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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41406550

苹果的 iOS 界面设计因各种问题而受到批评，例如元素对齐不良、标签居中不一致、符号渲染不对称以及不同 UI 组件之间缺乏区分。这些设计缺陷导致可读性和感知较差，特别是在本地化版本中，并可能导致用户感到沮丧。此外，Apple 未能为有关 UI 配置的个人偏好提供足够的灵活性。例如，缓慢的动画和执行日常任务的复杂过程可能会导致不必要的延迟。此外，一些功能（例如在地图导航时接听电话）仍然不完善，导致用户不满意。最后，苹果原生应用程序与外部应用程序之间存在脱节，导致不同软件包之间的数据传输不便。总体而言，与其他产品相比，苹果的 UI 设计被认为不太直观和灵活，这让寻求跨设备无缝体验的用户感到失望。

A friend doing homework for a university assignment, circa Leopard or Snow Leopard, noticed that Calculator produced negative values when raising a negative number to an even power.

The bug turned out to be in CFNumber, in Core Foundation. CFNumber does a lot of fiddly stuff at the bit level for performance, and one of their optimizations for exponentiation was incorrect. Somehow it was never found by tests or due to buggy behaviors it created in other apps, but by someone clicking buttons and thinking critically about the output.

Maybe they never had proper tests. Something as simple as exponentiating,which is a basic functionality of any modern calculator, not working for 50% of all integers? That looks to me like no one ever really tested that stuff.

In Excel (and some other languages), unary minus has higher precedence than exponentiation, so that -x^2 = (-x)^2 = x^2. That can bite you (for example when calculating the normal probability density function “manually”).

Interesting, I started playing with spotlight and typing in (-20)^21 returns " = 0", which is obviously not correct.

And typing in "(-22)^21" gives "-71100888972574851072", but wolfram alpha insists it should be "-15519448971100888972574851072".

Looks like there are still bugs here.

Wow that's bizarre.

At first I thought it was just an overflow error but no it's nothing like that. The math is indeed very clearly broken, as I play around with it on Sonoma on my M1.

I'm genuinely shocked. I though this kind of floating-point math was rock-solid, tested thoroughly over the decades.

There must be a way to do a mash-up between a spreadsheet and other languages like FORTRAN. Perhaps the language could be pluggable. You could mix and match and the spreadsheet formulas are the glue. Cell values abstract away the details of how that value got there. But, it accepts a refresh request.

Can this be true? Does the calculator have any irrational number? What if I enter PI * 2? Infinite precision, wouldn't that mean running until your RAM is full? Or would it simply work, because no irrational number is calculated to infinite (as many as the device could) digits and is therefore finite and can easily be multiplied?

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.

Comically, I didn't even notice those wobbly numbers in the first screenshot, I was too busy noticing:

- "Unicode" button label way off center

- The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position

- The indicators for bits 31 and 63 are not aligned with each other

- x and + not being horizontally aligned (I believe this is an icon-font issue, seen on HN before so knew to look for it)

God, the more you look, the more you find. It's actually horrible.

Also, the "32" label sits directly centered under the bit above it, but literally none of the others do, they're wherever-the-fuck.

The x, + etc don't look centered vertically either -- compared to the numbers to the left of them.

2's and 1's look like they are a different font size to everything else.

The padding on the buttons at the top is hideous -- the downstroke on the y almost touches the outside of the button.

I fear how awful this looks in localized versions, if they made any.

The 31/63 issue for me is that they appear to be aligned differently to the 0s directly above them. The left-edge of the 6 seems to be further left than the left edge of the 3. The 3 in 31 at least looks vertically aligned with the 0 above it.

However, I suspect they both have the same ("Incorrect" seems too harsh a word... "Visually imprecise"?) layout constraints and they look different in practice because "63" is a wider number than "31".

> and they look different in practice because "63" is a wider number than "31".

Gah, I was just noticing this again today, in Finder! No sane font has Roman numerals that are not monospaced.

Lots of fonts have monospaced numbers, they just need to be enabled! Look for OpenType (TTF and/or OTF) fonts with feature "tnum", and enable it.

For CSS, use font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums.

From zooming into your clip both ASCII and Unicode are wrong:

- ASCII is off center ~43/50 pixel margins

- Unicode is off center ~20/25 pixel margins

- Both have different margin sizes

- The button sizes of both are the same.

