[HN Gopher] Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple'...
___________________________________________________________________
Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
Author : wojtczyk
Score : 535 points
Date : 2024-08-31 04:29 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (martin.wojtczyk.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (martin.wojtczyk.de)
| hakanderyal wrote:
| My bet would be on some compounding error from long usage also.
|
| I'm using Apple Notes and it fails in some random ways after
| keeping it open for 1-2 weeks: When I try to copy something I
| select, it copies some random stuff, dragging text won't work, I
| can check/uncheck todo boxes. Goes away when I restart it.
| al_borland wrote:
| I ran into this in Notes as well. Restating Notes fixed it, but
| wasn't my first instinct, as I view copy/paste as a system task
| and didn't think it would be impacted within a single app.
|
| Seeing that I'm not the only one, I need to remember to restart
| notes at the first sign of an issue, rather than trying the
| action over and over trying to figure out what's going on.
| necovek wrote:
| Hopefully, seeing as you are not the only one, you figure out
| where to file a bug report and then file it too. And then it
| gets fixes.
|
| Ha, I am too used to it being more accessible to file a bug
| report, having spent most of my career with GNU/Linux
| (contributing and using since 90s).
| al_borland wrote:
| https://www.apple.com/feedback/notes/
|
| Or more generically...
|
| https://www.apple.com/feedback
|
| ...if you have bugs to report that aren't for Notes.
| nomel wrote:
| Maybe the offsets themselves represent a binary number within
| that byte that corresponding to the bits within that byte.
| Maybe if you give it the right sequence, a message will emerge.
| jval43 wrote:
| Notes has been super buggy for a while. The failure modes are
| so weird I don't even understand how it's possible for a text
| editor. E.g. text and selections rendered floating between or
| on top of lines of text. I wonder how they manage to bork it so
| hard.
| isametry wrote:
| Did this possibly start when they added "live" collaboration
| (quotation marks placed very intentionally) to shared notes?
|
| [0] says that was in macOS Ventura 13.1 and iOS 16.2.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if they had to rewrite the text
| editing engine in Notes, or at least parts of it, to
| accommodate for this change. And if there's anything more
| terrifying than modern Apple rewriting parts of macOS, it's
| them doing it for any cloud-based functionality. _shudders_
|
| 0: https://techhub.social/@shantini/109508624631773033
| chrisjj wrote:
| > When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random
| stuff
|
| A special place in hell exists for such code. No surprise the
| coder responsible is not keen to visit it.
| ntrcessor wrote:
| If I recall correctly, that is a kerning issue with the font. At
| the edges of the font is not a solid line, but rather more like
| every other pixel so that the characters can be closer together.
| This causes the up/down movement of one character to the next, as
| they fit together like poorly made puzzle pieces. And just how
| bad it looks depends on the size of the pixel on the monitor, and
| how much "bleed" it has with it's neighbors. (I don't recall the
| tech terms for this.)
| teo_zero wrote:
| Isn't kerning about left-right and not up-down, though?
| trilbyglens wrote:
| Yes
| jfoutz wrote:
| I think ascents and descents fall under keming. You don't
| want a j to bump into a b on the next line. So you have short
| letters from time to time. But that might be an archaic
| usage, or I'm wrong.
| isametry wrote:
| You mean another, more compact version of `j` with a
| shorter descender? Well that's called an alternate glyph.
|
| Kerning is strictly about the relative spacing between two
| _adjacent_ glyphs. The only case that would ever be
| vertical is if you're writing vertical lines (such as in
| Chinese or Japanese).
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Interesting... I'm in Japan and I was about to reply that
| Chinese and Japanese are almost always fixed-width, but
| luckily I grabbed a product next to me (laundry
| detergent) covered in Japanese. I was expecting to see
| perfect line-up of characters on adjacent lines proving
| they are fixed-width. They aren't even close, and this is
| true for both vertical and horizontal text on everything
| I look at. I opened a few apps like word and confirmed by
| default everything is fixed-width. So TIL Japanese is
| fixed width for plebs but any professional copy has way
| more kerning that I realised.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Depends on the language. Though I'm now struggling to think
| of a top-to-bottom script that isn't grid aligned. Mongolian
| I guess? Example: https://president.mn/mng/
| waveymaus wrote:
| kerning does not shift characters up and down, only left and
| right.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Haha, off-by-one pixel error!
|
| I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses
| (browser and SSH), but I also have a documents folder that I've
| accumulated over decades. I still use various .txt files in the
| docs folder as my low tech note taking apps.
|
| I use the Spotlight or Alfred keyboard shortcuts (that also use
| spotlight index?) for quickly opening the files when needed - and
| annoyingly my most important file - notes.txt - regularly
| disappears from the Spotlight index and suggestions. It's been
| like that for at least 5 years, probably closer to 10. I'm not
| even trying anymore, will just open the file from command line
| with vi as the fallback step.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Speaking of bad vision for a moment I thought I read "I still
| see MsDOS as the best choice" and almost yelled out what
| patrician taste!
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Well, you can run multitasking in TSRs & keyboard interrupt
| handlers (the original event loop)... implementing a window
| manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an
| exercise to the reader...
|
| I'm pretty sure both of those have implementations
| available for DOS already.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| I recalled something from distant past - MSDOS
| multitasking with DESQView (apparently the same vendor
| who built QEMM):
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
| jval43 wrote:
| Funnily enough a simple fgrep is super fast on SSDs and
| actually reliable. Even across TBs of data.
|
| With Spotlight you can never be sure. And to be fair, the
| Windows equivalent sucks just as much.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Yeah I sometimes use ripgrep for this. It's suspiciously
| fast!
| darkwater wrote:
| > I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop
| uses (browser and SSH)
|
| If it' just "this", Linux is perfectly capable and IMO even
| superior.
| baq wrote:
| Which Linux laptop do you recommend?
| haskman wrote:
| Try a Lenovo (thinkpad or ideapad), or a System76, or
| Tuxedo. Those are generally the most Linux friendly
| devices.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| It should be noted that the build quality of the ThinkPad
| are much higher than the IdeaPad. I have both and the
| IdeaPad is more or less on par with other cheap consumer
| laptops.
| gmokki wrote:
| Thinkpad P14s series with AMD, they make sure it is fully
| supported on Linux. I would take the just arrived gen 5
| AMD because of the new Zen5 cores. Same perf than with
| Zen4, but much lower power consumption.
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| Huawei mate book 14 (2024) the grey one (800 bucks) or the
| green (1200). The mate book pro is superb too but to
| expensive.
|
| You'll love the OLED screen and it's ratio 3:2! What a
| beautiful thing.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| For the described usage pretty much any laptop would work,
| even a Chromebook.
| greatgib wrote:
| Dell XPS are quite nice on the high end developer category
| of laptops
| tankenmate wrote:
| If you're looking for an occasional laptop, I bought a
| Lenovo V14 ADA for the few times I travel; got it brand new
| for less than $275. 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 4 threads, good
| Mesa support. Perfect for travel / now and again usage. It
| can even play some games on low graphics.
|
| EDIT: I should note, this is the AMD variant of the V14
| tankenmate wrote:
| I just checked Lenovo's more recent offerings in the US;
| the IdeaPad 1 15" AMD Abyss Blue.
|
| Not sure if the build quality is as good as the EU SMB
| market laptops (which are generally really good value
| with good build quality, for me a perfect compromise
| between price and build quality, steel internal framework
| with solid plastic case, not sexy but definitely robust).
|
| This IdeaPad1 looks like it has the same specs as the EU
| model (V14 G4 AMN). Just check if the build is solid
| enough. The IdeaPad1 can be bought at Best Buy.
| darkwater wrote:
| I have an oldish Lenovo Thinkpad T470 which is bulker but
| it's very good nonetheless and a Dell XPS (4 years old, and
| the battery sadly is the weak point since I used it 95% of
| the time connected to an outlet and never cared for battery
| health)
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Yep I should have written "mostly browser/SSH". But then
| occasionally I have to print something or run a (customer-
| provided) VPN client or open some corporate Excel file, etc.
| And there's the convenience factor of keeping my current
| setup. But should the MacOS thing become untenable for some
| reason, yep next step would be a Lenovo/System76 laptop known
| to work with Linux (including audio/bluetooth/wifi after
| resuming from sleep!) or even a Chromebook...
|
| P.S. I've ran Linux/X (plus VMWare VMs with Windows) on my
| _desktop_ machine with few complaints since the '90s and it
| was always the laptops that had issues, causing me to switch
| back to Windows after a couple of weeks of trial &
| frustration in the 2000s. I got Windows pretty performant &
| usable though, even attended Mark Russinovich'es Windows
| Internals class in London back in 2006 or so :-)
| tankenmate wrote:
| Laptop issues have dropped markedly in the last 3~4 years;
| especially battery life on AMDs in the last 6~12 months,
| the kernel perf / scheduling changes have been pretty good.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Just a cheap Chromebook would probably be even better IME -
| nothing to worry about, it is really very much just a
| keyboard and screen and gets out of the way.
|
| Less can be said about your typical Linux experience in in
| the 2020s where you will still inexplicably find yourself
| having to mess around trying to get
| Bluetooth/audio/webcam/sleep working reliabily.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| Does anyone remember NDISwrapper? You took Windows drivers
| for your laptop WiFi device or whatnot and the wrapper
| allowed to load them into Linux kernel (still didn't work
| for me reliably though, not surprised). Even when I was
| young and had lots of free time, it seemed insane to have
| to deal with this.
| mjlee wrote:
| I use linux on the desktop, but I still run a MacBook for my
| laptop.
|
| Nobody else offers the same combination of battery life to
| performance/weight, build quality, keyboard, trackpad, and
| screen. Of course it's not perfect for everbody and you might
| have different priorities but I think the MacBook gets most
| of them right for most people.
|
| Some come close on a few of those points but if you want
| official linux support your choice is very limited. Perhaps
| that doesn't matter to you but I don't want to even think
| about if updating my daily driver is going to result in a
| broken webcam or flaky wifi or bad power management.
|
| I'm holding out hope for the new snapdragon based laptops.
| They seem pretty close!
| jwells89 wrote:
| Even when expanding scope to include laptops that run Linux
| well despite not officially supporting it, the selection
| available still have major issues, whether they be with
| build quality, screen panel quality, battery life, standby
| time, sleep/wake, overall lack of fit and finish (e.g.
| unthoughtfully placed ports) or some combination thereof.
|
| It seems like a near impossibility for other manufacturers
| to not phone some of those things in. There's always a
| catch.
| eru wrote:
| > I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop
| uses (browser and SSH), [...]
|
| Almost anything will do for those?
| johnwalkr wrote:
| Recently windows has become much better for things a linux or
| macOS user takes for granted, like using ssh (a quick google
| search tells you how to install it using powershell), but is
| missing a lot of features. Two recent examples for me are
| taking 5 minutes to figure out how to install and use rsync,
| and taking 10 minutes finding a program to add/delete pages
| from a pdf file that's not a trial or demo of some kind.
| eru wrote:
| SSH clients have been easy on Windows for at least 20
| years: just use Putty. And there's also at least on Chrome
| extension that works as an SSH client. But you are right,
| that Windows doesn't come (or didn't come?) with one out-
| of-the-box.
|
| In any case, I can see that those addition things like
| rsync or PDF manipulation might differ between the
| different operating systems. I was really just talking
| about browser plus ssh (client).
| layer8 wrote:
| That's pretty quick?
