If you type the letter “i” and it autocorrects to an “A” with a symbol
support.apple.com
support.apple.com
My android friends always complain about bugs on their google android phones and I used to just smile. Now I have similar problems.
If you're not German, it's very interesting to me as it highlights my lack of exposure.
Granted 11.1 fixes some of these issues, but I don't appreciate having my thousand dollar phone gimped for two months, and it's still worse than it was before.
I'm getting a different phone, watch, and TV device. But hey, the industry still has me by the balls as long as I'm buying something every year, right?
It worked great 6 years ago, and it still works now. I'm not persuaded by the "updates" Apple keep trying to tell me to run; I think I'll lose more features and stability and battery life and USB sync, and not gain anything of any practical purpose to me.
If Android had USB sync, I'd consider converting. But swapping one cloud ecosystem for another just doesn't work for me, I want to keep my data offline.
Uuuh,it does last time I checked. You can even create backups with debug enabled. Nobody uses it though because plugging the phone to the PC is annoying.
You are also not required to use the Google drive services for file syncing. Setting up an owncloud server gives you pretty much the same benefits and interactions that gdrive provides
I never think about it. If it's on my phone, it's on my PC.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.icecoldapp...
E.g. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/broad...
Today I tried using an an old iPad 2 that was upgraded to iOS 7. It was literally unusable.
I've never seen a phone where it isn't obviously somewhat impaired after 2 years, so what is it like on something that's 3 to 6 years old? Or do you get it replaced often?
But replacing, not getting it replaced. At least on my 5 it is a few screws worth of work to swap.
I use a Third Rail case, so I can recharge easily. I don't use 3G, and all my apps work offline.
https://www.amazon.com/Third-Rail-Protective-Compatible-Rech...
One of the reasons I still like my phone is because of that case. I wish there was something similar for another phone. The external batteries also have microUSB in and out, so I can charge friends' phones too.
It has, but last time I tried it (on Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.x), it was completely unusable. Transfers freezed and crashed all the time. I was unable to upload a single music album even after few tries.
First, make sure you’ve got at least 1GB free space on the device. iOS starts thrashing when free space is low.
Second, tap Settings > Battery to see if any apps are excessively burning the battery (and by extension, the CPU)
Third: Settings > Privacy > Location Services and make sure every app is set to Never, unless giving that app location services has some benefit to you.
Fourth: Settings > Background Refresh. Turn off everything except apps you want to refresh. For example, apps that sync data via iCloud.
Last suggestion: back up via iTunes, restore to factory settings, restore from backup. In my experience, this is iOS’ dirty little secret, sometimes it gets into a state that can only be resolved with a wipe.
Over the last six weeks it’s felt like 2008 again - “no, I don’t know why they did that. Yes, it’s different. No, no reason”.
I’m not averse to change, but they’ve shifted bits of UI that habitual users relied upon, and done things are really inobvious to a neophyte - try getting your non-tech relative to save a pdf from safari on iOS - and as a corollary - power touch has given rise to a slew of blind mystery interaction. It’s just not as thoughtful as it was.
Then it's a matter of encouraging grannies and other tech illiterates to ask the obvious questions to the tool in front of them: "Where did the button to save episodes go?"
For example, my wife, my daughter, and my sister are all really smart but not tech savvy. They love Apple, but the "upgrade" to iOS 11 is bothering them quite a bit. (Too bad Android isn't any better.)
My mom is still on Windows. She hates Windows 10 and really misses XP, but she can get by OK without too much help. She's 84. I'm thankful she never went to Apple, frankly. She would never talk to a computer. That is in the ridiculous range for her.
The thing with menu driven interfaces is while they're ugly, they do make functions discoverable. You don't need to remember what icon you want nor where it is, you just need to remember it is in the menu.
From a personal perspective, I still find myself hunting for common functions in Office even after years of using the Ribbon bar. I've found that to be the single handed biggest productivity killer to Office
For example in IOS 10 to enable night mode was -> "Swipe up, tap" done. In iOS 11 it now requires 2 swipes, a long press then a tap. Also minimizes the app in focus requiring another tap to get back to it. Why?
