Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator
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What's happening is: the operator buttons have an animation on them, and they don't register inputs while the animation is running. The animation is pretty long, so it's quite easy to tap an operator, tap a number, then tap the operator again and have your input be missed.
Conveniently, this should be a trivial fix. Just abort the animation when a second input is received while it's still running and register the touch. (Or, lazily, make the animations a lot faster.)
Edit: I got operator/operand mixed up while writing this. :P
The event loop is processing events during the animation. It is up to the programmer to decide if events are ignored or processed during animations because what that means depends on what you want to happen: is the animation interactive and reversible? Does tapping reset the animation or does it start animating to the new state from its existing state?
CoreAnimation does the work based on the policies you select (eg: interpolating between a half-complete animation and the new desired end state).
The numbers are the operands.
trivial to fix the bug in the calculator app. not trivial to deploy that fix. this would be a full system update, right?
But, also conveniently, iOS 11.1 is in beta at the moment. They just released beta 5 today, so it's not like they couldn't slip a fix for this in before the final release if they wanted to.
Whether they will or not, well...
That means updates still need to be a part of a system update.
I haven’t measured data usage, but I suspect this means that removing Calculator’s icon actually removes its code from the system. If that is true, it is potentially upgradeable independent of the iOS system, at least from a technical perspective.
I suspect Apple’s QA and release processes cannot take advantage of this, though.
Re-enabling the app will basically restore the ROM version. You can then install updates from the store, which I think is basically a full install and the ROM version is ignored again, based on the consumed space of such apps.
Lag doesn't necessarily have anything to do with performance. I really don't think people are talking about performance at all. No one would seriously think that a modern smartphone could be dwarfed by a 35 year old calculator in terms of raw performance.
It also takes about 20 seconds to disable all animations in Windows, which makes it feel as snappy as XFCE (even on my 5-year-old machine).
For what I do now (Office, email, programming using IDE hooked into Docker containers), it really doesn't hinder me to be on a non-*nix OS.
One reason I moved from Windows phone was the massive delay in switching apps.
Now on iPhone the animations are annoying, yes, but they are at least consistent in length, meaning I expect them and know how long to take a (tiny) pause. I know some work is happening that’s being disguised and that’s why they can’t (all) be turned off.
(The last time I brushed-but-didn't-quite-hit some interesting info was in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136939, which I quoted (very tangentially, as a footnote) in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15153262.)
I always come back to the example of WhatsApp and how it took on SMS, IM, and emails and won. People claiming WhatsApp went in mobile first are getting it only partially right. WhatsApp defined itself as a replacement for SMS: No login passwords, no chat history, cross platform and that led to them being cheaper, better, faster, frictionless. Later added MMS-esque capabilities like media and then email-esque features like Groups with super nice execution on the UX front.
Similar thing for AMP pages: It just works and it is blazing fast.
It is already blazing fast with only HTML and CSS, as the Web was designed to be.
EDIT: typo
Only mobile, the web version is shitty because it hosts a web server on your phone which is unreliable. And even with that you can only access the web version from one computer and it does not work well on tablets.
US-centric competitors would only support iOS and Android, whereas WhatsApp was running on the hundreds of millions of 2003-2010 vintage Nokia/Samsung featurephones that were in daily use in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc.
That is also part of UX. When it comes to messaging apps, Snapchat is one extreme of the spectrum -- iPhone-focused, cryptic UI, teen-oriented, majority of users in USA -- and WhatsApp is the very opposite. Both are successful examples of UX focus.
These things go hand-in-hand by the way. And that's not a complaint, it's just funny how "only teens bother to figure this out" can be an honest-to-goodness feature under specific circumstances. Especially if you (basically) need to be "introduced" to a program and all of its quirks through your friends.
What needs to happen here is pressing the button needs to immediately register the press elsewhere in the code. The UI animations and the button tap should be decoupled entirely.
Then the user can tap away as fast as their heart desires and only the animations are going to continue on. That’s an easy problem to solve... by doing as you say and aborting them or shortening them.
But you should NEVER have UI animations and effects block your logic path. They should be parallel operations not serial.
Soo.. When he left his desk, I went in and hit SHIFT-SETUP, turned the audible BEL off in the VT-100 setup menu and enjoyed the silence.
When I came back in the office the next day, there was a technician from Digital with the terminal in what looked like 100 pieces on the desk trying to "fix" it. He was pretty upset when he realized it wasn't the speaker and the setting was just turned off (why he didn't check that first, I'll never know). Needless to say as a teenager, I kept quiet about the whole thing.. until now..
The buffer in question is, for a tty, a driver-level buffer that holds on to the data until something reads it. If a command doesn't read it (which things like apt-get update don't) then it'll get read as the next command.
Of course, most terminals these days are ptys accessed via emulators, so the buffer is actually part of the emulator, but the same idea applies.
You can link two commands together with the "AND IF" operator
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
This goes well beyond UI design, and there are even physical analogs - for example, the crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 in Paris could have been prevented if the device to prevent the cabin being pressurized if the cargo door was not properly closed had been operated by the door locking pins sliding home all the way, rather than by a side-linkage off the linkage that was supposed to drive in the pins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981#Ca...
You don’t want the switch activated until it’s all the way left or right.
But I feel my first suggestion was exactly what you're suggesting -- immediately register the input and apply the operator -- I just phrased it in terms of what happens to the animation.
Also! I certainly feel there are times when letting an animation block your logic is valid. That would be any time when an animation has the UI in a potentially confusing state, such that the meaning of an input is ambiguous. (You should avoid these states as much as possible, of course. And this sort of button-flash comes nowhere even near that category.)