- The Hide button is offset from both 8/10/16 selector and ascii/unicode buttons

- Even if everything was correct, because there is no contrast between "Off" and background, it's going to look wrong anyway

The selector issue is very visible in your video still: you can see black pixels at the top of the selected number where it shows the selector background, but none at the bottom because it's misaligned and the selection bubble is slightly outside its box.

Edit: zooming in closer it's maybe not outside the box at all, but there's some odd aliasing artifacts or something making the space above the highlight look bigger than the space below.

Honestly I don't think it makes it any better if the Unicode text is theoretically centered; the fact that there's zero separation between the options, and such poor spacing that it's difficult to tell and feels awkward either way is still terrible design.

> Its actually the center of the button

Upvoted for putting in the effort, and because you make a correct point.

But the Unicode button is perceptually off center, because ASCII is a smaller word, and there's no visible boundary between the buttons. This comes up a lot in iconography, the classic example is a play triangle (like the media control) in a circle. Placing the triangle in the geometric center won't look centered, it needs to be a tiny bit to the right of that to account for the shape.

No separation between the buttons means you can't see the bounds which the words are centered in, so it looks off.

The 8 and 10 have the same problem, for the same reason. A visible background-gray line between the buttons would solve this problem, it should be 'squircled' to make it I-shaped and match the outer edges.

One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/.

That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.

I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.

I can confirm this. I had annoyingly bad chromatic aberration with my previous glasses. I specifically asked for CR-39 lenses for my next set of glasses and now it's barely noticeable at all.

I would recommend this to any programmer who uses high-contrast syntax highlighting. To me, it felt fatiguing every time I noticed differently colored words scrolling slight further than other words on a terminal screen on the same line.

One thing to keep in mind is that CR-39 is not impact resistant. They will shatter and can do horrible things to your eyes when they do. Kids should always be put in impact resistant lenses.

If you’re a desk jockey, or impact resistance is not a concern, CR-39 will give the least aberration with the exception of crown glass.

The hidden hack here if you need/want impact resistance is to ask for Trivex lenses. Same impact resistance as polycarbonate but much better ABBE value. It’s often overlooked because it costs a little more than polycarbonate and most people don’t complain about the distortion.

Also, anecdotally, you get what you pay for with progressive lenses. I have a cheap lens in my sunglasses and a higher end lens in my daily drivers and I can easily tell the difference.

> It’s often overlooked because it costs a little more than polycarbonate and most people don’t complain about the distortion.

I just started wearing glasses. I asked about fringing and they had brushed my concerns off as me being new to glasses.

This really bothered me many years ago, and I tried CR-39 and even glass, just for fun. I was never that happy with the results. I could always distract myself with chromatic aberration, and I think I eventually decided not to care anymore.

But right now, I have high index lenses and am reading HN with Dark Reader, and even if I use the maximum strength of my glasses (progressive bifocals), I can't really see any chromatic aberration.

I'm not sure if I should be happy or worried.

I thought I got used to the color fringes in my glasses, but the real problem is that they actually reduce image clarity away from the center of the lenses. If you look e.g. at white text on a dark background from an angle, the chromatic aberration blurs (the color components of) the letters together. You can't really see clearly by moving the eyes to the edge of the FoV of your glasses; you have to turn your head instead.

This is directly contradicting the main purpose of glasses: to see clearly. So it's actually somewhat less safe to e.g. drive with glasses that have major chromatic aberration. No idea why optometrists brush it off as a minor glitch.

I don't think anybody makes achromatic glasses lenses because they would be too thick and heavy.

AFAIK, every optician sells PADC (e.g. CR-39) lenses.

Another irritating thing that is captured in that image is the single pixel gap between the top of the application window and the menu bar. If the desktop background is bright it is very distracting. Not a mistake like the off centre X but drives me mad, nevertheless.

I knew from the very start of using macOS that it was designed around apps NOT being full-screen. Yeah, they are catering to the full-screen-apps people a little more nowadays, but embracing floating windows everywhere, and making good use of the distinction betweend CMD+Tab and CMD+~ makes it so much more powerful than just tabbing through full-screen apps, or three-finger-swiping. It also makes macOS way more beautiful to look at in my opinion.

It’s quite maddening if you use spaces (as workspaces) and same windows across them. An option like CMD-Tabbing being restricted to only applications with windows in the current space will go a long way.

Power users is an unknown concept at Apple.

I’m not sure that they’re an unknown concept, because macOS has lots of little things tucked away all over the place for power users. It’s one of the things I miss most when using other desktops, particularly those that go maybe a little too far on the minimalism thing (like GNOME).