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I did mention it's become a lot better. These are just
| minor annoyances.
| jmb99 wrote:
| Both of those features have been built in to macOS for 2
| decades, so in comparison, it's quite slow.
| galad87 wrote:
| macOS on a low dpi screen is mostly full of those kind of issues.
| I wouldn't recommend using a low dpi screen.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The problem appeared in the screenshots that the article shows,
| I don't think it has anything to do with the screen.
| galad87 wrote:
| It's a screenshot of macOS running in low-dpi mode.
| wruza wrote:
| I've used fullhd imac/osx for many years until around 2018 and
| never noticed anything like that. Easier to call it "low dpi
| issues" now that they destroyed it, I guess ;)
| kalleboo wrote:
| 2018 was about when they stopped selling the last Mac with a
| non-Retina display, so that would make sense for when they
| stopped testing for it.
| necovek wrote:
| It's not only about stopping testing: they dropped subpixel
| rendering altogether.
|
| Though this seems more like a hinting issue.
| chrisjj wrote:
| You don't stop testing when you stop selling X. You stop
| testing when you stop supporting X.
| galad87 wrote:
| 6 years is a long time ;)
| aulin wrote:
| They removed subpixel hinting after Mojave IIRC. Now it's
| unusable on anything less than a 27inch 4K display, and it's
| been like that since years...
| baq wrote:
| It's crazy that I had to buy BetterDisplay (great tool btw)
| just to get fonts from incomprehensible to merely ugly on a
| 25x16 monitor via a fake 2x scaled one. Windows renders razor
| sharp even without gfx drivers.
| skydhash wrote:
| There's a great article with explanations on the net. But the
| gist is that macOS renders like a giant image with no care
| for pixels and small details. It works fine when using native
| resolution (low dpi) or have enough pixels for their "retina"
| approved resolution. Anything else and it looks blurry.
|
| Linux and Windows use actual pixels for their rendering, and
| even with anti-aliasing, it looks sharp. If you're stuck with
| macOS, aim for 4k at least.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Ideally, you want a screen that natively runs at a
| resolution that's a perfect 2x multiplier of a mainstream
| 1x resolution that has the right amount of screen real
| estate for the screen size.
|
| So for example, a 20"-24" screen should be 4K so it can run
| at 1920x1080 @ 2x. Similarly for 27", you want 5K which is
| 2560x1440 @ 2x.
|
| This is a really good post describing how it all works:
|
| https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/
| skydhash wrote:
| That's the article. I got hit with this issue after
| purchasing a 27" QHD monitor. Native resolution made
| everything too small, and everything else was blurry. I
| gave up after trying pretty much everything and bought a
| 24" 4K monitor for the mac.
| wojtczyk wrote:
| The issue persisted when I disconnected the external screen,
| but I probably should have taken additional screenshots from
| the built-in laptop screen.
| quink wrote:
| Starting to see this with view counts on YouTube in Firefox after
| some recent UI updates.
| rv3392 wrote:
| Oh that's what that is. I saw this on YouTube in Firefox the
| other day and thought YouTube was just A/B testing a quirky new
| way to display view counts.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I don't remember in which browser I saw this, Chrome or
| Firefox, but when a block of text suddenly becomes a bit more
| animated (eg. moves around in a div) you could see it change
| from Windows' native font rendering method to DirectWrite-style
| fuzzy edges.
| userbinator wrote:
| My bet is on a random bitflip more than an actual bug in the
| code, based on its localised nature and rarity.
|
| Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel
| fonts all the time.
| r-w wrote:
| A bet on cosmic rays is a rare bet indeed ;)
| userbinator wrote:
| Rare but does happen.
|
| Not necessarily cosmic rays but things like marginal timing
| can cause errors like this, especially on GPU buses/VRAM that
| tend to have less protection.
|
| GPGPU and now AI has made accuracy of results more important,
| but before that, GPUs were regularly ran at the limits and it
| was assumed that occasional barely-visible artifacts or
| otherwise computation errors whose results aren't noticeable
| were acceptable. (Imagine you're playing a 3D game and a few
| pixels in a frame occasionally have incorrect values, or some
| shapes are a pixel off --- unless the errors are massive,
| you're unlikely to notice.)
| matja wrote:
| If only Apple used ECC RAM, then that would be easy to confirm.
| hollerith wrote:
| Maybe the bug is the need for everything to line up perfectly.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| Yu're rih, i's no s bd ne yo'r use t i.
| dylan-m wrote:
| One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at
| some point, they changed the appearance of the window close
| button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in
| the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of
| screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of
| wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center
| in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses
| component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-
| button/.
|
| That post points out it's probably just subpixel stuff causing
| the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were
| adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was
| already visually confusing.
|
| I assume it's kind of gone away at this point with all the high
| DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if
| there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| This is not a software bug, but rather an optical phenomenon
| called "chromatic aberration". What's happening is that your
| glasses are bending light at different angles depending on the
| wavelength, to the red and blue and green are landing at
| slightly different places on your retina.
|
| It's a hard problem to solve optically and requires specially
| shaped lens. It's a common issue in telescopes, with higher end
| expensive scopes having these specially shaped lenses to reduce
| this effect.
| voctor wrote:
| From the post:
|
| > In conclusion, the off-center "x" is real and probably an
| artifact of the display or how it is rendered. It is unlikely
| that it is the result of chromatic aberration.
| meta-level wrote:
| from the comment:
|
| > That post points out it's probably just subpixel stuff
| causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the
| time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something
| that was already visually confusing.
| dustincoates wrote:
| Is this why, when I'm reading text on a dark background, red
| will appear on a different plane than white? I was just
| wondering the reason last night.
| leereeves wrote:
| A different plane?
| amiga wrote:
| The red text seems to be closer than the other text. As
| if it were floating above the other text.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I get that a lot with default terminal colors - on black
| background, dark blue and dark red look shifted in
| opposite directions relative to baseline (white/light
| colors); when both colors are used in close proximity, it
| gives me a strong and quite distracting 3D effect.
|
| I always thought this is specific to that color
| combination (red and blue on black) and LCDs, thus is
| perceivable by anyone, and could be used to create
| intentional 3D effects; I never considered glasses may be
| a factor too.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Sounds a bit like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis
|
| > Another interesting reversal effect was observed in 1928
| by Verhoeff in which the red bars were perceived as farther
| away and the blue bars as protruding when the bars are
| paired on a white background instead of a black background.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I have pretty strong high-index lenses, and definitely can
| get a kind of 3D effect.
|
| The classic terminal blue and green text colors on a black
| background is the situation where I first noticed it:
| moving my head makes them shift in different directions
| giving a parallax or depth effect.
| krispyfi wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis
| almostnormal wrote:
| Chromatic aberration is mostly relevant further away from the
| center of vision. If there is an icon (or text) visually
| inspected carefully it is at the center where chromatic
| aberration matters least.
|
| The icon is mis-aligned, or its the different color subpixels
| of the screen that are not produced at the same place.
| Tradidionally, red is to the left.
| _ph_ wrote:
| To be precise: chromatic abberation is lowest at the center
| of the lens. But with glasses we often don't look through
| the lens center even if we have something in the center of
| our vision.
| mrob wrote:
| >More expensive lenses have a coating to compensate for this
| chromatic aberration.
|
| You can't compensate for chromatic aberration with a coating.
| You need a compound lens made from multiple elements each with
| a different dispersion, e.g.:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatic_lens
|
| More expensive glasses lenses usually have worse chromatic
| aberration than cheap ones. The cheapest material for glasses
| lenses (PADC, often called by the brand name CR-39) has one of
| the best Abbe numbers (measure of dispersion).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CR-39
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbe_number
| kortilla wrote:
| Can you link to something to buy?
| mrob wrote:
| I don't think anybody makes achromatic glasses lenses
| because they would be too thick and heavy.
|
| AFAIK, every optician sells PADC (e.g. CR-39) lenses.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| I can confirm this. I had annoyingly bad chromatic aberration
| with my previous glasses. I specifically asked for CR-39
| lenses for my next set of glasses and now it's barely
| noticeable at all.
|
| I would recommend this to any programmer who uses high-
| contrast syntax highlighting. To me, it felt fatiguing every
| time I noticed differently colored words scrolling slight
| further than other words on a terminal screen on the same
| line.
| agent86 wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that CR-39 is not impact
| resistant. They will shatter and can do horrible things to
| your eyes when they do. Kids should always be put in impact
| resistant lenses.
|
| If you're a desk jockey, or impact resistance is not a
| concern, CR-39 will give the least aberration with the
| exception of crown glass.
|
| The hidden hack here if you need/want impact resistance is
| to ask for Trivex lenses. Same impact resistance as
| polycarbonate but much better ABBE value. It's often
| overlooked because it costs a little more than
| polycarbonate and most people don't complain about the
| distortion.
|
| Also, anecdotally, you get what you pay for with
| progressive lenses. I have a cheap lens in my sunglasses
| and a higher end lens in my daily drivers and I can easily
| tell the difference.
| xattt wrote:
| > It's often overlooked because it costs a little more
| than polycarbonate and most people don't complain about
| the distortion.
|
| I just started wearing glasses. I asked about fringing
| and they had brushed my concerns off as me being new to
| glasses.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Deal with it for a few weeks, your brain will likely
| adapt.
| jrockway wrote:
| This really bothered me many years ago, and I tried CR-39
| and even glass, just for fun. I was never that happy with
| the results. I could always distract myself with chromatic
| aberration, and I think I eventually decided not to care
| anymore.
|
| But right now, I have high index lenses and am reading HN
| with Dark Reader, and even if I use the maximum strength of
| my glasses (progressive bifocals), I can't really see any
| chromatic aberration.
|
| I'm not sure if I should be happy or worried.
| kps wrote:
| For those with stronger prescriptions who want higher index
| lenses to reduce thickness (and weight), look at
| http://opticampus.opti.vision/tools/materials.php and/or
| talk to your optician about available materials.
| (Personally, I've settled on MR-8 for my last couple pairs
| of computer glasses.)
| azlev wrote:
| TIL. Thank you.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I can't speak to glasses, but limiting chromatic aberration
| in the binocular world does seem to involve coatings (at
| least as Swarovski, Leica, Zeiss present it).
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| If you cut some wavelengths, you won't get their
| contribution to the distortions ;)
| sitharus wrote:
| You can't eliminate chromatic aberration with coatings,
| it's a physical property of how the lens interacts with
| light. The only way to fix it is to adjust your lens types
| or materials. Zeiss' current marketing seems to agree
| https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/us/nature-
| observatio...
|
| Coatings are still very useful to reduce other lens
| artefacts though.
| cubefox wrote:
| I thought I got used to the color fringes in my glasses, but
| the real problem is that they actually reduce image clarity
| away from the center of the lenses. If you look e.g. at white
| text on a dark background from an angle, the chromatic
| aberration blurs (the color components of) the letters
| together. You can't really see clearly by moving the eyes to
| the edge of the FoV of your glasses; you have to turn your
| head instead.
|
| This is directly contradicting the main purpose of glasses:
| to see clearly. So it's actually somewhat less safe to e.g.
| drive with glasses that have major chromatic aberration. No
| idea why optometrists brush it off as a minor glitch.
| jahnu wrote:
| Another irritating thing that is captured in that image is the
| single pixel gap between the top of the application window and
| the menu bar. If the desktop background is bright it is very
| distracting. Not a mistake like the off centre X but drives me
| mad, nevertheless.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| I knew from the very start of using macOS that it was
| designed around apps NOT being full-screen. Yeah, they are
| catering to the full-screen-apps people a little more
| nowadays, but embracing floating windows everywhere, and
| making good use of the distinction betweend CMD+Tab and CMD+~
| makes it so much more powerful than just tabbing through
| full-screen apps, or three-finger-swiping. It also makes
| macOS way more beautiful to look at in my opinion.
| skydhash wrote:
| It's quite maddening if you use spaces (as workspaces) and
| same windows across them. An option like CMD-Tabbing being
| restricted to only applications with windows in the current
| space will go a long way.
|
| Power users is an unknown concept at Apple.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I'm not sure that they're an unknown concept, because
| macOS has lots of little things tucked away all over the
| place for power users. It's one of the things I miss most
| when using other desktops, particularly those that go
| maybe a little too far on the minimalism thing (like
| GNOME).
|
| It's just that they expect these users to have fairly
| specific usage patterns and design around those. The
| further one's personal patterns deviate from that
| expectation, the higher the level of friction
| encountered.
| skydhash wrote:
| > It's just that they expect these users to have fairly
| specific usage patterns and design around those.
|
| That's how you design generic appliances, not
| professional tools. While macOS is great for the users it
| caters to (that only use a handful of apps), it's not for
| people that use their computers as computers (making it
| do pretty much everything).
