What to do with long press? (was Re: Set DoubleClickInterval very low!)

[Richard Gaskin]

J. Landman Gay wrote:

 > Note that on Android double clicks are almost unheard of. Android
 > uses a long press for alternative actions.

...as long as that alternate action is a tooltip ("toast"). :)

I was thinking about long press recently with an app I'm making, and it 
reminded me of our earlier discussion about that gesture.  I'd seen 
cases where long press had been used to provide a contextual menu, and 
you noted that more recently it's used only to display toasts.

The most recent Material Design guidelines very explicitly support your 
assertion, with the only thing they say about long press being that it 
should not be used to provide a contextual menu.  But they don't 
describe what it should be used *for*.

The older Android Design Guidelines appear to have been removed from the 
dev site (if someone can turn them up please share the URL), so we're 
left with no official guidance as to what we should be doing with long 
press other than just as a mobile equivalent of tooltips.

What is the iOS recommendation for long press?  Does it differ 
significantly from their more recent hard press?

What do you folks do with long press?

Supporting it turned out to be pretty easy. Now I'm just unclear as to 
what I should be doing with it beyond displaying a label usually too 
small to be read beneath my fat thumbs.

PS: Anyone here make a HIG-savvy toast widget for LC?  Does iOS have a 
similar object?

And is there a way to make mobile-savvy menus from LC popup menus, or do 
we need to roll our own for those too?  Making them is merely tedious 
but not difficult, but the animation to reveal them is something that 
takes some effort to try to get right.  Might be nice to see supported 
in the engine, so newcomers making mobile apps can enjoy the same 
benefits LC provides for desktop apps....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com