It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those. The further one’s personal patterns deviate from that expectation, the higher the level of friction encountered.

> It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those.

That’s how you design generic appliances, not professional tools. While macOS is great for the users it caters to (that only use a handful of apps), it’s not for people that use their computers as computers (making it do pretty much everything).

It’s kinda tough, because a clean-cut, coherent vision of how the OS is intended to be used is necessary to build a great experience. The more you try to accommodate ways of usage beyond that, the more the vision falls apart and you end up with checkbox waterfalls and branching tunnels of config dialogs added in the pursuit of making everybody happy.

So realistically, judiciousness is required to keep it all glued together, and some usage patterns just won’t be accommodated.

For example, Apple doesn’t seem to be bending over backwards to make former Windows users happy, because the way that desktop works is just too different from what they’ve envisioned and what their long time users are used to. If they add a series of toggles to support Windows usage patterns, that’s a sudden 2x multiplier on the behaviors and UI that needs to be tested.

That said, I don’t necessarily agree with all of Apple’s decisions (I’ve never liked the linear representation of virtual desktops that in place since 10.7 Lion that well and preferred 10.6’s Snow Leopard’s 2D grid, for example), but the lines have to be drawn somewhere.

That gap provides contrast and separation between two similarly-coloured-but-not-quite grey objects. It would look worse without it, though I agree it is silly.

This is the same reason why window gaps are so popular in all tiling window managers. It just looks better.

When I got an ultra wide monitor I also noticed this for the first time on the macOS circular red X button, when wearing glasses. I guess a wide monitor has you looking at things off-axis more. It is really remarkable how much you can make the X dance around the red circle by moving your head. There's something about the colours and simplicity of that particular icon that really cause the effect. The effect is almost non-existent if you're looking at a more complex image, so I guess it's also remarkable how much your brain compensates for chromatic aberration in most contexts.

My glasses cause a bit of chromatic aberration, but not enough that I'd expect to see this sort of effect except at the edges of their field of view.

Now that you point it out, the X is way off center on my up-to-date M2, so I took a screenshot with default display settings and zoomed in to look at the pixel work.

The X is rendered asymmetrically. It appears to be about 0.1 pixels too far to the left and down, since the antialiasing has shaded pixels "outside the X" but only on those sides. The antialiased render of the red circle is symmetric. This matches what I see without zooming in and rules out my glasses.

I wonder if someone fixed the bug for low-dpi displays where subpixel rendering mattered a lot, but did so in a way that hard-coded whatever Apple shipped 10 years ago. Maintaining tall piles of hacks is hard.

Alternatively, maybe their font renderer is getting wobbly in its old age. The window manager is my #1 complaint about this laptop, but crappy font rendering vs. well-configured Linux is also on my list.

This is not a software bug, but rather an optical phenomenon called "chromatic aberration". What's happening is that your glasses are bending light at different angles depending on the wavelength, to the red and blue and green are landing at slightly different places on your retina.

It's a hard problem to solve optically and requires specially shaped lens. It's a common issue in telescopes, with higher end expensive scopes having these specially shaped lenses to reduce this effect.

From the post:

> In conclusion, the off-center “x” is real and probably an artifact of the display or how it is rendered. It is unlikely that it is the result of chromatic aberration.

Chromatic aberration is mostly relevant further away from the center of vision. If there is an icon (or text) visually inspected carefully it is at the center where chromatic aberration matters least.

The icon is mis-aligned, or its the different color subpixels of the screen that are not produced at the same place. Tradidionally, red is to the left.

To be precise: chromatic abberation is lowest at the center of the lens. But with glasses we often don't look through the lens center even if we have something in the center of our vision.

I have pretty strong high-index lenses, and definitely can get a kind of 3D effect.

The classic terminal blue and green text colors on a black background is the situation where I first noticed it: moving my head makes them shift in different directions giving a parallax or depth effect.

I get that a lot with default terminal colors - on black background, dark blue and dark red look shifted in opposite directions relative to baseline (white/light colors); when both colors are used in close proximity, it gives me a strong and quite distracting 3D effect.

I always thought this is specific to that color combination (red and blue on black) and LCDs, thus is perceivable by anyone, and could be used to create intentional 3D effects; I never considered glasses may be a factor too.

from the comment:

> That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

>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.

>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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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”?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

> 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.

>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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 :)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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'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 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.