| jwells89 wrote:
| It's kinda tough, because a clean-cut, coherent vision of
| how the OS is intended to be used is necessary to build a
| great experience. The more you try to accommodate ways of
| usage beyond that, the more the vision falls apart and
| you end up with checkbox waterfalls and branching tunnels
| of config dialogs added in the pursuit of making
| everybody happy.
|
| So realistically, judiciousness is required to keep it
| all glued together, and some usage patterns just won't be
| accommodated.
|
| For example, Apple doesn't seem to be bending over
| backwards to make former Windows users happy, because the
| way that desktop works is just too different from what
| they've envisioned and what their long time users are
| used to. If they add a series of toggles to support
| Windows usage patterns, that's a sudden 2x multiplier on
| the behaviors and UI that needs to be tested.
|
| That said, I don't necessarily agree with all of Apple's
| decisions (I've never liked the linear representation of
| virtual desktops that in place since 10.7 Lion that well
| and preferred 10.6's Snow Leopard's 2D grid, for
| example), but the lines have to be drawn somewhere.
| sph wrote:
| That gap provides contrast and separation between two
| similarly-coloured-but-not-quite grey objects. It would look
| worse without it, though I agree it is silly.
|
| This is the same reason why window gaps are so popular in all
| tiling window managers. It just looks better.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| When I got an ultra wide monitor I also noticed this for the
| first time on the macOS circular red X button, when wearing
| glasses. I guess a wide monitor has you looking at things off-
| axis more. It is really remarkable how much you can make the X
| dance around the red circle by moving your head. There's
| something about the colours and simplicity of that particular
| icon that really cause the effect. The effect is almost non-
| existent if you're looking at a more complex image, so I guess
| it's also remarkable how much your brain compensates for
| chromatic aberration in most contexts.
| trustno2 wrote:
| I mean horizontal and vertical centering is the hardest thing
| in computer science
| amelius wrote:
| Honestly what annoys me most is that it looks like a sideways
| traffic light.
| hedora wrote:
| My glasses cause a bit of chromatic aberration, but not enough
| that I'd expect to see this sort of effect except at the edges
| of their field of view.
|
| Now that you point it out, the X is way off center on my up-to-
| date M2, so I took a screenshot with default display settings
| and zoomed in to look at the pixel work.
|
| The X is rendered asymmetrically. It appears to be about 0.1
| pixels too far to the left and down, since the antialiasing has
| shaded pixels "outside the X" but only on those sides. The
| antialiased render of the red circle is symmetric. This matches
| what I see without zooming in and rules out my glasses.
|
| I wonder if someone fixed the bug for low-dpi displays where
| subpixel rendering mattered a lot, but did so in a way that
| hard-coded whatever Apple shipped 10 years ago. Maintaining
| tall piles of hacks is hard.
|
| Alternatively, maybe their font renderer is getting wobbly in
| its old age. The window manager is my #1 complaint about this
| laptop, but crappy font rendering vs. well-configured Linux is
| also on my list.
| Bondi_Blue wrote:
| You can try submitting a bug report with Feedback Assistant.app
| or apple.com/feedback, but there's no guarantee they will see it.
| gield wrote:
| Someone will definitely see it, but maybe not take action on
| it. Now that it's on HN, it will definitely get more traction.
| superjan wrote:
| Possibly they ask the text engine to render halfway two pixel
| lines. It will round up or down quite randomly when fp errors
| accumulate.
| djbusby wrote:
| Maybe now is a good time to remind everyone: your vision will
| deteriorate. Keep this in mind when designing.
|
| When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my
| own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable.
|
| According to my eye doctor the screen time is causing eyesight
| issues earlier. We're not designed to stare at a bright light
| 40cm away all day.
|
| May want to look at some eye exercises - or at least something
| far away.
| mrob wrote:
| Very few screens are bright enough to compete with the normal
| brightness of outdoor sunlight. There's no evidence that close
| focus or looking at bright screens causes eyesight problems.
| Bright light actually seems to protect against myopia. Here's a
| good overview:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/
| immibis wrote:
| Once I took apart an LCD monitor (with LED backlight) since
| one of the backlight elements was broken (I got it broken for
| very little money). I thought I'd see whether the LCD element
| can be used in front of a window to make a sci-fi type
| screen. Turns out the backlight is much, much brighter than
| daylight, and the LCD lets almost no light through. The LCD
| was too dark to make a cool sci-fi screen, and the backlight
| sitting separately was blindingly bright.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Just want to endorse this point about considering accessibility
| when designing interfaces. Small low contrast fonts are a real
| pain as you get older.
| ahoka wrote:
| Doctors would say the stupidest things. We are not "designed"
| for anything.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Evolution by natural selection of often regarded (somewhat by
| analogy) as a process of 'design'.
|
| If you like, replace 'designed for' with 'suited to'.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| 'of' --> 'is', of course.
| samatman wrote:
| You can get grumpy about it, sure. Or you can just accept
| that any use of "designed to" in respect to humans can be
| replaced with "adapted for" without loss of meaning.
|
| Most people who say "designed" here aren't ignorant: they
| don't care about the distinction and say what's idiomatic.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use
| my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are
| workable.
|
| FWIW in Firefox (and i guess Chrome and other browsers) you can
| have per-site zoom. Also addons like Stylus allow you to setup
| site-specific CSS rules (and HN uses a bunch of classes in
| elements that use the same visual style by default but can be
| altered with custom CSS). For example in HN one thing (among
| others) i have is to use a slightly darker background for every
| other comment to make it easier to distinguish between comments
| when scrolling.
| usaphp wrote:
| Reminds me of Microsoft calculator having a one pixel off between
| buttons:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| That's awfull!! I couldn't use it anymore after I've seen it
| once
| layer8 wrote:
| Use the old one, it's better anyway: https://winaero.com/get-
| calculator-from-windows-8-and-window...
| wojtczyk wrote:
| Ouch! I had no idea.
| manoweb wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there are Apple employees that read HN. It would
| have been cool to include a build number of the OS
| akerr wrote:
| Or, you know, file a Feedback:
| https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/
| saagarjha wrote:
| Don't do that.
| raws wrote:
| YouTube viewership numbers ha et a similar issue.
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| It's font hinting and kerning. But whyyy the heck only in the
| last few chars?
| isametry wrote:
| Well you've just answered your own question: because it's not
| just font metrics.
|
| There seems to be more to that custom view than a standard line
| of text; something about that view is not optimized for low-dpi
| displays.
| mgaunard wrote:
| In that picture I'm personally more bothered by the antialiasing
| than by the misalignment.
| dingaling wrote:
| I'm disturbed by the ambiguous UI.
|
| Is 'Hide Binary" enabled or disabled? If it's enabled, why is
| it a different colour to the slider that has presumably
| selected Base-16?
|
| Are the binary digits editable?
|
| Are "ASCII" and "Unicode" mutually exclusive as you'd expect,
| in which case why are they both the same colour?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but
| there isn't_
|
| There is: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/
|
| That said, it isn't very user-friendly, and I find that they
| don't seem to pay much attention to it. When they do respond, it
| tends to be some form of "#wontfix. Please close this."
|
| That looks like a fairly ugly little bug. I suspect they know
| about it now, thanks to the HN Bug Reporter. It tends to
| highlight these types of things.
| minkles wrote:
| Conversely all 4 of the bugs I reported with that were fixed in
| the next minor release!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It may well have to do with the types of bugs I report. Many
| are Xcode bugs, and Xcode is one of the most productive bug
| farms on Earth.
|
| I also submit feature requests and usability issues.
|
| My experience is pure anecdata.
|
| I usually end up closing the reports, after a number of
| months of them being ignored.
| chrisjj wrote:
| RNG coding? I.e. what bugs replaced them...
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| I reported a bug that occurs in a specific configuration of
| the Music app (trying to use Home Sharing + using bluetooth
| headphones), never heard anything back. I wonder if it's been
| fixed in the latest version of the OS, I still haven't
| upgraded...
| cromka wrote:
| Every now and then I think about starting a public bug report
| tracker for Apple bugs since they keep theirs to themselves.
| The number of maddening but minuscule bugs I run into makes me
| wish I was using Linux again, where I can fix them myself, or
| at the very least report them upstream and hope someone else
| eventually does so.
|
| By not having a public record of bugs Apple conveniently hides
| the sheer number of them and how many people they affect.
| MagerValp wrote:
| There's https://openradar.appspot.com where you can at least
| share the bugs you file yourself.
| hamishwhc wrote:
| Also https://github.com/feedback-assistant/reports
| specifically for Feedback Assistant reports.
| cromka wrote:
| Also very nice. Thanks for that!
| cromka wrote:
| Oh, this is great! Not surprising someone already thought
| of it.
| wojtczyk wrote:
| Oh, this is great!
| MagerValp wrote:
| I was also a bit surprised to read that, since Feedback
| Assistant.app should be the first thing that pops up if you do
| a spotlight search for "feedback". The app helps a bit with
| collecting a sysdiagnose report and makes it easy to add
| screenshots.
| dagmx wrote:
| Only if you're on beta builds afaik
| IIsi50MHz wrote:
| On macOS 14.6.1:
|
| 1. Cmd-Space 2. I type "Fee", "Feed", or "Feedback" 3.
| Feedback Assistant appears in the list of suggestions.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| It's not "not user friendly", it's criminally user hostile as a
| deliberate act. I know - incompetence over malice. But this is
| wilful malice of Apple to cover for their incompetence, so yeah
| maybe both. Not to mention the grand Apple opacity.
| wojtczyk wrote:
| Thanks! I didn't know about this site to share feedback. I'll
| give it a try.
|
| Also another reader mentioned to enter Feedback Assistant in
| Spotlight. It's the first time I see that app.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Honestly you might as well scream it into the nearest pillow.
| I'm sure someone somewhere reads some of them, but in most
| cases the very best you can hope for is a comment asking you
| to confirm whether it's still an issue in the latest
| release/beta.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Wasn't it admitted or leaked through court documents that
| it was originally added only to placate upset users who
| expect to be able to submit feedback but that they weren't
| going to particularly monitor or care for what gets
| submitted through it. I recall it was Jobs himself who
| didn't want it and gave in after constant demands for a
| feedback contact method
| wojtczyk wrote:
| Thank you for the context!
| zackmorris wrote:
| As a policy, I tell the world about (non-exploit) bugs from
| billion dollar corporations, but I report bugs directly to
| small businesses.
|
| This creates an incentive for the big players to improve their
| process and proactively catch bugs.
|
| I've seen bugs reported to Apple's bug reporter get fixed in
| subsequent OS versions, but almost never in updates to the
| current or previous ones. This is a fundamental flaw with their
| process that provides a historical track record of them
| deprioritizing certain bugs. Which is why we should probably
| pivot away from internal bug reporting services and move
| towards third party bug trackers.
|
| The AAPL market cap is $3.48175 trillion as I write this.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I do like single-dev apps. There are two apps I use
| regularly, and I have Discord open to the developers of both.
| They are always happy to receive bug reports (because so few
| report) and often open the code while I'm talking to them to
| figure out the problem.
| st3fan wrote:
| "We cannot process this report. Please attach 50GB of logs that
| may or may not include PII".
|
| I've had enough cases where a simple screenshot or log snippet
| should have been enough to accept the bug report but instead
| they were closed because I cannot in good conscience attach all
| the data they want from a Mac that I use for my day to day
| work.
|
| :shrug:
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The last report I submitted, was an App Store Connect bug.
|
| If you are submitting a build for Mac (in my case, as a Mac
| Catalyst companion to an iOS app), you can't reset the build
| number to 0, after you change the main version.
|
| For example, if you go from 1.0.0 (106) to 1.0.1, you would
| expect it to be 1.0.1 (0), but it won't let you submit a Mac
| build with that build. It must be 1.0.1 (107), even though
| the iOS build is fine, with 1.0.1 (0).
|
| This forces me to keep updating the build number on both
| builds (because I sync them). I used to use the build number
| as an indicator of release status, but this pooches that. Not
| the end of the world, but annoying.