The numbers have the same animation, but it's both shorter and interruptible, so the people who built the app seem perfectly aware of the problem and how to "fix it".
This seems deliberate, as if somebody figured that, while it's a legitimate use case to rapidly tap digits to input a longer number, tapping an operator multiple times is likelier to be an input error, so they purposefully block it. Clearly a mis-feature, but a feature nonetheless, rather than a bug.
I can't come up with a good UX reason for that restriction, so either it's an oversight or a technical limitation.
No they're not. The linked thread is literally discussing what you describe as "the actual issue".
> The actual issue is that some developer at Apple screwed up their animation configuration when implementing the calculator redesign, and nobody tested adding more than two numbers together quickly. Multiple failures, none involving system performance.
Unless you were talking about the discussion here on HN? I haven't read most of the discussion here yet. I just wanted to point out that the Redditors get it right just fine, since there's a lot of unheeded shitting on Reddit on HN (has always been the case and I think it's sad. HN has got its own community smells, but at least I hardly ever see Reddit dumping on HN and when they do it's in good natured fun poking and not vitriol like here) (btw your remark wasn't vitriolic, but others are very much so).
Asshole, but perfection requires assholes. Apple is regressing. Their products are too expensive to tolerate regression.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-calculator-2011-10
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
Wait, wat? How?
WOW!
It's just so wrong at so many levels, I don't even know where to start.
I'll leave a link to this video: https://www.ted.com/talks/brian_goldman_doctors_make_mistake...
Lots of bugs and issues happened under Jobs, but this was the usual press BS.
The iPhone 4 went on to sell 50 millions of devices or so with that antenna and nobody in the real world had much of an issue with it.
And the bumpers aren't proof of anything except perhaps marketing; they could have just decided that the cost of giving everybody free bumpers was cheaper than any brand damage they might otherwise have sustained.
You wanted a totally original rephrase for a response to the exact same topic on a different subthread?
>Apple gave away free bumpers with the 4, so yes, it was an issue
Which few really used in the wild, so no, it wasn't.
But the problem is probably not at developer level, it's higher ups who don't care about quality control, which permeate downwards.
In any case, I would be shocked if there was anyone, anywhere that thought: “you know, I would have put in the effort, but I knew even if I screwed up, no one would verbally abuse me, so why bother?”
Just my opinion, but I would reckon no software has ever been made better by verbal abuse. Jobs succeeded in spite of it, not because of it. Going on a tirade is something egomaniacs do when they can’t control their temper, not an effective motivational strategy.
But then again, I'd never block user input to play an unnecessary animation on my own initiative, so I must have been doing that because my manager told me to do it, or because I wasn't given enough time to do the job properly. So if I got yelled at in that situation, I'd wait to see if I was fired, and quit if I was not. Management by loud, abrasive, dominance-displaying histrionics is not something I can work with, ever.
Every company gets one freebie, where I go above and beyond the call of duty to make the kind of software that I am proud to stand behind. If that effort is not rewarded or recognized, and explicitly encouraged to continue, I fall back into line and do exactly as I am told thenceforth--no more, no less. I won't offer my opinion unless it is requested, and I won't go looking for extra things to do to improve the code base. If that freebie is actually punished or reprimanded, I start looking for other jobs. What I have found is that few companies are interested in doing anything well, or even technically correct. They desire extremely consistent mediocrity. They don't want a hand-crafted hamburger made from fresh-ground chuck and crisp, juicy vegetables; they want a McDonald's hamburger with exactly two pickle slices and one pinch of minced onion.
Anyone that yells at a grill cook for making a gourmet burger instead of the McDonald's standard probably shouldn't be hiring trained chefs and assigning them to the grill. But worse, anyone that yells at their grill cook because they put a third pickle slice on the burger--an extra pickle that was asked for, or even demanded--probably should not be in charge of anything, much less a bunch of grill cooks.
Fear of getting yelled at is actually fear of having to navigate the awful interview process all over again, while pretending to care about my current job long enough for an offer to come in. I avoid doing my work badly mostly because I don't want to be a person who does bad work. If I ever do bad work, it's because I was told to do it that way--or maybe yelled at to do it that way--and I hate every shortcut and kludge, even as I am typing them into existence. At that point, I am already mentally out the door, only sticking around until that paycheck can be replaced by a check from somewhere else. Yelling is bad management, and bad management motivates me to leave.
Do you seriously think anyone would answer "yes i love getting yelled at"? If yes, then I'm done here. If no, then ask yourself why you asked that question. it's a rhetorical question to control your narrative, which has nothing to do with what GP said. GP never said it's a good thing to yell at others, and neither did I. You're the one who turned it into this narrative for the sake of your argument.
Nobody is defending management which abuses employees for failing to meet quality standards. But yelling at employees is not the only way to indicate disapproval of work which does not meet quality standards, and the fact that Apple has not been maintaining quality standards is a black stain on current management that Steve Jobs never would have allowed in his company.
Apple shouldn't model Jobs's management style and go back to yelling at workers, but its entire corporate ethos depends on keeping Jobs's quality standards. If those standards are gone then Apple's brand will surely die.
Lots of bugs and issues happened under Jobs, but this was the usual press BS.
The iPhone 4 went on to sell 50 millions of devices or so with that antenna and nobody in the real world had much of an issue with it.
If only media worked that way and never discovered problems where they don't exist or are totally marginal...
By the same logic, if nobody listened any difference with $1000 "hi-fi cables" they wouldn't be buying them...
Let's just be frank: there were TONS of BS issues like that under Jobs all the time, regardless of whether he was obsessive about this or that particular app.
