players who swapped mouse buttons at the OS level were out of luck.
Most developers assumed that left click = primary click, but that's only true about 95% of the time.
Terraria, among others, still has this bug.
> A bug which won't be triggered by righteous people but infuriating to those who will surely be left behind after The Rapture™.
Or perhaps the righteous versus the sinister.
I'm right-handed, and I hold my phone in my left hand and scroll my phone with my left thumb.
It makes sense to use the left hand as phone holder to be free to use the right hand to do some other activity, example: I will have my breakfast while reading HN.
However I usually keep my phone with my right hand and scroll with my right thumb. Furthermore I am writing this comment by swiping with my right thumb. I can swipe with my left thumb but I'm not as accurate.
As a lefty, his tongue in cheek derision toward lefties still pisses me off genuinely.
I’m old enough to have been smacked around by a teacher as a kid for writing with my left hand. Right-handed bias is EVERYWHERE. Everywhere. Right-handed people will never notice it until they look for it, and even then it’s hard to see.
So yeah I am sure the ribbing is nothing more than “a sensible chuckle” for right-handed people, us southpaws are not laughing. And if you try to tell me you are, I seriously doubt that you are left-handed.
I am left handed and and it did not bother me at all. Probably because you seem to have faced discrimination and I never have.
I'm sorry it upset you. I thought it was funny but I'm also younger and I think I escaped most of the dextrocentric bullshit my parents' generation had to deal with. My mom was forced to use her right hand but it was mostly just an inconvenience for me. I like making jokes about being sinister (literally the Latin word for left) but I'd probably feel differently if people smacked me over it.
But you just called yourself a southpaw - what is that, if not self derision?
And anyway, it reads more like making fun out of the almost religious belief that left handed people don't exist held not by the writer but by developers of wordpress.
Can you elaborate on this “right handed bias”? I can’t think of anything other than a can opener where it might matter?
Anything that isn't symmetrical. Mice and keyboards. Circular saws. Tape measures. Box cutters. Folding knives. Garden tools. Those are just ones that impacted me recently.
Some have lefty versions but there is less selection. I recently found a left-handed weeding sickle and it is the best thing. Most of them are just annoying. I can do most things with right hand but then have to switch hands instead of the natural motion. But there are a few that are dangerous.
Measuring cups are a peeve of mine. They almost always have the handle on the right for US customary units. I had hopes of finding one biased for righty metric / lefty US in Canada but they haven't fully committed to the change yet.
I've learnt to mouse and keyboard the right handed way because it would just be too much hassle to switch over every setup I'm presented with. It does make me atrocious at drawing with a mouse though
Scissors are the other big one; most of them are designed so that when to try to use them with your left hand, you end up pushing the blades apart slightly so they don't cut as well (or at all).
With that being said, self-deprecating jokes about how left-handedness is an affront to God are definitely a prominent feature of lefty culture.
(Edit: I guess formal place-setting is another area of society that assumes right-handedness, as well as restaurants that pack people close enough together that everyone needs to use the same hands to avoid elbowing each other.)
I prefer right-handed scissors because you can see the cut line better when using them left-handed. It does take some technique to keep the blades shearing.
I can usually twist my hand to push the blades together, but the cut line is always hidden by the top blade for me
I had to read this a couple times and look at the comments here before I realized they were talking about scrolling on a phone. I was like "who scrolls with their thumb?"
something similar actually really annoys me on linkedin mobile, I'm left handed and often accidentally like posts if I scroll my feed as the like button is very close to where I naturally touch the screen to scroll.
sometimes I wonder if things like this are actually dark patterns to _encourage_ accidentally clicking 'like' etc.
similar to how in Threads, the '...' icon (under which 'save' is hidden) is so small that half the time clicking on it just clicks the entire thread (opening it to view replies) -- sometimes I suspect they make the target extra small on purpose
or how on FB, some of the options in the menu are now under the AI generated content, which pops in just slowly enough to encourage misclicks as items shift under your finger
all to make some PM's numbers go up, of course...
Making bad assumptions about data seems more likely than deliberate malice. If you A/B test different designs, and you see a huge increase in "interactions" with some design, you'll tend to assume that's a positive thing, unless you spend the time to interview a lot of customers to figure out what's going on.
I think they do encourage it - probably due to marketing. If you are getting paid per click its in your best interest to get someone to click irrespective of content. Snapchat do it with the scroll up feature, instead of it going to the next clip as most doom scrollers do, it goes straight to a profile. Vice Versa on other popular platforms. That little 'glitch' for a second, and now a new popup came at just the time you were about to press right where your digit is and you are loading onto a sponsored site. Of course the sponsor then boasts look how many clicks you have got.
NYT games app loads in an interstitial screen with a play button, as you go to click it they shift it up and put a subscribe button there so that when you click you accidentally click subscribe. Evil genius.
It could be accidental, but without that there's no reason to have the interstitial screen at all.
I'm not left-handed, but I often scroll my phone with my left thumb. My right hand is on my computer mouse, or holding a pen, or employed to make precise touches on the phone screen with my right index finger, or briefly comes over to join with my left thumb for typing...
Scrolling doesn't require much precision, and I naturally hold my phone in my left hand.
The solution is simple : don’t use LinkedIn :) I only use it when looking for a job and I never look at the “feed” (what’s that for anyway?)
I get more useful and up-to-date info from LinkedIn than from here.
Not sure who you’re following on LinkedIn but this is most assuredly not the case for me or anyone I know
LinkedIn is this constant networking event where everyone is looking for their next opportunity. It just feels gross to participate in it. Especially now that the only thing people do is talk about AI or use AI to talk about AI on their behalf.
The older I get, the more sausage fingers I get.
One of the great things about promoting LLMs is I don't have to care about sausage finger typos any more
> The older I get, the more sausage fingers I get.
It seems with age fingers do not just get fatter (feet too btw) but also get drier. So the keys do not register as well on smartphones: older people hitting right in the middle of the virtual keys, one by one, in a slow but decided manner are not "just old". There's apparently some science behind it.
Android has an old person setting with larger text and icons and explicit home/back buttons.
I might set up my parents with it, but I currently have it on my phone in my attempt to make my phone less addictive.
The combination of a black and white screen, old person setting squeezing out information, and turning off animations makes my phone feel shitty to use without having to actually block Instagram (which is commonly used for messaging in my circles) or any other app.
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