|
| I first got a "cannot reproduce" response, where they wanted
| me to submit a sample app (In the original report, I actually
| sent them a link to my full app source code, as it is an
| open-source app -most of my work is open-source, and I have a
| number of repos that contain full source for shipping apps).
|
| I responded, saying I would not, because it would require
| creating a whole fake app, with fake releases and whatnot,
| and it wasn't worth it, as I had already sent them a link to
| a shipping app, that exhibits the problem, and also, they
| were quite capable of doing that, a hell of a lot more easily
| than I could.
|
| I then got a second response, saying something like "Oh, I
| see. It is a _string_ issue, not a _numerical_ issue. Works
| as designed. #wontfix. Here's how to close a bug."
|
| I gave up, and closed it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I got surprisingly helpful technical support through Feedback
| Assistant for a problem I reported having with a >10 year old
| Thunderbolt display. I always thought these "send feedback"
| forms at big companies always just went to /dev/null, but after
| sending three bug reports with logs (and after six months) I
| got a fairly technical response which was obviously written by
| an engineer, including a root cause diagnosis and a workaround
| that actually worked. Have to say I was very impressed.
| Aloisius wrote:
| It appears to be fixed already in Sequoia.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/5klvt24
| jb1991 wrote:
| On mobile devices, Apple's Calculator app has always been one of
| the most frustrating apps I've ever used, and I'm surprised it's
| a stock app by the company itself. If you press buttons quickly,
| like you would a normal calculator, many of the key presses
| simply don't register at all. I'm not sure if they're
| prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual
| functionality, but it's incredibly surprising from a company that
| focuses on user interaction, supposedly.
| artursapek wrote:
| The lock screen is even worse. I have to slow down to input my
| passcode or button pushes don't register.
| afandian wrote:
| I'm glad someone else noticed this. I never manage to unlock
| my iPhone first time.
| artursapek wrote:
| It's pretty sad
| Seb-C wrote:
| I have a similar problem on my Zenfone, there is a weird
| delay between key presses, especially when repeating a
| character twice, so that I often fail my password.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I always continue to fail several times because after
| failing once the last press of my last attempt gets
| registered as the first press of the next attempt so if I'm
| going fast my next attempt will fail too, until I stop and
| enter it like my grandmother would.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised it's using the same UI code as the
| Calculator app.
| ilammy wrote:
| I'm sure the horrible lock screen UX is simply a dark pattern
| to nudge users towards Face ID.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| Even if you use Face ID you have to enter the password,
| instead of your face, regularly
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Assuming I get another apple phone, I'm really hoping they
| still do something with touchid. That was heaven compared
| to faceid. I don't think I can use apple wallet payments
| _without_ faceid, otherwise, I 'd ditch it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I do a lot of stuff with blue/purple gloves, and I can
| unlock my touchId device wearing those. Doesn't matter
| why/how. The fact I can shows how it is easy to bypass.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Can someone else wearing the same gloves unlock your
| device? Otherwise seems more likely the capacitive sensor
| isn't bothered by a few tenths of a mm of nitrile.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I've assumed it's enough oil/residue left in place that
| just pressing a clean solid surface to contrast the
| residue is enough to detect the pattern.
|
| Can someone else do it? Quite probably, as I've tried
| using a different finger from the the registered finger
| with the glove and it unlocks.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I use a full passphrase with alpha/numeric values instead
| of a numeric only passcode. I've never seen a sluggish
| entry on that. Does it behave differently with a numeric
| only entry? I definitely experience the calculator
| sluggishness, but never entering my passphrase.
| 42lux wrote:
| I have the same problem with the bitwarden macos app. If you
| start typing directly when it opens it misses keystrokes
| drives me nuts.
| teekert wrote:
| Try switching focus mode from the lockscreen (by long
| pressing somewhere inbetween all notifications, widgets, the
| clock etc). Always takes me several tries and I end up
| feeling like something is broken.
| mason55 wrote:
| This makes me angry literally every morning when I wake up
| and turn off sleep. And the worst part is that it used to
| work fine until they changed it to a long press for some
| reason.
| JamesonNetworks wrote:
| I have this same issue, and the same frustration every
| morning. It's to the point where I will probably set up a
| shortcut and train myself not to use it haha. I really
| miss when it just worked!
| tolmasky wrote:
| It's very easy to reproduce this bug, even if you don't go
| quickly. Basically, if your tap becomes a "swipe" that leaves
| the button area, then a previously registered "tap" that's
| already shown up in the field will actually "unregister" and
| disappear from the field. Try it yourself: tap down on a
| button, watch the dot appear, then without lifting your
| finger, swipe out of the button, and watch it disappear. This
| happens a lot when tapping quickly since you are tapping and
| beginning to move your finger in the direction of the next
| button. You have to train yourself to make only up and down
| motions to be able to go quickly. It is indeed very annoying.
| The way these buttons should work is like telephone buttons
| (registering on the "mousedown", not "mouseup"), and not like
| OK buttons (that register on the "mouseup"), but instead they
| chose a weird combination of both.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| The "keypress" behavior is not a bug in my opinion, it's a
| well-established behavior across platforms.
|
| You could do the same thing with a button+mouse on a
| desktop. The dot for the typed character appearing
| immediately is different from alphanumeric keyboard
| behavior, because you can't register any key press before
| releasing the touch (or key) there, due to composition.
|
| In my opinion, this is sensible behavior and your vision
| sounds like it would be a nightmare in reality to me,
| accidentally pressing neighbouring keys or tapping instead
| of swiping all the time.
|
| Is this any different on Android? I've used Android for
| most of my smartphone life.
|
| And I can't remember how often I was relieved to be able to
| cancel an accidental tap by swiping away, when I
| accidentally tapped a link while scrolling for example.
|
| This is even the default for mouse buttons, no?
|
| It happens, while rarely, still regularly, that I notice I
| pressed the wrong button just after the mousedown, but
| before the mouseup. And since I can remember, I was happy
| that the UI was made so I could then just hold the mouse
| button and move out of that button to cancel.
|
| Just verified your description of the lock screen code
| buttons. Not a bug, but the behavior you describe would
| feel buggy to me.
|
| There are plenty of UX annoyances on iOS though, that is
| not what I want to deny. I also prefer GBoard over apples
| builtin onscreen keyboard.
| tolmasky wrote:
| There's always been two button modes. "mouseup" is indeed
| the most common. However, "mousedown" is used in certain
| cases where the feedback is immediate, for example in the
| phone app where the number shows up as soon as you tap.
| However, notice that the lock screen uses neither of
| these, but rather a strange combination of both: it
| registers on "mousedown", just like the phone app,
| showing a new dot in the field, but then will
| "unregister" if you move away and lift your finger,
| removing the dot. As far as I can tell, this is the only
| place buttons work this way.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| Yes, but I feel this is totally Ok here?
|
| I think it would slow me down even more if it didn't have
| this behavior, because of typing in extra unintended
| numbers?
|
| I don't have any issues with typing my passcode in
| quickly, and tbh hadn't noticed the tweak with the
| immediate feedback on "tapdown" (and the possibility of
| the number disappearing).
|
| Would have to try, but I still feel I prefer the current
| behavior to what you suggested, and I'm pretty sure it's
| intentional.
|
| Anyway, thanks for bringing this up, hadn't noticed! I'll
| admit, for me this is good interaction design.
| tolmasky wrote:
| Your comment implied that this was following the
| traditional pattern where moving away cancels an action
| before it takes place. I hope we at minimum agree that
| the Lock Screen uses a unique behavior that doesn't exist
| anywhere else in the UI. I really think you're just
| confusing this _third interaction mode_ we're describing
| with the traditional mouseup mode that has existed for 3
| decades everywhere else.
|
| The simplest comparison point is the calculator app which
| behaves exactly as you described: if you put your finger
| down on the number 9, a 9 won't show up until you lift up
| your finger. OTOH, if it worked like the Lock Screen, a 9
| would show up, but would then be removed if you moved
| your finger away and lifted up. But again, _nowhere_ else
| works this way.
|
| If you think this is good interaction design, do you thus
| think the calculator app has bad interaction design? That
| it should instead be adding numbers immediately and then
| retroactively removing them?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I think it would slow me down even more if it didn't
| have this behavior, because of typing in extra unintended
| numbers?
|
| Can you explain how extra numbers would happen if it
| simply triggered on press?
|
| Do you often mis-press a number, then drag your finger
| out to cancel?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The bug is that it shows they character as entered into
| the passcode when it really isn't. The bubbles should
| only update when you get lift your finger, not when you
| initially press it down.
|
| > The dot for the typed character appearing immediately
| is different from alphanumeric keyboard behavior, because
| you can't register any key press before releasing the
| touch (or key) there, due to composition.
|
| That is exactly why the dot should not appear immediately
| upon the down event.
| deergomoo wrote:
| The lock screen has been buggy for me for years at this
| point. At least once a day I'll turn on the screen and for
| half a second or so the notifications will render with
| perfectly square edges and then switch to the correct rounded
| version.
|
| Also quite frequently I'll swipe up to view notifications
| beyond the fold and they'll end up in weird places, like
| they'll jump further up than they should or jerk around.
| meroes wrote:
| I swear I've put in the wrong passcode before hastily and it
| unlocks. I wonder if it's because of this lag the display
| doesn't match the input so I really did input it correctly
| but it just didn't look like it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd
| assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design
| when actually it's not. The thoughtlessness/pixel ratio might
| be worse than Microsoft in some cases, which can be hard to
| believe.
| diggan wrote:
| > Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd
| assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI
| design when actually it's not.
|
| Which led to people like me making a fool out of themselves.
| Always been using Android, and listened to iPhone users
| singing the praise of the amazing UI and UX of iOS. Well,
| eventually iPhone 12 Mini released so I figured, "why not
| give it a try, can't be worse than my current Motorola Moto G
| gen4 right?"
|
| Well, it is worse. I still have the phone because it still
| works, but that was my first and last iPhone. Everything is
| dog slow, not because poor performance but because of slow
| animations. Same on Android by default, but at least I can
| speed it up. And the UX makes you jump through hoops, things
| are impossible to discover unless you watch tutorials on
| YouTube, and the amount of UI bugs seems sky-high for
| something that sells itself as "Premium".
|
| And then CarPlay is just an abomination! Even the most basic
| things like "I'd like to answer a call while still being able
| to see the map I use for navigation" seems to be completely
| ignored and it honestly doesn't make any sense at all.
|
| Ugh, I almost look forward to accidentally dropping the phone
| so I can go back to having a non-distracting experience in
| the car again.
|
| Edit: I just remembered the most egregious issue: How can I
| see the current year without having to open up a separate
| calendar application/put a huge widget on my home screen?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > things are impossible to discover unless you watch
| tutorials on YouTube
|
| My last Android phone made me watch about a dozen youtube
| videos to discover how to configure it... It's not an Apple
| thing anymore.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| CarPlay is a thing because carmakers just can't seem to
| make a decent "radio" with a touchscreen no matter how they
| try. It would be nice to see a business school case study
| that reveals why.
| copperx wrote:
| That problem isn't limited to "radios." Have you ever
| used a smart thermostat? A touchscreen fridge? A smart
| TV? Horrible, horrible UX.
| DistractionRect wrote:
| Radios don't need a touch screen. Old button radios are
| pretty intuitive. The display/touch aspect is because
| people want navigation, apps like deezer/itunes/Spotify,
| etc. Then you have to think about updates/real time data.
| How does that work? Does the car need its own data plan?
| Or do we do everything via usb and just do everything
| offline?
|
| And then people still expect to connect their phones to
| the car, for calls/reading texts etc, so you still have
| to support that in some way... and people will expect
| that to play nice with the audio playback features (calls
| pause/unpause music, etc)
|
| Since we're already supporting a phone connection, then
| it just makes life easier to bring your own experience.
| The auto maker supplies the interface, you bring your own
| apps, data plan, etc via carplay/android auto.
|
| Personally, I find it's a huge step forward to whatever
| OEMs make in house which aren't updated/obsolete in a few
| years.
