[Ads-l] to long-press

Hugo hugovk at GMAIL.COM
Tue Mar 22 09:35:05 UTC 2016


Long-press as a verb has been mobile industry jargon for some time.

Here's a quick 2004 from Christian Lindholm who was director of user
interfaces at Nokia from 1995 to 2005:

---
Long press on right softkey enables voice commands
The voice commands can be activated by pressing and holding the right
softkey, this is independent of the labeled short cut. The possible
commands can be recorded in the Voice com. application which is in the
Tools folder.

Easy digit entry in alpha mode
Have you ever been annoyed how cumbersome it is to change the text input
mode, when you just need to enter a single digit.
A long press on number keys 0-9 in alpha mode creates a number entry
without changing the input mode.
---

http://www.christianlindholm.com/christianlindholm/2004/02/getting_most_ou.html

Both examples refer to pressing physical buttons, but the first is a
"softkey" which has no physical label and is rather labelled on-screen via
software, so can change depending on the context. When touchscreens came
along, the long press easily applied to those too.

Hugo

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