My immediate thought was that Apple had liberally sprinkled wait() into the iOS 11 code base so that I'd feel like my ole A9 CPU just wasn't cutting it any more and I'd realize, as they do, it's time to upgrade.
Or... maybe they are running every key stroke through the new Azure-enabled Cray computers to better predict what I am going to type so that overall, my typing is more efficient and I'm actually spending less time typing...
Yeah. Yeah, that's it!
The typing on iOS 11 in all apps is absolutely abysmal. What the hell is going on?
It would take an obsessive, aggressive, near manic product personality to stay on top of something that large and keep it running at an extremely high level of quality. Tim Cook isn't that leader (which pretty much everybody understood on day one).
Apple is seeing very serious problems across numerous aspects of their business, from product decisions to supply chain.
Every year it's always "Apple is dying" as they continue to siphon money from every industry they touch. They are about to push a tonne of users into a higher price point with the iPhone X. The Apple Watch is an unquestionable success. We are on the precipice of seeing an ARM based MacBook based on their incredible work with A-series chips. They are also strategically very well placed with their Health and AR initiatives.
Anyway look forward to your position in a few weeks when iOS 11.1 is released given the betas are looking pretty good.
Not that I spend any time looking at people's wrists, but you'd think if it was a massive success everyone would notice.
I wonder how much that has bolstered the amount of people using one.
It would be interesting to see the geographic distribution; I was in Delaware a two years ago and used mine to pay for my purchases at a Bookstore and everyone was quite surprised--they were unaware of the active Apple Pay feature on their own point of sales terminals.
The people wearing them aren't techie types at all which is why I'd guess the sentiment in tech circles is so negative on the watch's success. I think we're used to seeing our colleagues being the earlier adopters of gadgets like these, but the Apple watch early adopters include a diverse set of non-tech people.
Most of the Apple-using techie types I'm friends with have a Watch.
Although as a counterpoint, at $WORK, most of the techie types don't (but also don't use other Apple stuff.)
As a random example, yesterday I bought fast-food fried chicken for lunch. The woman who took my order was wearing an Apple Watch. The barista at my regular coffee shop wears one.
They're definitely showing up on non-tech people. I've also never seen a woman wearing a smartwatch that isn't an Apple Watch.
Starting around 2001, that last one got replaced by my mobile phone.
I'm not really seeing the use case for smart watches. But then again, I was never a fan of purses or fanny packs or any kind of jewelry either, and never understood fashion, so I'm probably never going to see the point of smart watches either. If I'm going to strap anything to my body all day, it has to be clearly useful for the entire duration, to overcome the discomfort and inconvenience. I'm just not seeing that yet in any of the available options. In every case, I'd rather put a wrist strap on my phone.
The same that has happened for every iOS .0 release for YEARS.
They focus on showstoppers (P1) only then focus on usability (P2) during the next year's worth of point releases. Then iOS 12 will come along and the process repeats.
Edit: to respond to another comment elsewhere in this thread, Apple also tests on all of the supported hardware when prepping iOS.
THIS! My exact experience and sentiment. The lag frustrates me every time I open almost any app (and then I get frustrated with myself for letting myself succumb to such a first-world-problem)
Is there any recourse? Can we disable some animations or other unnecessary features in settings?
Can we expect 11.0.4 or 11.1 to fix?
"Some reddit users claim that resetting their settings (Settings --> General ---> Reset --> Reset All Settings) fixed all of the app issues, while others have restored their devices and set it up as new to solve the problem. Others have backed up and restored and had better results."
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/25/ios-11-app-slowdowns-pe...
And this when I have yet to restore from iCloud or restore an entire 25GB Music cache!
What's happening, Apple?
EDIT: Should probably mention it's called Reduce Motion.
Resetting all settings seems to have done the trick. But I am not 100% sure.
HOWEVER I am running the developer preview betas which are notorious for being UX janky and logging insane amounts of crap on every action the OS takes. Which probably explains it for me at least.
It sounds like an issue that a reset or reinstall may fix.
I'd be similarly pissed off like you if even my much older phone did that.
The time from wake to photo was ~2seconds (using the lockscreen short cut).
The time from wake to home screen photo app to photo was ~5 seconds.
*
I had to start the timer myself then go back to using the phone so I believe I could cut ~500ms.
Since I have Live Photo enabled, the 2-second shots actually have a few frames that are sub 2 seconds.
Going to the homescreen was accidental. In each attempt, I attempted to use the lock-screen camera shortcut.
As a whole, the experience using the iphone is too unpredictable to be reliable for quick reaction shots (< 3 seconds). A number of times I either: bypassed the lock screen, didnt get passed the lock screen, unlocked my phone to a different app, and on one occasion, the camera app paused for a few seconds before focusing.
Back in the 90s I decided we needed a real-time UX - hard real-time guarantees. I had no idea how to even start with this, especially as the only OSes I knew well were UNIX-like, none of which did real-time. There was QNX(?) but I didn’t have access to play with it.
So do we need an effort to make a new real-time phone OS? Kinda like the Firefox phone OS project but built on an OS that allows guarantees?
Also, I swear the rear-facing camera has lower color saturation and higher sensoe noise after the upgrade. I’d love to see A-B camera tests for iOS 10 and 11 on old hardware.
I bought a very expensive phone that was unable to launch apps (50% of the time, when it did, it took several seconds) and unable to make calls (the receiving end would be mute and would not hear what I was saying).
The phone was bought on an official apple store and had one day of use. Problems persisted for over a week. Tried all the possible solutions. The only one that worked was downgrading to 10.