| akdev1l wrote:
| In theory you could use a smartphone as data provider for
| updates etc
| diggan wrote:
| > CarPlay is a thing because carmakers just can't seem to
| make a decent "radio" with a touchscreen no matter how
| they try
|
| But CarPlay is 100x worse than Android Auto, even though
| Apple is supposed to excel at UI and UX, this was the
| point I was trying to make, not that car makers such at
| UI/UX.
| Angostura wrote:
| Having used both, I disagree. What do you prefer with AA?
| diggan wrote:
| Well, for starters, if I'm using a map app on the
| CarPlay/Android Auto dashboard, then I expect phone calls
| to not cover the entire screen automatically, as I'm
| probably using the map for navigation.
|
| Anything on top of that would just be extras, but
| something basic like that should work at least. Which it
| does on Android Auto, but not on CarPlay.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I am happy CarPlay and Android Auto are a thing because I
| do not want to give any other entity access to my phone.
| immibis wrote:
| You can't feel the controls on a touchscreen. You always
| have to look at it.
| savanaly wrote:
| >Everything is dog slow, not because poor performance but
| because of slow animations.
|
| Did you try Accessibility > Motion > Off?
|
| >Things are impossible to discover unless you watch
| tutorials on YouTube
|
| There's a pretty useful manual built into the device itself
| called Hints I think? Did you read that?
| diggan wrote:
| > Did you try Accessibility > Motion > Off?
|
| There is no "Motion > Off" but there is a "Reduce Motion"
| toggle. Seems to be turning things that were slowly
| animated into even slower fade, like when you switch
| applications. Doesn't seem to actually affect much,
| animations inside for example Apple applications is still
| there, no matter if that toggle is on or off.
|
| > There's a pretty useful manual built into the device
| itself called Hints I think? Did you read that?
|
| I've browsed through it, but I don't think it's in no way
| extensive? I tried to find anything documenting the "Hold
| on spacebar and drag to move text cursor" in the Tips
| application (that I'm guessing you're referring to?) and
| found nothing, which is one of the features I
| "discovered" purely by accident.
| mh- wrote:
| There's a manual for iOS. Here's[0] the section about the
| onscreen keyboard (ctrl-f for trackpad to find the
| spacebar thing).
|
| Expand the _Table of Contents +_ at the top to see all
| the sections.
|
| _(Like others, not defending the state of things, just
| trying to help.)_
|
| 0: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-
| onscree...
|
| edit: if you want it in an offline format, you can find
| it in the Apple Books app by searching _iPhone User
| Guide_.
| diggan wrote:
| Yeah, with the helpful title of "Turn the onscreen
| keyboard into a trackpad", not even mentioning
| "move/moving" or "cursor", and also using "trackpad"
| wrong? A trackpad is for controlling a pointer, like a
| mouse, not to control the "insertion point of text".
|
| Great that it is mentioned somewhere, in some manner, I
| guess.
| mh- wrote:
| Yeah that was quite hard to find, even though I already
| knew about the user guide. I searched for both cursor and
| spacebar and came up empty. Finally checked each section.
|
| Not great.
| jodacola wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm generally fine with iOS and use it and
| macOS as my daily drivers.
|
| > There's a pretty useful manual built into the device
| itself called Hints I think? Did you read that?
|
| I posit that if one needs to load up the Tips app to
| figure out how to perform desired functions, that's a
| problem with the UX and not the human trying to use the
| device/app.
|
| The ideas espoused in The Design of Everyday Things[0]
| pops into mind right now.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-
| Revised-Expand...
| bagful wrote:
| On the contrary I think it's quite reasonable to gate
| functionality behind reading the manual. But one wonders
| why it's a distinct application and not integrated
| throughout the system, such as through tooltips or a
| "question mark cursor"?
| weaksauce wrote:
| > The ideas espoused in The Design of Everyday Things[0]
| pops into mind right now.
|
| the unfortunate reality of touch screens is that there
| are no affordances for things that can't be seen. design
| of everyday things goes over stuff like never put a pull
| handle on a push door kinda things. i think having to go
| to an app for some things is somewhat reasonable given
| the ui size constraints and only having so much touchable
| area... most of the functionality is there and self
| evident without an app.
| runjake wrote:
| I think you're talking about iOS. If so, it's Settings ->
| Accessibility -> Reduce Motion -> On
| mulmen wrote:
| This doesn't solve the problem. It just turns the
| animation into equally slow fades.
| amluto wrote:
| Wow, for just a second I was excited. And then I looked
| in Accessibility > Motion and there's no "off". I tried
| "Reduce Motion" and deleted an old Wallet Pass, and it
| still did a ridiculous and obscenely slow animation.
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| > And then CarPlay is just an abomination! Even the most
| basic things like "I'd like to answer a call while still
| being able to see the map I use for navigation" seems to be
| completely ignored and it honestly doesn't make any sense
| at all.
|
| I totally agree that this is terrible. But this kind of
| behavior always makes me wonder if this is a "passive
| aggressive safety" thing. I have a 2019 Subaru Impreza, and
| I can't change the time on the clock unless I'm in park. I
| tried it at a red light once because I got sick of seeing
| the wrong time after DST and I thought something was messed
| up, but it turns out it was because I was in drive. I'm
| fully capable of changing the time at a red light without
| causing an 8 car pile-up, just like you're fully capable of
| talking on the phone and following directions while
| driving. Regardless of whether it's a bad UX thing or a
| misguided attempt at safety thing, it's still super
| annoying.
| diggan wrote:
| > I totally agree that this is terrible. But this kind of
| behavior always makes me wonder if this is a "passive
| aggressive safety" thing.
|
| I'm 99% sure no one of the designers who created those UX
| flows have ever actually used CarPlay in real life, like
| the users do. It's really hard for me to imagine a
| designer coming up with an appropriate reason for
| blocking the map view because you answered a call.
| bombela wrote:
| I don't know why you are being down voted.
|
| I know from first sources that it is true. The car dash
| design is completed independently of the UX/UI work.
|
| And the designers/programmers never test it in the car.
| There is almost no iteration there. In fact the people I
| talked to worked remotes. They couldn't even try to get
| into a prototype car if they wanted.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I am curious where you perceive the slowness.
|
| I always had flagship Androids before my switch to a 12
| mini. Overall I am happy. There are plenty of things that
| annoy me lots but I never really noticed slowness.
|
| Where do you notice it? Do you play games or use compute
| intensive apps?
| diggan wrote:
| > I always had flagship Androids before my switch to a 12
| mini.
|
| And I had budget Android phones (Motorola Moto G) before
| my 12 mini, yet the iPhone is worse on most points
| besides the display and sound.
|
| > Where do you notice it? Do you play games or use
| compute intensive apps?
|
| Anywhere where there is an animation/sliding/transition.
| Everything feels like it's moving in molasses.
|
| But it's very much not a Apple-specific issue, designers
| nowadays seems to make animations in general way too
| slow. Which is fine when it can be configured (like on
| Android) but Apple doesn't like customization (or used to
| at least), so we can't.
| runjake wrote:
| This sounds backwards, based on my experiences. I keep
| thinking of switching back to Android, so I keep a
| recent-ish Pixel in my inventory.
|
| I do not observe this on my 12 Mini that is on iOS 16.
| Comparing it to my Pixel 6a with stock Android 14, I'd
| say the iPhone is faster/smoother and less glitchy moving
| around the UI.
|
| Perhaps something is up with your 12? That would still be
| a ding on Apple.
| chowells wrote:
| I think you misunderstand the complaint. What you
| perceive as "smooth", they perceive as "obnoxiously
| slow". They don't want smooth, they want the animation to
| be over so they can get on with life without waiting for
| it.
| diggan wrote:
| As the other commentator is saying, it's about the speed
| of the animation. It's the same on every iPhone,
| including mine, but it's too slow for someone who doesn't
| want to be "amazed by cool animations/translations" every
| time I switch pane/panel/window/go back/go forward.
|
| > 12 Mini that is on iOS 16. Comparing it to my Pixel 6a
| with stock Android 14
|
| Enable the Developer/Debug menu on your Android phone,
| turn off animations inside that menu then compare the
| "snappiness" between the two. While the iPhone puts
| animations/transitions/fades between everything, the
| Android will immediately "jump" to what you wanted,
| without animations. If you try this out, I'm sure you'll
| notice what I mean.
|
| This is what I want on my phone too, or at least 100x
| faster animations.
| EricE wrote:
| Have you reduced motion in the accessibility settings?
| Sounds very similar to the devloper settings in Android.
| diggan wrote:
| Yes, to no avail. Mentioned earlier here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409580
| bombela wrote:
| Everything is molasses and it irritates me to the point
| where I am hurting myself out of stress and anger by the
| simple fact that I have to constantly abort my muscle
| movements and train of throught to let the stupid
| software finish rhe animation/lag/burning my computer.
|
| It turns out most people are not bothered by this.
| Somehow they are still slower than those animations.
|
| On of my biggest suffering in life.
| crtasm wrote:
| >slow animations. Same on Android by default, but at least
| I can speed it up.
|
| Enabling the power user/developer menu in Android's
| settings lets me disable animations entirely. My old phone
| feel really snappy now and I'd do the same on a new phone
| too.
| Dibby053 wrote:
| No need to enable developer settings, at least in Android
| 14 it's in accessibility>color and motion>remove
| animations.
| eks391 wrote:
| I've used a few apple products -- the iPhone 3 was my first
| smartphone, and an iPad mini back when tablets were
| starting out. At the time of the switch to android, I
| didn't think too much of it, but definitely enjoyed the
| customisation.
|
| A couple years ago I was gonna get a new phone and, half my
| family being Apple devotees, I was considering switching
| again so I could stop hearing the 'blue bubble' nagging,
| plus they seem to genuinely enjoy their phone.
|
| In pure luck, a friend had a new iPhone 13 and hadn't
| switched from his old phone yet, and allowed me to use it
| for a couple days so I could see just how incredible the
| phones are and I should switch. After about 48 hrs, I was
| so done with the product, and like you, preferred to switch
| back to my old 'crummy' phone until I bought my next
| flagship.
|
| I can't imagine being locked in till it dies, because as
| you said, the iPhone is such a miserable product. I'm sure
| you could resell and get a flagship for a similar price.
| You'd still net loss, but IMO it would be better than
| keeping the phone since you don't like it.
| talldayo wrote:
| The older I get, the more certain I am that Apple
| products are designed from the ground-up as ad-watching
| appliances. On iPad, you're restricted to a sandboxed
| environment where you are not encouraged (or in many
| cases, allowed) to do anything other than watch ads. You
| cannot sideload apps that are Open Source. You cannot
| install emulators or fullspeed VM software. You cannot
| switch the browser out for one you would prefer with
| controls amenable to your satisfaction. You watch ads,
| because any holistic path to entertaining yourself is
| either sold by Apple or monetized through advertisements.
| _On every Apple platform._
|
| I remember watching those "what's a computer?" ads and
| laughing out loud. Yeah, what is a computer? We've gone
| so long watching YouTube ads and Music.ly sponsored
| content that half of us don't even know what one is. Are
| we even still connected, when companies like Apple
| mediate how we're allowed to communicate with each other
| and share ideas? Apple's design for a bicycle for the
| mind has been repurposed into a flywheel for cash
| generation. I don't meet a single person "riding" their
| iPhone anywhere more important than Pornhub or Instagram.
| diggan wrote:
| > You cannot sideload apps that are Open Source. You
| cannot install emulators or fullspeed VM software. You
| cannot switch the browser out for one you would prefer
| with controls amenable to your satisfaction.
|
| Worth noting that while this used to be true, those
| things are now/soon geofenced features that only
| Europeans get to enjoy. Too bad if you happen to live in
| the home country of Apple.
| talldayo wrote:
| I don't believe you're allowed to run fullspeed VM
| software or JIT-enabled browsers, even with the DMA.
| Nothing has been super set-in-stone yet, but those are
| the terms Apple is intent on promoting.
| diggan wrote:
| The intention is for people to be able to run whatever
| software they want, and Apple is currently figuring out
| if EU wants Apple to follow the intent of the law, or the
| letter. We'll see how it goes but I wouldn't hold my
| breath for Apple to get their will.