My initial thoughts were that these issues were showing how things look on a non-retina display, or a display with non-default scaling. That does seem to be the case, but not entirely.

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...

Maybe now is a good time to remind everyone: your vision will deteriorate. Keep this in mind when designing.

When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable.

According to my eye doctor the screen time is causing eyesight issues earlier. We're not designed to stare at a bright light 40cm away all day.

May want to look at some eye exercises - or at least something far away.

From the same article:

"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.

Once I took apart an LCD monitor (with LED backlight) since one of the backlight elements was broken (I got it broken for very little money). I thought I'd see whether the LCD element can be used in front of a window to make a sci-fi type screen. Turns out the backlight is much, much brighter than daylight, and the LCD lets almost no light through. The LCD was too dark to make a cool sci-fi screen, and the backlight sitting separately was blindingly bright.

> When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable.

FWIW in Firefox (and i guess Chrome and other browsers) you can have per-site zoom. Also addons like Stylus allow you to setup site-specific CSS rules (and HN uses a bunch of classes in elements that use the same visual style by default but can be altered with custom CSS). For example in HN one thing (among others) i have is to use a slightly darker background for every other comment to make it easier to distinguish between comments when scrolling.

You can get grumpy about it, sure. Or you can just accept that any use of "designed to" in respect to humans can be replaced with "adapted for" without loss of meaning.

Most people who say "designed" here aren't ignorant: they don't care about the distinction and say what's idiomatic.

My bet would be on some compounding error from long usage also.

I'm using Apple Notes and it fails in some random ways after keeping it open for 1-2 weeks: When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random stuff, dragging text won't work, I can check/uncheck todo boxes. Goes away when I restart it.

Notes has been super buggy for a while. The failure modes are so weird I don't even understand how it's possible for a text editor. E.g. text and selections rendered floating between or on top of lines of text. I wonder how they manage to bork it so hard.

Did this possibly start when they added “live” collaboration (quotation marks placed very intentionally) to shared notes?

[0] says that was in macOS Ventura 13.1 and iOS 16.2.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to rewrite the text editing engine in Notes, or at least parts of it, to accommodate for this change. And if there’s anything more terrifying than modern Apple rewriting parts of macOS, it’s them doing it for any cloud-based functionality. shudders

0: https://techhub.social/@shantini/109508624631773033

I started using a shared note last week and my sister in law edited a grocery list at the same time I did

It duplicated the entire list on top of itself; I was laughing at how bad of a bug it was

I ran into this in Notes as well. Restating Notes fixed it, but wasn’t my first instinct, as I view copy/paste as a system task and didn’t think it would be impacted within a single app.

Seeing that I’m not the only one, I need to remember to restart notes at the first sign of an issue, rather than trying the action over and over trying to figure out what’s going on.

Hopefully, seeing as you are not the only one, you figure out where to file a bug report and then file it too. And then it gets fixes.

Ha, I am too used to it being more accessible to file a bug report, having spent most of my career with GNU/Linux (contributing and using since 90s).

> When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random stuff

A special place in hell exists for such code. No surprise the coder responsible is not keen to visit it.

Maybe the offsets themselves represent a binary number within that byte that corresponding to the bits within that byte. Maybe if you give it the right sequence, a message will emerge.

Haha, off-by-one pixel error!

I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH), but I also have a documents folder that I’ve accumulated over decades. I still use various .txt files in the docs folder as my low tech note taking apps.

I use the Spotlight or Alfred keyboard shortcuts (that also use spotlight index?) for quickly opening the files when needed - and annoyingly my most important file - notes.txt - regularly disappears from the Spotlight index and suggestions. It’s been like that for at least 5 years, probably closer to 10. I’m not even trying anymore, will just open the file from command line with vi as the fallback step.

> I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH)

If it' just "this", Linux is perfectly capable and IMO even superior.

I use linux on the desktop, but I still run a MacBook for my laptop.

Nobody else offers the same combination of battery life to performance/weight, build quality, keyboard, trackpad, and screen. Of course it's not perfect for everbody and you might have different priorities but I think the MacBook gets most of them right for most people.

Some come close on a few of those points but if you want official linux support your choice is very limited. Perhaps that doesn't matter to you but I don't want to even think about if updating my daily driver is going to result in a broken webcam or flaky wifi or bad power management.

I'm holding out hope for the new snapdragon based laptops. They seem pretty close!