My latest annoyance is when I'm using the keyboard and it just visually freezes for several seconds. It appears locked-up, but it's really not. It's silently recording every button you press in anger, and finishes with the throwing of the entire buffer contents at you all at once, which, to add insult to injury, you now have to also delete.
For a 3 year old phone, it's frustrating but still miles ahead of the last Android phone I kept for 18 months. It's still frustrating that the iOS update is basically forced on us instead of being an optional upgrade like on desktop. (Of course it's technically optionally, but the constant nag annoyance makes it effectively forced, imo.)
That was actually recently debunked by Futuremark https://www.futuremark.com/pressreleases/is-it-true-that-iph....
Important excerpts found at the bottom of the page:
> Our benchmarking data shows that, rather than intentionally degrading the performance of older models, Apple actually does a good job of supporting its older devices with regular updates that maintain a consistent level of performance across iOS versions.
and
> That said, there are some factors that might affect people's perception of performance after updating an older device with a newer version of iOS. An update might add new features that use more resources or require more processing power. New apps developed for the latest models might not run as smoothly on older devices. Conversely, apps designed for an earlier version of iOS might not take full advantage of optimizations in the latest version. And then there is always the psychological effect of knowing that there is a new and improved model available, which can make your own device seem outdated.
Does Apple sprinkle wait()? No. Does the system become more and more complex and Apple taking less time to optimize because it runs “fine” on the [latest - 1] hardware? Yes.
I'll help you a bit.
> > [...] Apple had liberally sprinkled wait() into the iOS 11 code base so that I'd feel like my ole A9 CPU just wasn't cutting it any more
From the article
> Are older iPhones being deliberately slowed? [...] maintain a consistent level of performance across iOS versions
Sure, as you snarkily remark, your CPU/GPU hasn't changed, but neither has the iOS version inherently made your phone slower. Apps on the other hand might be assuming more power nowadays, but that is a whole other question... Or, you could also just have read the end of my comment...
The real rebuttal of "slow" claims should be to look at the added features and security and discuss whether such trade-offs are worth the reduction in performance. For example, to make the user's data much more secure, Apple puts a lot of mechanisms behind XPC, which is inherently slower than mere API calls. These slow the system. Are they worth it, for the security benefit? That's the productive discussion we should be having.
But that is LITERALLY what people were accusing Apple of doing, actually slowing their devices to make them buy newer models. There might have been less conspiracy-esque claims, but jesting they were "sprinkling wait() calls in the code to make me upgrade" is not in that category - so I disagree with your claim that people weren't meaning that.
Anyways, this discussion has derailed, so I'm just gonna leave it at that.
My main problem is that if I simply want to do something on any iOS now as soon as I unlock it I'm blocked by pop ups for things like making a back up and buying more iCloud storage and upgrading to iOS 11 -- things I never intend to do. There's no way to switch these off either. And they happen constantly, multiple times a day.
Last time I used my iPad I dismissed a popup, opened up an app and the same pop up came a few minutes later completely interrupting me. I have no tolerance for these annoyances.
Samsung phones were complete trash back in the day with their bloated interface but I've since switched to a Note 8 and the experience has been very good. UI is very clean and the performance/features on the phone are outstanding.
The iPhone is a rather one size fits most device. If you don't want to go along with Apple's idea of how to use the device, you will be unhappy with it.
Right now I'm fighting the practically forced upgrading of a particular app for which the update will remove functionality. But in order to not update one app, I'm forced to manually update every other app individually. Which is about 40-50 updates a week that I have to approve.
Using the phone forces me to realize the extent to which I don't really own it. I'm just sort of renting services from it with an all-or-nothing set of features.
Edit: I don't mean CPU benchmarking which has been discussed elsewhere in this thread. More like usability testing, sequences of actions not invoking new OS features where possible, and also a second set of tests using new OS features because that's what most people's experience would be.
It takes literally zero planning to do a test now and then do another after the update.
I've found a few examples here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/kabriolett
These don't support the argument that devices are slower after updates.
Honestly I feel like the people in charge of iOS have stopped using the devices personally. I have no other explanation for so much annoying crap slipping through (ok, other than some idiot exec being in love with the animations, and shutting down any attempt to correct this behaviour, like what happened with Forstall's obsession with skeuomorphism).
>Calling the generator’s prepare() method puts the Taptic Engine in a prepared state. To preserve power, the Taptic Engine stays in this state for only a short period of time (on the order of seconds), or until you next trigger feedback.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uifeedbackge...
Which would affect the 2017 iPad also. Why introduce a new iPad with the A9 if you're going to limit the performance. Is it to get people to buy... what exactly? An iPad Pro? Why not simply ONLY make iPad Pros?
This line of reasoning is immature and beneath the type of discourse that should occur on any tech leaning site.
I really hope you're just being sarcastic and mocking everyone who really thinks this.
Edit: I, personally, have a 6S and it's fine. Of course I DFU and set up as new for new OSs. It's even better on 11.1 beta 5.
You have something really wrong when your smartphone can't open apps...
After one week I got tired of this shit and downgraded to iOS 10, which for now is working as expected. I really hope apple won't force me to update to iOS 11. (So here's what I did: I intentionally filled my phone space. Good luck fitting iOS' 1GB here).
Frustrated disappointed and utterly angry at Apple. This is definitely the last iPhone I'll own.
Anyway, whatever apple did or didn't do, worked. I upgraded to an 8 Plus and couldn't be happier.
I run in to others who have version 6 phones and have no problem, so I don't know why I'm an outlier. Part of it is probably my storage habits, I was almost always within 5-10% of capacity. Now I have 256gb version and am hoping I don't get near the limit so that this phone will last me 3 years.