| cyberax wrote:
| > I don't believe you're allowed to run fullspeed VM
| software or JIT-enabled browsers, even with the DMA.
|
| You can. There's a new JIT entitlement for web browsers
| in Europe. It's still limited to _only_ browsers, so
| emulators are out of luck.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Apple products are designed from the ground-up as ad-
| watching appliances.
|
| That's funny. I have virtually no ads on my Apple
| devices. I associate ads with Windows and Android.
|
| And I have several browsers on my iPad, one reason being
| avoiding ads.
| talldayo wrote:
| > I have virtually no ads on my Apple devices.
|
| _Virtually_. It 's great when you log into iCloud and
| only have to deal with the App Store's "Suggested
| Content" and the Google suggested results in Spotlight
| Search and the misery of the default YouTube client
| running 30s midroll ads. Then you can make the little
| storage nag go away with a convenient $2.99/month payment
| addressable to Apple Inc. Oh, you wanted sideloading?
| That's to the tune of $99/year... can't pass off the SDK
| for free, can you? We'll assume you ignore Apple Music,
| although it will certainly nag you to try it.
|
| For cloud storage and basic sideloading capabilities,
| Apple will charge you $11.24/month for basic features of
| the phone _you bought_ and still treat you like garbage.
| The premium brand-halo surrounding their products is the
| well-documented Reality Distortion Effect - you are being
| fooled into defending _nonsense_ because you think this
| grifting benefits you. To be clear, I think Android and
| Windows both suffer from similar problems, but their
| users aren 't fooled because it's explicit. Apple
| uniquely abuses their position as OEM, and the problem
| _literally extends_ to them advertising to their users
| and convincing them it 's harmless when Apple does it. If
| you don't understand it by now, just read the affidavit
| once the FTC wraps up their case.
|
| > And I have several browsers on my iPad, one reason
| being avoiding ads.
|
| You have one browser, with multiple interfaces. When
| Apple serves you boot, your browsers have no choice but
| to lick.
| diggan wrote:
| > I can't imagine being locked in till it dies, because
| as you said, the iPhone is such a miserable product. I'm
| sure you could resell and get a flagship for a similar
| price. You'd still net loss, but IMO it would be better
| than keeping the phone since you don't like it.
|
| I'm not locked to it but honestly I spend so little time
| on my phone that it's one of the smaller problems in my
| life. I do despise it, but not enough to sell it before I
| can't use it anymore.
| fishtacos wrote:
| Along these same lines, the tabletification of Mac OS is
| annoying. A friend asked me to help with importing photos
| from the Apple Photo app on his brand new desktop Mac.
|
| The sequence of events was:
|
| Lightroom Legacy needs photos imported because the new
| Lightroom (cloud/subscription version I believe) has a
| different workflow, interface and apparently, features,
| so he's using both for the time being.
|
| So he follows guides on Adobe to import from iPhoto
| through a plugin.
|
| I had to learn after much google-fu that iPhoto has been
| replaced by the new Photo app. No compatible libraries
| found, says the unhelpful error message.
|
| No way to import his Photos library into it without first
| exporting all photos into a separate folder and importing
| that one into Lightroom Legacy. Why there is no
| compatibility shim/layer for that functionality I will
| never understand...
|
| He refuses to export and reimport all his photos because
| he has A LOT of them. He does photography as a hobby
| primarily, but has been using his iPad and iPhone for a
| while without a Mac PC and was astonished at not being
| able to do such a simple process.
|
| Part of my troubleshooting involved looking for a
| potential directory where the Photos app stored the
| files. It's some sort of package file that creates what
| seems to be the equivalent of a virtual directory. So I
| search for the Mac Drive icon... that took me to google,
| to then Finder, settings, and enable showing the drive.
| Why the hell does Apple hide the frigging storage
| device?!!! (I know why... but it's maddening)
|
| One more reason to never want to use or support any Apple
| product in the future.
| FabHK wrote:
| See, the file system is a fine system for general data,
| but if you have data of a specific kind, then there's
| often a better way than just dumping them in the file
| system. That's always been Apple's approach: let data
| assigned to a specific app be handled by that app [1].
|
| Apple's approach has also been to allow export of that
| data into standard interoperable formats (be it music,
| photos, emails, contacts, calendars, etc.).
|
| And FWIW, the photos are in "~/Pictures/Photos Library" -
| that must have been very difficult to find.
|
| [1] it had two pieces of metadata, content type and
| creator, for files in Mac OSes prior to OS X, when it
| regressed to the windows/Unix way of handling things with
| inelegant file extensions.
| fishtacos wrote:
| Windows has a Pictures folder. Before they started
| screwing with the OneDrive directories, it used to be in
| ONE location. Now it's in OneDrive\directory location,
| which works, even if it annoys me. The upside being
| automatic backup and restore. That Pictures folder is
| accessible systemwide and is accessible through EVERY
| application that can browse directories.
|
| The Photos library on the Mac was not accessible via
| Lightroom Legacy. He (& I) could not locate it through
| the "Browse" functionality within the application. I
| think I could open the photos through finder, but could
| not import them through Lightroom Legacy. I could,
| however, Open With: from the Photos app, which then
| imports into the application just fine. This irked him
| enough to not want to do it, and I explained that it was
| the only way to do so, or otherwise export and import the
| desired photos in bulk.
|
| I see what you're saying, but Apple's approach was
| clearly not intuitive for me, nor the Mac user. It's what
| it is, but Apple needs to facilitate working with their
| virtual folders/libraries natively through applications,
| not force users to resort to using workarounds... to
| export into interoperable formats for applications that
| run natively on their OS. Either Adobe is screwy or Apple
| is screwy here, but I'm leaning on Apple so far.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| UI is designed by designers for designers. Then management
| and marketing. End users are a tertiary consideration.
|
| Yes I'm bitter about the Jetbrains New UI abomination.
| saagarjha wrote:
| You can answer the call and switch back to Maps while the
| call continues, right?
| diggan wrote:
| > You can answer the call and switch back to Maps while
| the call continues, right?
|
| Yes, I can, and currently have to, but absolutely 0 times
| I've answered a call in the car and want the Phone app to
| cover the entire screen, no matter what I had there
| before.
|
| It's just extra dangerous when I'm using maps, as maybe I
| have a turn I have to make in that exact moment, and
| having to go back to the maps just because some designer
| at Apple want to showcase their contact/name/phone number
| layout in the Phone app sounds like asking for trouble.
| ein0p wrote:
| You could disable animations on iOS through accessibility
| options. As a rule a flagship iPhone is at least 30% faster
| than flagship Android (by which I basically mean Samsung
| Galaxy) on realistic workloads.
| diggan wrote:
| > You could disable animations on iOS through
| accessibility options
|
| No, you cannot (mentioned here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409580). Makes it
| even worse in the cases I tested actually.
|
| > As a rule a flagship iPhone is at least 30% faster than
| flagship Android (by which I basically mean Samsung
| Galaxy) on realistic workloads.
|
| That's cool, but not what I'm talking about. Even my
| Motorola Moto G4 (released in 2016) allowed me to turn
| off the animations, so even that one "appears" faster
| than my iPhone 12 Mini only because iOS forces you to
| wait for animations to finish.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| A phone doesn't spend much time doing "workloads". UI
| animations in particular should never be close to CPU or
| GPU bound.
| ein0p wrote:
| And they aren't. The op probably just didn't like some
| hyperparameter, like duration, because it had a different
| value than on Android.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Yes, I agree, that is what they meant by slow animations.
| So why did you bring up compute power? They specifically
| said "not because poor performance".
|
| Also I don't think "just" is the word to use here. Slow
| is slow, and when it's on purpose it's harder to avoid.
| ein0p wrote:
| Slow is in the eye of the beholder. Of all the legitimate
| complaints one could make about Apple, "slow" is
| somewhere towards the bottom of the list.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The threshold of what is too slow is in the eye of the
| beholder, but there have been good studies done on that
| topic and small delays do cause problems.
|
| But the general idea of things being slowed down by
| animations is objective. It could be done in a frame or
| two, it takes X frames. And you can add up those delays
| when you're navigating and reach significant numbers.
| vaindil wrote:
| > Edit: I just remembered the most egregious issue: How can
| I see the current year without having to open up a separate
| calendar application/put a huge widget on my home screen?
|
| I'm not a fan of Apple for many reasons and I agree with
| your overall sentiment (though not with the same voracity),
| but I'm really curious how _this_ is the most egregious
| issue for you. The calendar year changes so infrequently,
| why would you need it featured so prominently?
| diggan wrote:
| > but I'm really curious how _this_ is the most egregious
| issue for you.
|
| Because it's so basic. Add a switch that lets me decide
| how I want the date to be displayed on the
| lockscreen/notifications centre.
|
| > why would you need it featured so prominently?
|
| It doesn't need to be more prominently than where the
| date is right now, I just want the current year next to
| it as well.
| HaZeust wrote:
| >Because it's so basic
|
| Exactly, it's such basic knowledge to know - it'd be a
| waste of space to show it ... What UI even gives you the
| option to have year next to date/day and time?
| jvdvegt wrote:
| To be fair: I also can't find the current year on my Pixel
| 4 (Android 13) in the clock app or the settings. I have to
| open Google Calendar.
| xp84 wrote:
| The egregious amount of time wasted playing the animations
| is really the worst. For a great demo of how bad it is,
| even on my 15 Pro Max -- try this: go into a Messages
| conversation and hit the + next to the text entry field. An
| ugly, blur-filled animation has to play for about 1000ms
| EVERY TIME you open this menu up, which is now the way you
| have to add a photo to the conversation. Heck, I don't even
| want the menu, I just want a photo button which instantly
| shows my most recent photos.
|
| Back in jailbreak days there was a global animation timer
| hack you could do -- changing the animations to take zero
| seconds -- so they would all just be skipped. It made the
| phone so fast.
|
| ("Reduce Motion" is useless for this because yeah, the
| fades are just as slow.)
| docfort wrote:
| I take your overall point, but for this specific
| complaint, there's a shortcut: long press on the "+"
| button to take you directly to the photo pocket in
| Messages.
| petters wrote:
| > most egregious issue: How can I see the current year
|
| What do you want/need this for? Not something I've heard
| before
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| A full-year calendar. I'm not GP, but I'm pretty visual
| when it comes to planning things for the coming year. I
| don't need coloring to show what's available and what's
| not, just a full year view of the calendar.
| jb1991 wrote:
| That might have been true once, but I don't think that's
| really true any more. Most users are not awed by their iPhone
| experience as they were ten years ago. Everyone realizes that
| iOS and Android are essentially identical for most practical
| purposes and usability, and most are not choosing the
| platform for that reason any more. I also think plenty of
| people in-house at Apple are well-aware of these issues.
|
| Today, it is more about maintaining your suite of apps, the
| Cloud with all your data, the little blue bubbles in your
| group chats, and a host of other issues that are more a
| priority for choosing one platform over another, for most
| people. If I were to switch to Android now, it would be a
| huge PIA considering the 10+ years of platform integration
| and thousands of dollars of app purchases, iCloud, etc, that
| has made up a significant part of my digital life. I'm sure
| it would be similar for people going in reverse. Apple knows
| this, hence why services have become an essential part of
| their business.
| brookst wrote:
| It's really the cross-device stuff that keeps me in Apple's
| ecosystem. Taking phone calls on my mac, having recent
| browser tabs from all devices on every device, etc. of
| course each individual thing can be done on windows /
| android / linux, but the out-of-the-box, no-config-required
| experience is really very good. Even if it is frequently
| and frustratingly not perfect.
| jmholla wrote:
| Android has a lot of those features through KDE Connect
| now.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Calls on computer? Like Signal allows? Tabs from other
| device? Like Firefox offers?
|
| The thing is, it is very easy in comparison to offer this
| cross device functionality, if you lock in your users and
| can simply make lots of assumptions about what software
| the user will be using. How much of that cross platform
| stuff works for non-standard browser or non-standard
| messenger?