The x1 carbons running Linux are better than the Mac in every aspect except performance for the battery life, but personally I don't want to use my laptop for that long at once anyway, so w/e.

Even when expanding scope to include laptops that run Linux well despite not officially supporting it, the selection available still have major issues, whether they be with build quality, screen panel quality, battery life, standby time, sleep/wake, overall lack of fit and finish (e.g. unthoughtfully placed ports) or some combination thereof.

It seems like a near impossibility for other manufacturers to not phone some of those things in. There’s always a catch.

Yep I should have written "mostly browser/SSH". But then occasionally I have to print something or run a (customer-provided) VPN client or open some corporate Excel file, etc. And there's the convenience factor of keeping my current setup. But should the MacOS thing become untenable for some reason, yep next step would be a Lenovo/System76 laptop known to work with Linux (including audio/bluetooth/wifi after resuming from sleep!) or even a Chromebook...

P.S. I've ran Linux/X (plus VMWare VMs with Windows) on my desktop machine with few complaints since the '90s and it was always the laptops that had issues, causing me to switch back to Windows after a couple of weeks of trial & frustration in the 2000s. I got Windows pretty performant & usable though, even attended Mark Russinovich'es Windows Internals class in London back in 2006 or so :-)

Laptop issues have dropped markedly in the last 3~4 years; especially battery life on AMDs in the last 6~12 months, the kernel perf / scheduling changes have been pretty good.

Just a cheap Chromebook would probably be even better IME - nothing to worry about, it is really very much just a keyboard and screen and gets out of the way.

Less can be said about your typical Linux experience in in the 2020s where you will still inexplicably find yourself having to mess around trying to get Bluetooth/audio/webcam/sleep working reliabily.

Does anyone remember NDISwrapper? You took Windows drivers for your laptop WiFi device or whatnot and the wrapper allowed to load them into Linux kernel (still didn’t work for me reliably though, not surprised). Even when I was young and had lots of free time, it seemed insane to have to deal with this.

If you're looking for an occasional laptop, I bought a Lenovo V14 ADA for the few times I travel; got it brand new for less than $275. 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 4 threads, good Mesa support. Perfect for travel / now and again usage. It can even play some games on low graphics.

EDIT: I should note, this is the AMD variant of the V14

I just checked Lenovo's more recent offerings in the US; the IdeaPad 1 15" AMD Abyss Blue.

Not sure if the build quality is as good as the EU SMB market laptops (which are generally really good value with good build quality, for me a perfect compromise between price and build quality, steel internal framework with solid plastic case, not sexy but definitely robust).

This IdeaPad1 looks like it has the same specs as the EU model (V14 G4 AMN). Just check if the build is solid enough. The IdeaPad1 can be bought at Best Buy.

It should be noted that the build quality of the ThinkPad are much higher than the IdeaPad. I have both and the IdeaPad is more or less on par with other cheap consumer laptops.

Thinkpad P14s series with AMD, they make sure it is fully supported on Linux. I would take the just arrived gen 5 AMD because of the new Zen5 cores. Same perf than with Zen4, but much lower power consumption.

I have an oldish Lenovo Thinkpad T470 which is bulker but it's very good nonetheless and a Dell XPS (4 years old, and the battery sadly is the weak point since I used it 95% of the time connected to an outlet and never cared for battery health)

Huawei mate book 14 (2024) the grey one (800 bucks) or the green (1200). The mate book pro is superb too but to expensive.

You'll love the OLED screen and it's ratio 3:2! What a beautiful thing.

Funnily enough a simple fgrep is super fast on SSDs and actually reliable. Even across TBs of data.

With Spotlight you can never be sure. And to be fair, the Windows equivalent sucks just as much.

Recently windows has become much better for things a linux or macOS user takes for granted, like using ssh (a quick google search tells you how to install it using powershell), but is missing a lot of features. Two recent examples for me are taking 5 minutes to figure out how to install and use rsync, and taking 10 minutes finding a program to add/delete pages from a pdf file that's not a trial or demo of some kind.

SSH clients have been easy on Windows for at least 20 years: just use Putty. And there's also at least on Chrome extension that works as an SSH client. But you are right, that Windows doesn't come (or didn't come?) with one out-of-the-box.

In any case, I can see that those addition things like rsync or PDF manipulation might differ between the different operating systems. I was really just talking about browser plus ssh (client).

Well, you can run multitasking in TSRs & keyboard interrupt handlers (the original event loop)… implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader…

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