I'd try restoring my phone if I were you - that fixes these issues for a lot of people.
But this problem is not some stupid complaint coming from uninformed people. This calculator thing was a perfect symbolism for all this bullshit that's been going on since iOS 11 release because the bug is so easy to replicate, but there's much more going on than just this calculator bug.
Before I go on, note that I have the latest iOS installed, and I do iOS development. I'm not a clueless newbie.
Anyway here are some examples:
1. my iPhone apps crash 50% of the times when I bring them back from sleep.
2. Even the ones that DO load, takes around 8 seconds on average to start up. This includes Email and iMessage. Yes, I have to wait 8 seconds for my mail app and messages app to "boot up" before being able to check a message I just received. This is ridiculous. I have talked to several of my friends who have been experiencing the same thing.
3. I had to turn off animations. Otherwise I couldn't my screen will freeze when i try to type into imessage, etc. Remember, all of the above are happening WITHOUT the animation turned on.
4. I started getting emails from "No Sender" with empty content, couple of times a day. I'm just assuming this has something to do with some fucked internal clock (I have double checked and my iCal and preferences are correctly set) but who knows.
5. Yesterday I was trying to take a picture and opened the camera. And YES, I mean the native camera app that ships with iOS. I saw the camera UI launch, but there was no "camera". It was just a black screen. I've become accustomed to this type of lag in app loading so i waited for my camera to "boot up". It never did. The camera app was open and there were all the UI components, but it wasn't capturing anything. I have never seen anything like this before.
Please stop saying "haha it's funny how these idiots think some calculator problem means Apple's future is doomed" because last time something like this happened was when I switched from Windows to Mac.
This feels like Apple has crossed the Rubicon. The Steve Jobs era is officially over.
I think Android 8 has some flaws atm that are really kneecapping things. I had constant app crashes. Loading problems. All sorts of little things that seemed to be super buggy. Windows appearing behind other windows, adds not properly being put into their space. I went back to my iPhone 6s.
That said, you might have a better experience, those things might get fixed. I am sure they will be fixed both on iOS and Android. I am just saying, the latest and greatest on Android kind of sucks too.
Apple managed to make a smartphone unable to launch apps and make calls. Not sure if incompetence or malice. Regardless, I'm never looking back.
If you mean one of the developer betas then that's the cause of ... > [apps take a long time to load]
So no, the developer beta is not the cause. It happens to me and a lot of my "normal" friends who just upgraded their iOS because it kept bothering them with push notification to upgrade.
On iOS 10, I noticed, if I swipe the lock screen left and right really fast where it brings in the camera, it eventually gets stuck. Like half the screen is now black and nothing happens until I hit the reset button. This is reproducible. It seemed to me like a really weird little bug to have on maybe the most popular mobile OS on earth but brushed it off as me being anal about something not even Apple considers a problem. This calculator story is a bit of a waking call that Apple UX quality genuinely did get worse in recent years. It's little things that add up. It's the little annoyances with Android that keep me coming back to iOS but now it seems like they're introducing all kinds of new issues with iOS. Ugly.
You can't be the most popular if your competitor's market share is ~85%.
Also, the amount of lag when loading basic apps has increased significantly with this update (I have an iPhone 6s).
I think you might want to debug this like a problem rather than assume it’s all due to Apple errors. With all that’s going on I’d probably just jump all the way to a full restore.
As I mentioned I have multiple devices and I observe these problems everywhere. And I have heard the same from friends too. And all these people on this thread are complaining about it.
Now where is your source on how my problem is just some extreme case and my own fault?
I mean, if that’s what you prefer to do, be my guest. I don’t mind at all. I’m just pointing out you might be able to do something about some of the problems.
Also, I didn’t say it was your fault. I get that you’re frustrated, but it doesn’t help to get angry, especially with people who are trying to help you.
On my iPhone 6 I see maybe a crash rate of 2-5% (one in 20-50). There are apps with higher crash rates from time to time that usually get fixed with updates. I don't try to run the latest demanding 3d games and such on the phone, since I don't expect them to be usable on a 3-year-old device.
Maybe you're pushing your devices harder than I do or something but I second the parent's sentiment that your experience is out of the ordinary. But that doesn't mean it's your fault at all, just unusual.
All that being said, I'm overall less happy with iOS 11 than 10 on my phone. But love it on the iPad.
:(
iOS 11 must be the buggiest piece of s I've ever tried. Stuck animations, apps that take ages to load, widgets not working, more stuck animations, text overlapping everywhere.
Related: Flat design was supposed to make things leaner...
EDIT: Worst of all, every single operation is wrong: 7+8+9 = 96 4+5+6 = 60
Also, if this turns out to be a performance based bug that will be pretty frustrating considering Apple is always bragging about how they build the hardware, the software, have grand-central dispatch, have Metal and have multi-core custom built CPUs...yada, yada.
It’s not just that number sequence...it’s any rapid fire typing of numbers that cause these gross miscalculations.
Rollback the calculator app, if that doesn’t fix it...rollback the OS.
Yes I’m frustrated.
The animation shouldn’t prevent the + button from being pressed again, but it does. That’s the bug.
I have switched off any animations and performance tweaks that I thought might help, but no luck.
If you have a 6, I'd recommend avoiding iOS 11 as much as you can.