| jwells89 wrote:
| The thing that keeps me on iOS is that Android just doesn't
| feel right, and none of the tweaks that can be applied
| (launchers, etc) can fix that. Animations, interactions,
| etc just feel... _off_ somehow, like I'm using an early
| alpha build of software that has placeholders strewn about.
|
| It's not a "it's not iOS" thing, either. There are certain
| desktop Linux setups for example that don't bother me
| nearly as much. It's just Android that feels "wrong".
|
| If only the entire front end of Android were
| interchangeable like Linux DEs are.
| airstrike wrote:
| I think it's just the lack of consistency in app designs
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm in the same mind. As much improvement as Linux GUIs
| have made over the years, there's always just been that
| last bit of polish they are missing that makes them feel
| just a bit klunky in comparison to an Apple OS. Does it
| affect performance, no, but it just has that OSS feel to
| it. I totally understand the $$$ differences involved,
| and modern *nix UIs have come a long way, but it's like
| that last mile problem they just can't quite get there.
| It does not make it unusable, it's just the thing that
| always makes it noticeably different.
| diggan wrote:
| > Animations, interactions, etc just feel... off somehow,
| like I'm using an early alpha build of software that has
| placeholders strewn about.
|
| It's funny that I'm the complete opposite. I was fine
| with Android, switched to iPhone (as mentioned upthread)
| and everything feels off, like no one cared about the UI
| and UX, and bugs galore everywhere. If someone handed me
| my iPhone 12 Mini today I'd say they're running a beta
| version of iOS on it.
|
| Maybe it's just a "get used to" thing as we're surely not
| the only ones having very opposite feelings about this.
| I've now had my iPhone for 4 years it seems, but I still
| feel like the OS is beta-level quality, should have
| gotten used to it by now...
| jwells89 wrote:
| QA for iOS has slipped in recent years, but I feel that's
| a different matter. The issues I have with Android aren't
| bugs, it's more like odd choices for things like
| animation timing curves and nitty gritty things like
| that.
|
| Bugs aside, it feels like touches more "directly" control
| iOS whereas with Android it's like interactions are all
| passing through an additional layer, leading to an
| impression of disconnectedness. It's not entirely unlike
| the phenomenon that used to be observable on some Linux
| desktops a decade+ ago when computers were weaker and you
| could "feel" the layering of X11, GTK, your compositor,
| DE, etc all kind of slip-sliding and not acting fully in
| concert, where Windows and OS X usually didn't give this
| impression.
| troupo wrote:
| Apple _used to be_ the epitome (or close to it) of UI design.
| There was care and attention to detail that usually went into
| their designs.
|
| The past 10 years or so? Everything has gone out of the
| window. No one is left at Apple who cares.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I switched to an iPhone a few years ago and I really miss the
| Android calculator app. It showed the entire expression typed
| so far and its current value! In desperation, I have resorted
| to SSHing to my desktop and using `python` as a calculator.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Well, if you really want that on your phone you can get other
| calculator apps that are quite advanced. Might be easier than
| doing what you are doing.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Other calculator apps that might have different privacy
| policies, and who might call home to Google and Facebook
| despite reporting "no data collected", and which might
| disappear from the app store because it costs $100/year to
| have the privilege of providing a free app (e.g. as
| happened with OpenCalc.
| https://github.com/breeko/OpenCalc/issues/3 )
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| Believe me, I looked for a while. Nothing quite scratched
| the itch while also being free, ad-free, and private. I
| guess I sound quite picky, but SSH + python checks all the
| boxes.
| oluminate wrote:
| You can use Siri Search on iOS as a calculator, which works
| the same way as Finder on a Mac -- this keeps track of the
| entire expression when you're doing it
| diggan wrote:
| > You can use Siri Search on iOS as a calculator
|
| With the added benefit of having to press not just one, but
| two buttons in order to add a "+" sign. First press "123",
| then press "#+=" and now you can add your complex
| mathematical characters :)
| EricE wrote:
| If you rely on a calculator then you owe it to yourself to
| check out pcalc. One of the few apps I maintain paying for
| these days.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I'm happy this isn't just me. Apple's calculator app is a
| showcase for some of their most obtuse UX decisions.
|
| IO-blocking animations are everywhere on iOS, and sometimes
| they result in overlap (e.g. you can activate a widget and open
| an app if you press an app icon too fast after opening a
| folder). But having buttons on iOS _animate_ in response to
| touch but not _engage_ any further is mindblowing and
| infuriating.
|
| It's also filled with obtuse interactions. (Did you know the
| iPhone's calculator app has extra buttons? You have to use the
| control center, unlock your screen rotation, and then rotate
| your phone to access it.) (Did you know you can erase digits by
| swiping left or right on them? You can't _access_ the hidden
| digits of precision this way.)
| kurthr wrote:
| Maybe it will be fixed in Apple Calculator for iPad (soon to be
| released 2024) in iOS 18?!?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Of course not. Apple would not release a calculator for iPad
| that doesn't honor the bigger form factor and Apple's
| uncompromising design and user friendliness, nothing that
| doesn't make users go "Wow!" in slack-jawed amazement!
|
| It needs to work on it for at least five more years,
| meanwhile you can buy one of the many inferior iPad
| calculator apps that are not hindered by Apple's vision of
| greatness.
| rty32 wrote:
| Similarly in Google Calendar Android app:
| https://youtu.be/7z-82Hi5dtc
| bhauer wrote:
| > _prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual
| functionality_
|
| This describes iOS in a nutshell.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Anyone who has tried to play computer games semi seriously on a
| Mac has experienced some level of bewilderment due to Apple's
| decades-long refusal to include an option to disable mouse
| acceleration in their settings.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| It's not just animation causing the problem.
|
| There are so many cases where I touched a button and it's so
| slow that I tap again, but when it finally responds, it does
| the thing twice or changes the UI under me and I tap a
| different button.
|
| Or it changes color/flashes to acknowledge the touch, but does
| nothing until I'm super patient and try it again and it works.
|
| Or it does nothing to acknowledge my touch and doesn't execute
| the action, so I question my sanity.
|
| The point is that it's so inconsistent that I don't have an
| evidence-based guess at the root cause. My gut says it's the
| overuse of dispatch queues.
| jader201 wrote:
| > and I'm surprised it's a stock app by the company itself
|
| I'm not surprised. Apple's first party apps have always seemed
| like afterthoughts that were lower priority than other things.
| (E.g. relative to what I consider great quality hardware.)
|
| Maps was terrible for several years following the release, and
| is still not great.
|
| Screen Time, especially the parental controls side of it, is
| almost unusable.
|
| Find My Friends used to have all sorts of disconnects where it
| wouldn't work, though admittedly it seems to have finally
| gotten better over the past couple years.
|
| These are just some examples I can think of. But this bug in
| the OP doesn't surprise me.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| I would say it's a feature: it's supposed to be like a mechanical
| odometer.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Even if Apple were adopting skeuomorphism it would take a lot
| more change in design elements to support the concept that
| there's a mechanical system driving it, and for a binary
| display I'd assume a row of lights would be more appropriate to
| how this would read on appropriate machines
| DavidPiper wrote:
| Comically, I didn't even notice those wobbly numbers in the first
| screenshot, I was too busy noticing:
|
| - "Unicode" button label way off center
|
| - The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position
|
| - The indicators for bits 31 and 63 are not aligned with each
| other
|
| - x and + not being horizontally aligned (I believe this is an
| icon-font issue, seen on HN before so knew to look for it)
| countmora wrote:
| > "Unicode" button label way off center
|
| Its actually the center of the button, I made a video for
| context: https://imgur.com/a/1Y9O8dS
|
| > The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position
|
| Might be due to the image compression, it looks fine on my MB.
| samatman wrote:
| > _Its actually the center of the button_
|
| Upvoted for putting in the effort, and because you make a
| correct point.
|
| But the Unicode button is _perceptually_ off center, because
| ASCII is a smaller word, and there 's no visible boundary
| between the buttons. This comes up a lot in iconography, the
| classic example is a play triangle (like the media control)
| in a circle. Placing the triangle in the geometric center
| won't look centered, it needs to be a tiny bit to the right
| of that to account for the shape.
|
| No separation between the buttons means you can't see the
| bounds which the words are centered in, so it looks off.
|
| The 8 and 10 have the same problem, for the same reason. A
| visible background-gray line between the buttons would solve
| this problem, it should be 'squircled' to make it I-shaped
| and match the outer edges.
| fizzynut wrote:
| From zooming into your clip both ASCII and Unicode are wrong:
|
| - ASCII is off center ~43/50 pixel margins
|
| - Unicode is off center ~20/25 pixel margins
|
| - Both have different margin sizes
|
| - The button sizes of both are the same.
|
| - The Hide button is offset from both 8/10/16 selector and
| ascii/unicode buttons
|
| - Even if everything was correct, because there is no
| contrast between "Off" and background, it's going to look
| wrong anyway
| xelamonster wrote:
| The selector issue is very visible in your video still: you
| can see black pixels at the top of the selected number where
| it shows the selector background, but none at the bottom
| because it's misaligned and the selection bubble is slightly
| outside its box.
|
| Edit: zooming in closer it's maybe not outside the box at
| all, but there's some odd aliasing artifacts or something
| making the space above the highlight look bigger than the
| space below.
|
| Honestly I don't think it makes it any better if the Unicode
| text is theoretically centered; the fact that there's zero
| separation between the options, and such poor spacing that
| it's difficult to tell and feels awkward either way is still
| terrible design.
| layer8 wrote:
| Arguably it also should be "1s'" instead of "1's". ;)
| qingcharles wrote:
| I'd agree with that. I wonder if it was a conscious decision
| to make it not look like 1 second or something?
| furyofantares wrote:
| Interesting. I saw the wobbly numbers instantly, but I didn't
| see any of that, and can't even see the 31/63 issue now.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| The 31/63 issue for me is that they appear to be aligned
| differently to the 0s directly above them. The left-edge of
| the 6 seems to be further left than the left edge of the 3.
| The 3 in 31 at least looks vertically aligned with the 0
| above it.
|
| However, I suspect they both have the same ("Incorrect" seems
| too harsh a word... "Visually imprecise"?) layout constraints
| and they look different in practice because "63" is a wider
| number than "31".
| IIsi50MHz wrote:
| > and they look different in practice because "63" is a
| wider number than "31".
|
| Gah, I was just noticing this again today, in Finder! No
| sane font has Roman numerals that are not monospaced.
| xelamonster wrote:
| The 63/31 misalignment looks to me like it's because they don't
| use a monospace font.
| qingcharles wrote:
| God, the more you look, the more you find. It's actually
| horrible.
|
| Also, the "32" label sits directly centered under the bit above
| it, but literally none of the others do, they're wherever-the-
| fuck.
|
| The x, + etc don't look centered vertically either -- compared
| to the numbers to the left of them.
|
| 2's and 1's look like they are a different font size to
| everything else.
|
| The padding on the buttons at the top is hideous -- the
| downstroke on the y almost touches the outside of the button.
|
| I fear how awful this looks in localized versions, if they made
| any.
| wslh wrote:
| Beyond this bug, nowadays accessibility features are one of the
| most used in my setup, and I think as software engineers age they
| will become more sophisticated.
|
| I remember using fonts of 8pt in an IDE to "squeeze " the
| potential of the monitor.
| trissylegs wrote:
| There's a similar bug in the Windows calculator. One of the
| buttons is about 1 pixel wider than the rest.
| virtualritz wrote:
| And this on a Mac. :D
|
| That would have never happened under Jobs's watch.
| megablast wrote:
| One that Apple seems to ignore. You click on something. And the
| micro second before it changes the hi, causing you to click
| something else.
| unwind wrote:
| Wut? It changes before the click? That sounds ... magical. And
| what is "the hi"? Typo of "ui"?
| cubefox wrote:
| Google has this problem in its search suggestions. They
| update with some delay, and humans also have a significant
| delay in how quickly they can react to a changing stimulus.
| So I tap on the wrong search suggestion. One problem is that
| they aren't satisfying monotonicity: the suggestion can
| change unexpectedly even if further inputs keep exactly
| matching the old suggestion.
