Long press and long hover behavior needs to be improved

[kkoreilly]

Describe the feature

Long press events are currently supported on all platforms. However, there are several key issues:

• Long press events are accidentally triggered on desktop and get in the way; we only really need them on mobile, so we should disable them on desktop.

• Long press events are currently responsible for displaying both tooltips and context menus on mobile, which does not work with our new paradigm of putting app actions in a default context menu (#1197), as all widgets now have context menus that inconveniently show up whenever you want to look at a tooltip. We need a different trigger for tooltips and context menus on mobile somehow.

  • One idea is to have tooltips show up quickly and context menus take longer, although you need to keep pressing down to read the tooltip, so that doesn't really work (see also below for more discussion of tooltip timing).

• Even without that conflict, the discoverability of the long press feature is still very low, and the same is somewhat true, albeit to a lesser extent, on desktop with the right click. We really don't want it to be this hard to find the settings, and tooltips need to be discoverable on mobile (it wouldn't hurt to have some sort of cursor or indicator to make tooltips more discoverable on desktop as well).

  • We have previously consider some sort of loading screen tip to increase discoverability, but that only really helps on web, and doesn't really solve the problem.
  • We could also consider making tooltips show up quicker, which would reduce waiting for experienced users and increase incidental discoverability for new users (they would accidentally long hover more). For reference, GitHub appears to have nearly instant tooltips for their icon buttons, and gmail and other apps appear to be similar (tooltips are arguably the most important for icon buttons). Almost no one uses the native tooltips that look very bad and take longer. Making tooltips show quicker would also help rectify our longstanding plot and link tooltip issues where things are slow and unreliable. In Desmos, when a line is active, hovering over an intercept or relative extreme immediately creates a tooltip. Looking at UX discussions again, it seems like changing to 250-350ms might be reasonable.

I encountered those issues while writing the long press event docs in #1321.

Relevant code

No response

[kkoreilly]

I reduced the long hover (tooltip) time from 500ms to 250ms in ea4ce72, and it seems pretty good to me. You have to wait much less time for the tooltip to show up, there is better incidental discoverability, link and plot tooltips are much nicer, and it doesn't seem to me like the tooltips get in the way much.

The aforementioned issues about long press on mobile and context menu discoverability on all platforms remain.