Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

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.

The lock screen is even worse. I have to slow down to input my passcode or button pushes don’t register.

I’m glad someone else noticed this. I never manage to unlock my iPhone first time.

It’s pretty sad

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.

I wouldn’t be surprised it’s using the same UI code as the Calculator app.

I'm sure the horrible lock screen UX is simply a dark pattern to nudge users towards Face ID.

Even if you use Face ID you have to enter the password, instead of your face, regularly

I have the same problem with the bitwarden macos app. If you start typing directly when it opens it misses keystrokes drives me nuts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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?

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.

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.

> 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.

I think it's just the lack of consistency in app designs

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?

That problem isn't limited to "radios." Have you ever used a smart thermostat? A touchscreen fridge? A smart TV? Horrible, horrible UX.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

Having used both, I disagree. What do you prefer with AA?

I think you’re talking about iOS. If so, it’s Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion -> On

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.

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?

I am happy CarPlay and Android Auto are a thing because I do not want to give any other entity access to my phone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

You can answer the call and switch back to Maps while the call continues, right?

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

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.

No need to enable developer settings, at least in Android 14 it's in accessibility>color and motion>remove animations.

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.

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.

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.

Have you reduced motion in the accessibility settings? Sounds very similar to the devloper settings in Android.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, to no avail. Mentioned earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409580

> 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.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

> 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...

> 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 :)

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

In theory you could use a smartphone as data provider for updates etc

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.)

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 )

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.

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”?

A phone doesn't spend much time doing "workloads". UI animations in particular should never be close to CPU or GPU bound.

> 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?

Android has a lot of those features through KDE Connect now.

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.

Maybe it will be fixed in Apple Calculator for iPad (soon to be released 2024) in iOS 18?!?

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.

> 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.

And they aren’t. The op probably just didn’t like some hyperparameter, like duration, because it had a different value than on Android.

You can't feel the controls on a touchscreen. You always have to look at it.

> 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.

Similarly in Google Calendar Android app: https://youtu.be/7z-82Hi5dtc

> prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality

This describes iOS in a nutshell.

>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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

> most egregious issue: How can I see the current year

What do you want/need this for? Not something I've heard before

This doesn’t solve the problem. It just turns the animation into equally slow fades.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Sideloading is free (no need for a developer program subscription) and cloud storage isn't a "basic feature of the phone you bought".

The biggest shock for me moving from Android Auto to Carplay was the complete lack of multi touch support in Apple's offering. Worked perfectly on Android.

On Android you install Firefox, have real ad blockers and have effectively the same system as any desktop computer.

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.

considering the outright insane hiring practices of canonical im not surprised...

Sometimes I quickly want to just say “I’ll call you back” and end the call.

> Sideloading is free

Not if you want the nag to go away

> and cloud storage isn't a "basic feature of the phone you bought"

I agree, but Apple thinks otherwise if you want the Settings nag to go away.

Yes, if you don’t want your software and services to be ad-funded, then you have to pay for them. I thought that was sort of obvious.

This is probably at the center of it: only a portion of users want this, and thus it will be a PITA on iOS.

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.

That must be baffling to so many, but people's memory work in very different ways, and not keeping in "RAM" the current year or one's age is a thing. It comes back after a moment of thinking, but it's just not instantaneous.

And that's of course worse in countries with two calendars.

My "favorite" macOS mousing sin is that the reverse scrolling options for touchpads and mice are linked, despite there being two distinct checkboxes.

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.

Thank you! A year on this crappy UI and I never discovered that organically. Such a great discoverable UI.

> What do you want/need this for?

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.

> Exactly, it's such basic knowledge to know

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.

There has always been a vision in computing where you can access the same data with different tools.

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.

So you're coping. That's fine, just make sure you never use Android and discover how green the grass is on the other side. AOSP has fewer ads than iOS in it, and that's just an unfortunate fact.

This is about the beta iPad calculator in iPadOS 18 from a month ago:

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-18-calculator-app/

Shocker: you have to use the Calendar app to open the Calendar.

Well the phone calls work on every device. I suppose there’s a case that phone numbers are non-standard, but I think it takes motivated reasoning to get there.

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.

I'm with you.

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.

No, I didn't think of that Code entry character "preview" before in any way. Especially since it's only a dot appearing in practise.

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