| jacobp100 wrote:
| If I may pitch my own app, TechniCalc has this same mode, along
| with a bunch of other stuff the built in app doesn't support. It
| works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS
|
| https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc
| sigio wrote:
| This is to fit in with the windows calculator, which also has
| off-by-one pixel errors:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...
| kibwen wrote:
| How would you even tell in the first place? The contrast on those
| digits is so low and their font weight is so light as to render
| them essentially invisible.
|
| And as far as bad design goes, why are the bit position
| indicators on the right (0, 32) center-justified underneath their
| digits, whereas the ones on the left (31, 63) are left-justified?
| rustybolt wrote:
| > I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but
| there isn't
|
| This is infuriating and the same for all the big companies (at
| least Google, Microsoft, Apple); you have a serious issue and
| simply no way to talk to a representative. The best you can do is
| post something on Hacker News and hope it somehow gets picked up.
|
| I worked at a company that paid Microsoft a lot to have a 1-day
| SLA for support. When I contacted them, I got a reply back
| _weeks_ later saying "hey sorry I missed your email". About two
| weeks later (which was the time it took to email back and forth),
| it was clear that I had to insert another ticket and mark the
| subject as something else (that was not directly related, but
| apparently the team responsible for that subject was also working
| on the functionality I found a bug in. There was no way for me to
| know this since it was something internal to Microsoft). So, I
| had to go through the whole procedure again.
|
| Once I did that, the reply was "oh yeah, we dropped that
| functionality but the documentation doesn't mention it. we
| recommend you use <technology X> for this". Where, of course,
| technology X did not support the feature I was trying to use.
| wojtczyk wrote:
| Thanks! It looks like posting on Hacker News works well :) In
| the meantime a few people pointed out the "Feedback Assistant"
| for Apple. There's a website and an app that spotlight finds.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Casio FX115ES Plus, its only $15. Looks great, feels great, just
| works.
| imchillyb wrote:
| I've been using an app called PCalc on Apple's App Store.
|
| The Apple calculator is a frustrating mess to use.
|
| PCalc does scientific, engineering, and A to B calculations for
| most things.
|
| I wouldn't go back to Apple's calculator app even if Apple gave
| me a credit for the PCalc app.
|
| Nope.
| yayitswei wrote:
| Reminded me of this article about how centering things is the
| hardest problem in computer science (with plenty of examples).
|
| https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
| abhinavk wrote:
| Did he remove the cursor effect on his website?
| dpassens wrote:
| You need to toggle the sun switch top right to moon, if you
| mean the "dark mode" effect.
| troupo wrote:
| There's (or used to be) a multiplayer cursor on the site.
| You'd see other visitors' cursors moving across the page
| faresahmed wrote:
| Funnily enough, even the "dark mode toggle" icon in the blog is
| not aligned correctly with the navbar text.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/1xSCMWb
| heywoods wrote:
| This post is going to lead to a new calculator and a calculator
| app on the iPad.
| cubefox wrote:
| Braun may have some ideas:
|
| https://ganjieyin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/d...
| dagmx wrote:
| They already have that in iOS/iPadOS 18 fwiw
| wojtczyk wrote:
| Right, I think they announced it at WWDC ;) Before I even
| posted. Living the future.
| lapcat wrote:
| Apple software quality has gone into the trash the past 10 years.
| I'm not talking about initial quality but rather about "mature"
| quality, i.e., the current public versions almost a full year
| after a major release.
|
| I was just talking about this yesterday: somehow TextEdit on Mac
| has been wrecked. TextEdit, which is essentially a wrapper around
| NSTextView, was more or less "perfect" 15-20 years ago. Now I
| experience a bug where the window is blank when I open a document
| until I click inside a window, and scrolling performance in a
| long document is atrocious. For example, if I try to scroll
| backward, from the end of the document, it stutters and can lose
| my place. This doesn't depend on the document; it happens all the
| time.
|
| I guess that Apple rewrote everything a few years ago with
| TextKit 2, and it shows, but not in a good way.
|
| The impression I get from Apple is that Craig Federighi has given
| engineers license to keep churning out new features and not worry
| much about bugs, or design, or the user interface. And if
| something becomes a massive problem, they just pause on features
| for a couple of weeks, which is like rearranging the deck chairs
| on the Titanic.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Aren't the raised digits an indication of endianness or
| something? It looks like a transmission bit pattern. Or isn't
| high low high low double high double low the original Apple disk
| format? It's something like that.
|
| Just guessing -- it doesn't look accidental to me.
| ABCD0 wrote:
| Juste my vision
| fferen wrote:
| On the topic of calculator font bugs, Google's calculator
| randomly switches between two fonts:
|
| https://pasteboard.co/lmbr4iE6BJej.png
|
| https://pasteboard.co/sU3GA5psIaT0.png
| qingcharles wrote:
| The first one is worse because the 0 looks more like an O. What
| platform?
| diggan wrote:
| Hard to know if you're referring to Chromebook/Android/Web, but
| looks like the web one. If that's the calculator from the
| google.com web-page, that is surely a stylesheet/font that
| failed to load (sometimes?). Try to look at the browser
| developer console next time it happens for some request errors.
| klausa wrote:
| >Maybe the UI coordinate system is using floats and a rounding
| error aggregated over many days
|
| It's using floats on 32bit (...which means only the watchOS
| currently, I guess?) and doubles elsewhere.
|
| Are there any modern UI frameworks that _don't_ use
| floats/doubles?
|
| I was gonna guess CSS, but even that has supported sub-pixel
| precisions on HiDPI displays for a while now.
|
| [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5709698/html-sub-
| pixel-b...
| amai wrote:
| Relevant remark in the comment section of the blog post:
|
| "after I took screenshots and restarted the calculator, the
| misplacements were gone. I am looking out for it to happen
| again."
| Modified3019 wrote:
| They clearly need better telemetry in the calculator app.
| tlhunter wrote:
| Here's something that really irks me. On macOS I'll use Spotlight
| (Cmd+Space) to do some quick math. For example, press Cmd+Space,
| type "1.2+3.4", and it sort of displays 4.6. Now to copy the
| results you either have to click the copy option in the dropdown,
| using your mouse (no thanks), or press enter to get the results
| in Calculator.
|
| Assuming you last left the calculator in "Programmer" mode the
| calculator displays the value "4".
|
| Ideally, pressing enter in Spotlight would simply replace the
| text in the input bar with the result. The equivalent Alt+Space
| tool in KDE (Plasma Search) performs math this way and it's
| amazing. I haven't used Quicksilver or Alfred in a decade but I'm
| sure they do the right thing, too.
|
| Otherwise both Spotlight and Plasma Search are both pretty great.
| Type something like "14oz to lb" and they both display the result
| (though Plasma Search displays the exact "0.875 pounds" while
| Spotlight displays the rounded "0.88 pounds").
|
| Overall I'm mostly disappointed with first-party Apple software.
| Being one of the richest companies in the world I have higher
| expectations.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| Sounds like Alfred could solve this problem quite easily? I
| wouldn't give spotlight too much hope from Apple's end. Have
| seen some very nice Alfred workflows
| NaOH wrote:
| I run an older version of macOS, but it's historically been the
| case that Command-C copies the result of a calculation entered
| in Spotlight. They key is that the Copy command must be
| performed when the calculation is _not_ selected for the result
| to be copied to the Clipboard. Put another way, type the math
| to be performed in Spotlight, then press Command-C and the
| result has been copied.
| rgovostes wrote:
| A friend doing homework for a university assignment, circa
| Leopard or Snow Leopard, noticed that Calculator produced
| negative values when raising a negative number to an even power.
|
| The bug turned out to be in CFNumber, in Core Foundation.
| CFNumber does a lot of fiddly stuff at the bit level for
| performance, and one of their optimizations for exponentiation
| was incorrect. Somehow it was never found by tests or due to
| buggy behaviors it created in other apps, but by someone clicking
| buttons and thinking critically about the output.
| FabHK wrote:
| In Excel (and some other languages), unary minus has higher
| precedence than exponentiation, so that -x^2 = (-x)^2 = x^2.
| That can bite you (for example when calculating the normal
| probability density function "manually").
| 0x0 wrote:
| Interesting, I started playing with spotlight and typing in
| (-20)^21 returns " = 0", which is obviously not correct.
|
| And typing in "(-22)^21" gives "-71100888972574851072", but
| wolfram alpha insists it should be
| "-15519448971100888972574851072".
|
| Looks like there are still bugs here.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Spotlight on Sequoia looks correct, though it limits
| precision more than wolfram alpha.
|
| (-20)^21 = -2.097152x10^27 and (-22)^21 = -1.5519448971*10^28
| crazygringo wrote:
| Wow that's bizarre.
|
| At first I thought it was just an overflow error but no it's
| nothing like that. The math is indeed very clearly broken, as
| I play around with it on Sonoma on my M1.
|
| I'm genuinely shocked. I though this kind of floating-point
| math was rock-solid, tested thoroughly over the decades.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The Windows 3.1 calculator has a fun bug where 2.01 - 2.00
| returns the result of 0.00, not 0.01.
|
| That always amused me.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Acording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Calculator#
| Windows_9x_..., the Win98 version of calc.exe got an
| arbitrary-precision math library for basic math functionality
| to fix this sort of problem.
|
| also mentioned by Raymond Chen, https://devblogs.microsoft.co
| m/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39... :
|
| "Today, Calc's internal computations are done with infinite
| precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction,
| multiplication, division) and 32 digits of precision for
| advanced operations (square root, transcendental operators)."
|
| And they fixed the square-root-of-a-perfect-square bug a few
| years ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/89s53g
| /microsoft...
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Maybe they never had proper tests. Something as simple as
| exponentiating,which is a basic functionality of any modern
| calculator, not working for 50% of all integers? That looks to
| me like no one ever really tested that stuff.
| supportengineer wrote:
| There must be a way to do a mash-up between a spreadsheet and
| other languages like FORTRAN. Perhaps the language could be
| pluggable. You could mix and match and the spreadsheet formulas
| are the glue. Cell values abstract away the details of how that
| value got there. But, it accepts a refresh request.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I like Apple's hardware and underlying OS enough to shell out for
| MacBook Pros but, man, their homebuilt applications are a PITA.
| The RPN calculator on my high powered new MBP doesn't have a
| scientific or engineering notation option.
|
| Same on my old MBP as well.
|
| I guess it is a feature.
|
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank
| Aloisius wrote:
| Sequoia's calculator has RPN with scientific notation now.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Thanks! Look forward to getting it when it is released.
| rgovostes wrote:
| I can usually appreciate Apple's design homages. The original iOS
| Calculator is inspired by the Braun ET, and it makes some sense
| to provide a familiar design for basic use.
|
| But it inherits baggage from the limitations of the handheld
| calculators of the 1970s. Why can't I use the - button to write a
| negative sign? What does "AC" mean? The scientific calculator is
| an even worse design. There's a ton of invisible state, like the
| value stored in memory, or whether you're inside parentheses. The
| user has to hold the whole sequence of operations in their head,
| without clicking a single wrong button. Want to repeat a
| calculation with a different operand? Tough.
|
| Graphing calculators like the TI-84 that let you see and edit
| your input are so much more usable. Even better are notebook-
| style interfaces like Mathematica. It's a shame Apple won't pay
| homage to _those_ designs.
| FabHK wrote:
| Coming up in iOS 18.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Unless I missed something, they've added a handwriting mode,
| which is cool but not necessarily an improvement over
| something like Mathematica. I don't want to have to carry an
| Apple Pencil with me and write long hand every time I want to
| solve an equation.
| rgovostes wrote:
| I did miss something, you _can_ type in Math Notes in iOS
| 18. It's a little glitchy in the betas though.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Proudly presented to you by the company that took 14 years to
| port the calculator to the iPad, because "if we do it, it has to
| be the greatest calculator app"
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Windows 11 lets you conveniently "pin" the calculator in standard
| mode, keeping it accessible on top of your active window - great
| for multitasking with calculations.
|
| However, switch to a different calculator mode (like scientific),
| and Windows inexplicably removes the pinning feature.
|
| This baffling decision feels so actively user hostile it is
| deserving of an award for poor design choices.
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