I sort of disagree with this: once I’ve internalized the gestures, I really appreciate the lack of UI for them. It’s like vim and emacs: the sparse ui creates a steeper learning curve but becomes a feature once you’ve learned the tool
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Your average dev who's never used vim or vi will start frustrated by default.
The other important thing is learning to fit into the conventions of the platform: for example, Cocoa apps on Mac all inherit a bunch of consistent behaviors.
The other way around is yeah, hostile. But of course it looks sleek and minimalistic!
On the early iPhones, they had to figure out how to move icons around. Their answer was, hold one of the icons down until they all start wiggling, that means you've entered the "rearrange icons" mode... Geezus christ, how intuitive. Having a button on screen, which when pressed offers a description of the mode you've entered would be user-friendly, but I get the lack of appeal, for me it would feel so clunky and like it's UI design from the 80's.
"Another example is the absurd application of icons. An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages."