Obvious Hidden Features

Who ever reads the manual these days? No one!* But, if you don’t you could be missing out on some features of your gadgets and software that everyone else knows about.

This thought occurred to me when a twitter friend Daniel Swan mentioned that he’d discovered he could skip forward 5 seconds at a time on his iPod using a simple click. It made me recall that I’d discovered rather late that tapping the centre button a couple of times brings up a little diamond on the volume line, makes a whole track scrollable with the wheel. Friends and relatives find these late discoveries of the obvious very funny indeed.

But, it is obvious that there are plenty of other people out there who have found obvious hidden features many moons after the rest of us as a quick survey on twitter revealed:

Related to Daniel’s initial inspirational tweet, Chris Upton confessed a late discovery that he could use his iPod touch to control iTunes broadcasting to one’s stereo system! Meanwhile, diabetes expert JoBrodie tweeted to say how late she was to discover that she could view photos that a friend had put on a disc for her using her DVD connected her TV. Apparently, her friend Phil said it was akin to discovering that cracking an egg into a toaster would see an omelette popping out.

JonSatriani discovered late what the high-pass filter on his Ibanez electric guitar is for as well as the four-finger gestures hack on his MacBook Air.

@alandove wasn’t sure his obvious hidden feature discovery fits my original question, but said that discovering and learning the full set of keyboard shortcuts for the Firefox web browser revolutionized his work flow.

kristarella Found out just six months ago, that if you scroll while in the P setting on a digital SLR camera it changes the aperture/shutter combination to maintain the exposure. My colleague Paul Meehan of Intute Facebook poked me to explain how it took him “quite a while” to work out how to turn on his new mobile phone.

Oh, and seeing as we’ve been talking twitter here. I was quite late to discover two obvious features in that system – DM (direct messages) and the use of D before a twitter name and RT meaning retweet when you want to share a fellow twitterer’s earlier tweet.

But, Dave Munger had an interesting observation about obvious hidden features and technical manuals. Of course, he points out that, since no one actually reads the manuals, most of the features aren’t even in the manual. iPhone remote, for example, is not mentioned in the manual.

*There are exceptions to every rule thor310 tweeted to say that he does! He’s a rare breed indeed.