I'm currently on iOS 11 and the flow is still the same for me as before: "Swipe up, tap" done
I'm not seeing this "2 swipes, a long press then a tap"?
Actually had to look up how to do it which lead me to http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/01/access-night-shift-control-ce...
(edit - I'm on iPhone 5 which doesn't get iOS 11 which may have saved me)
- Mavericks is old enough that it hasn’t received any security updates in over a year
- You’re falling way behind on emoji support (but maybe you haven’t noticed if you spend all your time on Hacker News, since apparently emojis get stripped out of posts here)
With audio, it will occasionally hiccup or skip. With video (especially Netflix), it will skip or become choppy for a few seconds. With Bluetooth, my car stereo will switch from another source to Bluetooth Input whenever I receive a text, then it will not revert to the original source input (CD, terrestrial radio, etc). All of this only started happening after the iOS 11 update, and all of the above issues persist across both devices, so it's not a hardware thing.
My point is that in the mobile landscape iOS and associated hardware, at least for me, work better than anything else out there.
It seems to be very random. Maybe there are radio or baseband variants? It’s very frustrating to our guys who do this stuff as there are really no useful tools to troubleshoot.
If anyone from Apple is listening, please please please raise this up the flagpole on your teams. I love Apple, and think they’re doing fantastic work overall. I get that there are unique problems with having such massive scale, but iOS 11 has been a mess from the beginning.
Edit: It’s apparently “springboarding”, not restarting. Very similar experience either way.
I find it interesting to note how the quality of some Apple and Google software products is declining lately. Google Hangouts is a total buggy mess. And Gmail is worse than it was some years ago. It seems that big organizations inevitably get more disordered as they grow and age.
I wonder if this can be avoided or mitigated.
I know a lot of people hate this feature, but i use it all the time while driving. It will literally, every time, connect the call then go to "call failed" after 5~ seconds. This is completely reproducible on my parents and roommates S0's even after a pair/unpair(which is to my understanding the closest you can get to a "restore")
I've also gotten this to completely lock up the watch at the 'call failed' screen a few times, too
- Messages scrolls stupidly so I am looking at two exchanges ago and can't see the most recent reply
- Timer alert is delayed ~10-20 seconds if you look at the screen as it hits 0
In the full app opening and closing the keyboard fixes it. I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it, and actually actively made it worse.
I wonder if that's something to do with timer coalescing. The visual timer ticks down in some "cheap" way, but to actually change the view and make a noise, it has an event set in the OS scheduler—and that event only goes off at some large granularity, to prevent the scheduler from burning energy.
I wonder why some of these are so ridiculously inconsistent
I’m not so married to my iPhone that I won’t investigate switching to something else.
And it's supposed to "just work" so there's no way to diagnose problems.
Details: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/80174 (it had something to do with the preboot iirc, note that this wasn't on the beta but the actual release)
Also many problems with apps using the Java.Framework, such as JetBrains IDEs having no menus.
Newly installed AudioUnits plugins would not load until after a reboot (which is minor compared to the above).
10.13.2 beta seems to have resolved all these issues. I've not had a single freeze since installing this beta.
Cold boot login took over a minute on a 2013 MBP that runs Sierra just fine. Something was clearly hanging 60-75% through login and crashing the display server. Function keys wouldn't work until after first login. Can't change screen brightness, keyboard backlight always off, etc.
Only posts on Apple support forums were useless. Yes, I've run a disk check. No, a reboot didn't magically fix it. I've always done a disk check post-upgrade because the updater always seems to misplace >1k blocks in the filesystem after upgrading. The >console user login didn't work at all. Safe Boot looked like a broken powerpoint, is that supposed to happen?
I have no idea what I'm going to do with this update. I'm lucky Time Machine didn't garble my backup sparsebundle, which happens about every six months.
No, I don't want to hard-type my letter "I" to be a letter "i." This is why I'm no longer on windows, and why I switched from blackberry to iOS so many years ago.
I want to pay extra money to save time configuring all the BS, so I can get on with my life, and achieve my goals faster.
I've had problems like chrome autofilling to an old address so a package gets delivered to the wrong location, or having to constantly edit text messages back to what I originally wrote because the program decided I was wrong.