I ended up backing up everything and reinstalling from fresh. It's only just bearable now. Still noticeable 2s+ delays to open iMessage & and to get into Settings. Using the device for me has become completely joyless. In fact I have incipient resentment just looking at this p.o.s. It was once a great device. It's now hamstrung with bloat. I have stopped using it much now - I haven't yet installed Twitter & GMail or any of the many apps I had again. An entire 25 GB cache of Music library has yet to be re-installed. The phone sits almost the entire day unused. Battery life at end at night for a recharge? 80%!
If Apple doesn't fix these issues quickly and restore confidence in the already dwindling user base, they will suffer greatly at the hands of the Huawei's of the market. You don't need a fascist type of Jobs to get these types of issues fixed.
Come on Apple!
7 + 89 = 96
4 + 56 = 60
The second "+" isn't registering because the animation tied to the operator buttons for some reason only blocks other non-numerical inputs for the duration of the animation.
I don't even own an iPhone or have experienced the bug, just guessing at the cause.
I get 1+1+1=111
...
Looks like this is a feature, not a bug, or else it would have been fixed sometime in the last 8 years! /s
that might be true in general, but this calculator bug exists since iOS9 and only surfaced now.
First off, they look terrible, the slooooooow change from one thing to another. Secondly, they severely impede usability because you have to wait wait wait for 1000ms here, 1000ms there, and another 1000ms there after every action.
It's enough to make me want to give up privacy and switch to Android.
Soooo pissed at slow animations. 500ms, TOPS devs. NO MORE, and ideally something like 200ms. /rant
It'll be a cold day in hell when Apple does anything remotely similar.
The only thing iOS had for me was reliability
[1] https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=android+ios+crash...
[2] http://www.technologizer.com/2012/02/06/which-phone-os-crash...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/02/02/does-ios-...
It's sadly no better on the Android side of the fence either. How many times I've had to wait for the keyboard app to decide to load…
But still, the perverse incentives of Google make privacy a real question. Then again, if I was willing to put up or shut up, I would probably be running a de-googled AOSP based version of Android. :/
Reboot every few days, delete bullshit phone games that just for fun ensure they start quickly by loading every time you start your phone starts along with any other worthless apps you don't actually want or need.
You will no longer have this problem.
Also, the animation happens after whatever loading needs to take place, so if you just saw 500ms of still image while loading was going on in the background, the animation starts after all that.
Others definitely feel a lot longer than 300ms, such as opening the home screen when in an app. (I have reduced motion turned on, perhaps they have been slowed slightly for that).
"Jony wants you to take time
and appreciate the simplicity
of the slowly dimming animations.
Or we’re just using it wrong."
This is a pretty sad bug, though.
My (very expensive, "high-end") Japanese induction stove has a similar issue. Its capacitive touch controls take just an extra beat to register, so you have to turn on the stove, pause 700ms, turn on the burner, pause another 500ms or so, then turn the burner up to max to boil your kettle.
I'm totally used to it by now, and never get it wrong any more, but it still bugs me every single fucking morning.
Are they cheaper? I don't understand the point of them in the cases where they're literally just replacing a real button. The worst is when they don't even indicate clearly where the buttons actually are.
Not generally, by neither are they more expensive generally.
However, there's a large section of consumers that see that sort of thing and somehow assume it means the product is of higher quality, or that's what comes up in the marketing meetings I've had to sit through whilst advocating for mechanical switches.
That interface was genius. These days I sob and cry every time I have to figure out how to use an unfamiliar microwave.
Both are on the fly adjustable, both power and time. I find it really good design.
As for regular oven tops, we spent some time finding an induction model with physical buttons. It's wonderful and I enjoy using it every day. It's very tactile. Throw a kettle on and slam it to "P" in 30 milliseconds, aah I love it.
Product designers hate mechanical switches because they are almost always the first thing to wear out. Including a switch robust enough to last as long as the rest of the product is generally too expensive for consumer electronics.
Capacitive buttons can be made much better with some kind of instant feedback to replace the tactile feedback of physical buttons.
The problem is that adding that kind of feedback costs money. Even if it's just a few pennies per device, most manufacturers won't do it for consumer devices. That kind of penny pinching is the reason I avoid consumer grade products if at all feasible.
Capacitive buttons have some distinct advantages too, primarily being waterproof and nearly infinite durability. A lot of UI issues like OPs stove are likely poor software, there is no real reason why a capacitive button would need a 700 ms pause between actions. Now, the lack of tactile feedback is a more fundamental problem sometimes, but capacitive buttons can be great when implemented well.
The problem described occurs before the oven even has time to heat up at all much less heat the input panel to 120F.
However resistive needs fine-tuning, and really shouldn't be used in dusty or hot environments. Which adds design time and shielding costs.
In our internal research, they end up costing about equal. But we are small, so it might change at a larger scale, though I'd expect those differences to shrink.
You also don't need to engineer attachment points into the product chassis, and assembly is easier.
In addition, they can improve the lifespan of the product because they don't wear out nearly as fast, and they don't provide ingress for dust and water.
Capacitive inputs have many downsides, but at scale they are certainly cheaper on average.
In your particular case they may not be cheaper due to other design considerations.
My lab placed fancy touch-screens in the place of the light switches. Now turning the lights on or off takes at least 15 seconds but we get to pretend to be luxurious :(
They don't work any better or worse with wet hands, so I have to figure they kind of sacrificed overall usability in exchange for capacitive touch working with wet fingers.
You don't make sales based on how much people like using it, you make sales based on how attractive it appears while on display.
There are also options to reduce animations in both macOS and iOS, although I'm not sure if the calculator responds to that.
