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.
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.
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.
Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel fonts all the time.
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.
I'm pretty sure both of those have implementations available for DOS already.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.)
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).
You'll love the OLED screen and it's ratio 3:2! What a beautiful thing.
[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
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 :-)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
By not having a public record of bugs Apple conveniently hides the sheer number of them and how many people they affect.
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.
If you like, replace ‘designed for’ with ‘suited to’.
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.
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.
- "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)
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.
EDIT: I should note, this is the AMD variant of the V14
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.
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!
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.
I remember using fonts of 8pt in an IDE to "squeeze " the potential of the monitor.
That would have never happened under Jobs's watch.
Most people who say "designed" here aren't ignorant: they don't care about the distinction and say what's idiomatic.
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.
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?
Coatings are still very useful to reduce other lens artefacts though.
This is the same reason why window gaps are so popular in all tiling window managers. It just looks better.
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?
I just started wearing glasses. I asked about fringing and they had brushed my concerns off as me being new to glasses.
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.
Power users is an unknown concept at Apple.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
- 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
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?
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.
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.
https://ganjieyin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/d...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Or more generically…
https://www.apple.com/feedback
…if you have bugs to report that aren’t for Notes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Just guessing -- it doesn't look accidental to me.
It seems like a near impossibility for other manufacturers to not phone some of those things in. There’s always a catch.
> 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.
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".
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The past 10 years or so? Everything has gone out of the window. No one is left at Apple who cares.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
Yes I'm bitter about the Jetbrains New UI abomination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great that it is mentioned somewhere, in some manner, I guess.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.)
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?
Same on my old MBP as well.
I guess it is a feature.
And typing in "(-22)^21" gives "-71100888972574851072", but wolfram alpha insists it should be "-15519448971100888972574851072".
Looks like there are still bugs here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That always amused me.
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?
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.
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.
also mentioned by Raymond Chen, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/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...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On iOS you install a variety of shady ad blocking browsers because the Safari system of extensions doesn't really let the ad blocker extensions block what is needed. You are also trapped in Safari, which is not a good browser, just something that prevents Chrome from ruining everything.
Apple perfected optimizing for the 80/20 split, where 80% of users will experience very little friction, and the other 20% can go pound sand. And that was obviously a clever marketing decision up to a point.
And that's of course worse in countries with two calendars.
Meaning you cannot have reversed (aka natural) scrolling on a touchpad, and standard scrolling on a mouse at the same time without 3rd-party software.
Or another even simpler case: If division is infinite precision, and I enter (2/3) * X, does the calculator internally work with fractions? Otherwise it would have infinite digits to compute.
"In contrast, long-wavelength light is growth-inhibiting and short-wavelength light is growth-promoting in rhesus monkey (57) and tree shrew (58)."
Modern monitors have high amount of shortwave spectrum, blue is unusually shortwave.
Some things don't get stuck in my memory, like the current year or my own age. My own age is easy to calculate as long as I know the current year, but the current year isn't always easy to remember for some reason, especially the first 6 months of each year. Most of the time I just have to think for 10-15 seconds to remember it though, so isn't the end of the world exactly.
And no, my memory is generally fine, it's just some "sometimes changing" numbers that just don't get persisted correctly, or they're stored correctly but my retrieval microservice is too janky to retrieve stuff fast enough.
Well, for some people, they know exactly what date it is, and what week number it is, does that mean we shouldn't show that either, because it's such a basic knowledge to know for some?
I'd prefer to accept that different people remember different details, that's why we let our personal computing devices be customizable, because not everyone is the same.
I took some screenshots and I do not see the misaligned numbers at retina or non-retina resolutions, but I do see the odd bevelled edges on the 8/10/16 "tabs": https://imgur.com/a/PqqkWai
Apple have pretty much given up on making things look correct on non-retina displays, so many things are positioned at what turn out to be half pixel steps. Depending on whether we're talking fonts or shapes things can jump by a pixel or become blurry. I wrote about this here: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/01/25/running-modern-ma...
In the Kernigan and Plauger Software Tools book that describes the Unix user space you could use tools like wc, awk, sort, uniq, and grep, bound together with the shell, to do all kinds of things on plain text files.
As a photographer of course I want to share images between Lightroom Classic and DxO and as a computer graphics “artist” (I almost want to say “technician”) I want to work with images in Photoshop, web editors, tools I write to create images, etc.
Shouldn’t I be able to make music with GarageBand and then listen to it in iTunes and then write a program that plays it through my smart speakers at sunrise to wake me up?
Office 95 revolved around COM which meant that a Microsoft Word file was a composite file that could also contain data from other programs like PowerPoint and Excel so I could embed a small spreadsheet in a word document. (The fact that this system was documented and open was a weakness as much as a strength because you never knew if the recipient of a file had all the applications to open it)
Currently Office uses a documented XML and ZIP based file format. It is easy-peasey to load data in Excel format into pandas to do data analysis (less error prone than CSV even.). It’s not hard to write a program in PHP or Java that makes an Excel sheet complete with formulas for somebody to fill in then have them upload it back to a web site and suck the data out.
Locked in data is one reason why the cloud and mobile age feels like a step backwards than forwards, never mind the possibility of losing your data because you couldn’t pay the bill or your vendor got bought by Google, etc.
Source: have made this mistake. Have been flagged.
Brackets, exponents, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction.
Bedmas, Christmas in bed!
And still, they've fallen so low in recent years I don't see it being drastically better nowadays. Had a T495 for a while. Worst laptop I've had in a decade.
And the cross-device stuff is based on cloudkit, so it’s easy for third parties to adopt and get those benefits using apple id rather than additional signins. Of course that has some lock in, which I recognize is so offensive to some people that the upsides aren’t worth it.
Exactly this. And also a decent sound. I would definitely want to have a linux laptop again as OSX s*cks in many ways but Macbooks with M chips are still far superior so I keep monitoring the situation and waiting...
It is not a problem to find a laptop with high specs but then battery su*ks, it's made of creaking plastic, has a plastic clickpad hard to click, bad key travel and response or audio sounds like a 5y old cheap smartphone. This is something I am not willing to spend money on and torture myself at the same time.
If I have to use the default keyboard to enter arithmetic expressions, I'd rather SSH to my own server. I'm not exactly sure of the privacy implications of typing things into Siri.
It's just that I usually attempt to enter that code quickly if I have to, so I never consciously noticed it.
It seems great to me because when I enter my code slowly, I'm probably having input problems anyway (e.g. rain, thin gloves, tiredness).
And in these situations, the behavior felt so natural to me that I only now notice it.
I agree it may seem weird from a coherence standpoint, but the character appearing on keydown like it does just felt natural to me, just like a Win98 native button-down state.
These buttons don't behave like physical push-button phone buttons.
Regarding the calculator, the use case is the exact opposite, and I wasn't arguing against this regular "keypress" behavior anyway, just against the original suggested "keydown" behavior, which I'd consider a nightmare when used for tapping an on-screen keyboard.
The "bastardized" version on the iOS lock screen just has suited me well for this use case, especially when talking about numeric lock codes