But you're absolutely right about these non-responsive 2D stove controls. I have o multiple occasions given up on trying to use stoves at friends' places because I was actually unable to turn them on. The worst sin is obviously that there's no affordability indicating a touch has been registered. But on top of that, they somehow tried to sixth-normal-form these buttons. So you have one button rotating through functions (up, down, off, fire fire fire!), and one other button to choose the burner. Or something like that.
I really wouldn't know anything to make them worse. Maybe Clippy.
But with the added layer of animations post interaction it can feel really cumbersome and disconnected. Imagine if each key on the keyboard had an associated delay and animation and you can see how it might impede a user's progress in other scenarios as well.
I think it is a case of the rule of cool winning during design and development, and then because the devices and sites we use become daily use items we end up growing tired of the mounting small inconveniences.
Imagine if every time you opened your wallet you had to wait a few seconds for it to slide open from a button press, rather than it just opening as you manipulate it.
You lose a slight bit of control over the situation and it's timliness and that adds up over the course of long time use until eventually you throw out the wallet and buy a more rudimentary one that "just opens for crying out loud".
It’s a damn shame. I loved the Apple of old.
I'm pretty sure the very similar numeric spinner issue on iOS has been around since Jobs was alive and running the show, so the idea that he would have reacted swiftly and decisively to an issue like this is not merely unverifiable speculation, but contrary to what (inconclusive, to be sure) evidence is available.
Since it's an alarm, as another comment has exemplified, you may actually miss an important event in your life because you didn't know to wait for an animation to complete before saving your alarm.
I would say that this is severe given the potential outcome.
Similarly, the calculator bug is more of an annoyance for people who know about it, which is already bad, but the problem really manifests to those who do not know about it and may end up, say, wiring the wrong amount in a money transfer because their phone calculator didn't finish the animation in time to register actual key presses.
This is UI making the outcome of user operations actually wrong, not just laggy.
My favorite example comes from the aptly named "Asshole Design" subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/78b0di/apple...
It also means the number will be in the correct format. your example, 930, could mean many things (930 seconds? 9:30am or 9:30 pm?)
Who puts seconds as an input for setting their morning alarm? MAD!
The Android clock app silently corrects 73 minutes to 1 hour 13 minutes.
So for 1:13:45 (hh:mm:ss) you can input "7345" on the keypad and It. Just. Works.
A screenshot at the beginning of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37809848/can-we-use-some...
However IMHO it's a big usability regression from the old time picker widget, which was a number pad to enter the four digits a time is made of. I know the time I want to set and instead of typing it straight away I have to look for numbers on a dial. It takes longer.
Design teams are losing their way. Too much eye candy is making them blind to efficiency, pun intended.
What should I believe? /s
Sometimes I wonder why individuals working for these multibillion dollar companies, who affect the lives of millions of people, decide to change things for the worse. Imagine having spent all those hours overhauling the calculator app, on I don't know, fixing things that actually are broken.
I'm thinking maybe that has something to do with why their system software is riddled with shallow bugs that would be (should have been?) detected by casual at-the-desk testing.
> "and had a larger touch area"
Your comment regarding touch area made me curious. While the button image area is smaller, in my very simple and admittedly limited tests I seem to be able to activate the button with touching the button only tangentially. Even with my pinky I can't not activate a button when attempting to avoid them by pressing in the space between them. This leads me to believe either the active area extends beyond the button image area, or, more pragmatically, fingers are large enough that they're going to end up activating the buttons regardless. Would you mind going into more detail in how you determined that the touch area is reduced in the iOS 11 calculator?
I look at a button as defined by its shape as "perceived touchable area".
A circle enclosed in a square has a smaller area than the square enclosing the circle. You're seeing the new buttons as circles (thus smaller area), even though behind the scenes (as your little experiment has demonstrated) the buttons are still squares (real touchable area) on a grid.
I would also argue the eyes have a harder time parsing the layout, as the visual boundaries between the circular buttons have more complex shapes than the old UI, where the boundaries were very thin lines.
If you want to run another "experiment" – albeit theoretical – imagine we shrink the "perceived touchable area" of each button even further, say we get rid of the circular background and keep solely the digit displayed on the button. Your eyes will now perceive the visual representation of the button, as only the digit, and I would say our initial impulse is to touch what we see and not some imaginary boundary we know exists.
It would be one thing if these companies were making greenfield apps and choose Electron to make their calculator app. But both Apple and Microsoft had perfectly functional calculator apps before, why spend the effort to make them worse?
What appears to be happening — I have no idea what's actually happening, but my guess as to what the problem may be, is that there's no special handling of Start menu keyboard input, just a set of systemwide shortcuts that tell Explorer to open the Start menu and then to steal keyboard focus.
My fear is that the reason that no special effort appears to have been made to fix this is not some significant technical difficulty, but out of some explicit or implicit management decision that time spent fixing a bug that's only visible to the very few users who even realize the Start menu accepts keyboard input in the first place would be better spent on "important stuff", like, um, making the taskbar "more social"[1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/windows-10-gets-more-socia...
What a waste of time.
I moved back to linux for a computer where basic things like this would work reliably. A good move for the most part, but for some reason the calculator in gnome doesn't do anything when you hit the '=' key, I have to reach for the mouse. Seems like no one can make a simple calculator app anymore.
It animates the + button when you press it, and blocks any further touches till the animation is done.
Video: https://streamable.com/4xsh9
Yeah I missed a meeting once.
I'm not sure why it doesn't just set the time to the number that is mostly in the selection box and is being "snapped" to, instead of waiting for the animation to stop
Yes, Steve.
Messing up their own apps leaves a bad taste.
https://twitter.com/mempko/status/922673699752308737
I like to fire up older tech (2011 is not that old) to remind myself all the forks in the roads society had to take that led us to where we are today. RIP webOS.
Aside from bugs, don't even get me started on the giant fucking labels in the iOS 11 mail app telling me which folder I'm in....
Take care though, because I've used an app in the past which was broken with animations disabled. I can't remember which one it was, but it relied on an animation completing to trigger an event when a soft button was held down for a certain interval.
Doesn't seem to be getting any better and I plan on holding off on updating for as long as I possibly can.
There's some people who wish to start blending into the next animation the moment a new player input comes in. This is great for responsive gameplay, but causes wonkey looking animations, feet sliding etc.
Then there's the people that simply want to always let an animation complete. It looks great, but obviously is very frustrating as your inputs get ignored and you can't react to things when you want to. Buffering inputs is not viable either.
Sadly, it seems in modern games the latter group is winning more and more. For example, in the Witcher 3 (which is otherwise an amazing game) orienting your character such that it is looking at (and the right distance from) a pickup is almost a minigame, since every time you tap a directional key to move in the a direction, an animation plays, which inevitably moves you too far.
I can't really resist playing games like The Witcher 3 anyway, but if I could I would "vote with my wallet" and not play any games that prefer animation fidelity over good player controls. Sigh.
At my employer, our culture is almost the polar opposite -- everything is open unless there's a need not to. Every employee dogfoods the latest builds of our apps/website/hardware before it goes out to the public, and culturally, internal feedback is encouraged. This is invaluable QA signal (in addition to automated testing and traditional manual testing) and a key part of why we can release as fast as we can.
Seems they fired all software QA engineers, and hire more ppt engineer, stop saying awesome and check your code.
123 ^→ abc
This gets doubly fun when both windows are terminals with ssh to production machines open…
Thank god they had practice questions. Because here was silly old me thinking "well I've got a smart phone, I can just use that".
One iteration through the practice questions using my smartphone calculator, and off I went to the newsagent to pick up the old version for the real thing...
Of course,the rant for why they were testing me on manually-done math for a data analytics job can be saved for another thread :)
Important people leave companies sometimes, which can be a real pain but probably not a disaster.
On the other hand, this company overworks people, and the stock that employees have is probably worth a small fortune. They may have lost lots of good people, and cracks are starting to show.
Activation of application Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App failed with error: The remote procedure call failed. See the Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI/Operational log for additional information.
This kind of thing just seems like par for the course. I don't get it.
I’m still bummed they killed it. There are a few IOS apps I use that it was missing, but no dealbreakers.
I really wish someone would undercut the big three (on laptops and mobile) with an OS that was bulletproof, covered 90% of use cases well (and is ~10% as complex as the competition), and didn’t rely on ads/telemetry for revenue.
Screw platforms + ecosystems; just make it not suck.
But then chilled out. I didn't even pay for my shiny new iPhone.
Kids, theres plenty of software to be (re)written, be grateful to be employable for a very long time.
Reduce Motion helps a bit, but honestly I’d disable all animations that aren’t absolutely non-blocking.
Seriously what are Apple doing. The fundamentals are gone. I literally don’t know what day it is anymore in iOS 11. I use google calendar which is stuck on 31 because apple don’t let third party devs have updatable icons. I used to swipe left to find the date, but that no longer works. Now I have to pull down from the top, which I find a rather cumbersome experience. I am not an expert on android but the latest pixel phones promo shots show the date on the home screen (or can be configured to do with widgets I guess). It’s getting tempting to jump ship.
There's also assistive touch, which can help with gestures and other settings.
>It’s getting tempting to jump ship.
Well it looks like the new Pixel has much worse issues, so don't jump just yet. Phones in general, from all companies, are in a weird spot right now.
Updates slow down my phone, every single update, as well as introducing errors like this or where I double tap home to change applications and instead get a blur on the screen. Desktop OS updates have incrementally slowed down the computers, notably since Mavericks (and even earlier), so ever-slower desktops are actually expected by now.
I've used iOS products for years, refusing for example to use Android, but the issues I am encountering on the phone have become ridiculous. It may be time for an old school flip phone with a week long battery.
Thanks for letting me know about MIUI.
I'm still rebooting every couple days to keep bluetooth working reliably with my car. Maybe by 11.1 I can tell my sister and parents that it's safe to upgrade.
My wife is a nurse and uses the iPhone calculator to calculate doses. She performed a calculation like
2.25
/
1.5
=
I would like to point out that most (if not all) the lag issues and other performance related issues can be reproduced on a current iPhone 8. I have one. The flashlight has a noticeable delay when turning it on, the calculator is broken as described, the UI gets stuck a lot, apps crash a lot etc.
This is not a money grabbing scheme by apple. iOS 11 is just really bad software. Not the calculator though, this problem is older and has been there in iOS 10 aswell.
iOS usually launches with a bunch of bugs and issues. But this particular release has been one of the buggiest I can remember. There’s so many UI inconsistencies and other issues that feel incredibly rushed. I really hope the next minor patch addresses these, especially the battery issues. I’m charging my iphone7 2-3 times a day.
This isn't that, obviously, but it underscores the importance of testing. This clearly should have been caught in QA.
Also constantly hiding basic functions behind more menus and adding way too much white-space.
I just assumed it was my phone.
The excellent Working Copy is now non-functional for me.
This is Apple flagship device and milk cow. This is not what I paid for.
... ;)
The software definitely blows.
Does anyone know of another smartphone brand where the hardware is close to being as good as the iphone?
I think the problem is due to the UI is lagging and thus the second addition click event is not registered. e.g: 4+5+6 will return you 56.
Edit: Did it without using the "=" as other has pointed out.