When designing anything, if you think that you are doing someone a favor by doing work ahead of time please stop.
I completely disable autofill in the first place. As an added bonus, sites can't have hidden fields that get autofilled with my information either.
Second, I'd strongly argue it's your fault for not looking at what Chrome filled into the fields.
> if you think that you are doing someone a favor by doing work ahead of time please stop.
To be fair, they probably are doing some people a favor. I just think that things should be opt-in instead of opt-out though.
If things don't get opted into, then perhaps you should look to see why. Maybe people just don't know about it. Time to create some quick tutorials then.
A GUI that changes what you've typed into some field (especially when you're not looking) is a prime example of UI dark patterns and shitware.
chrome://settings/autofill
Can see validity in your other points, but I don't think this is always true. For example, I find it useful when looking up classical musicians on youtube to see what works they are most famous for playing
On the other hand, assuming know what the user "really" wants to do and doing that work ahead of time without asking first is arrogant and frustrating. If this also breaks existing behavior, it's also teaching people to treat your software as unreliable, possibly hostile, unpredictable toy they they should avoid when possible.
Tools need to be reliable, and that includes reliably following the user's orders.
And you think that is the right call for the majority of people?
Also, in addition to auto correcting words, your phone also auto corrects individual key presses based on the word you are typing. The same physical impact on your screen will register a different letter based on the letters that come before it.
So part of your “typing on glass accuracy” is dependent on a designer designing that feature that “does work ahead of time”.
No. Certainly not on a desktop, where I type much faster than any suggestion can appear (esp. infuriating on IDEs); usually not on a phone either, where "corrections", while sometimes faster than me, are always wrong.
But changing a word for another makes a sentence unintelligible and blocks or at least seriously slows down communication.
…On the other hand, my teenage younger sister has always used her phone with autocorrect disabled (just because she doesn't like the capitalization), and she types pretty quickly. Maybe it's just a matter of training yourself with autocorrect off, and eventually you can type accurately while keeping the same speed. But I'm not sure. There's no doubt that training would help, but can it make up the full difference, compared to a user well-trained with autocorrect on? (…And for that matter, if I care about speed so much, shouldn't I switch to a swipe-style keyboard? But that's a separate discussion.)
Anyway, the fundamental problem is that without the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard, it's much easier for your fingers to get misaligned, so the relative positions of the taps might be reasonably correct but the absolute positions are totally messed up. Even though you can see when you make a typo, humans have pretty high latency in responding to visual feedback, and you only get the feedback after the fact (whereas on a physical keyboard you can feel if you're in the wrong place before you've actually pressed down on the key). It seems more efficient to just type the whole word at once, and even if you were misaligned, most of the time autocorrect will figure out what you meant. (Especially if you keep going with the sentence, which can change previous words after they were seemingly finalized. I used to go one word at a time, stopping to correct any word that turned out wrong, but after I learned to trust autocorrect a bit more I realized that some of those corrections were unnecessary. This applies especially to the word "its", which autocorrect likes to change to "it's" but will often change back when appropriate.)
Actually, I make typos on physical keyboards too - which I'd like to think is just a side effect of being a fast typist, though I'm probably less accurate than most - but my impression is that those are more often timing rather than positioning related, and I can often tell they've happened by feel alone, letting me hit option-delete to redo the word immediately without waiting for visual feedback to go through my head...
It's reasonably fast, I don't have to aim for tiny boxes with my fat fingers and it takes care of accents when I type in french. The correction algorithm is also getting better (albeit still far from perfect); sometimes it'll correct the previous word based on what I enter next. If you want me to disable this you'll have to give me a full size keyboard as a replacement.
It seems to me, speed is only an issue for long texts, and why would people type long texts (or lots of small ones) on a phone? Can't that wait until they're in front of a proper computer?
> If you want me to disable this
I don't want you, or anyone, to do anything ;-)
I simply find it strange that people rely on autocorrect, and then send a second message immediately afterwards, to say correctly what autocorrect got wrong. It seems it would be faster, and better, to get it right the first time than the current sequence of "type, send, proofread, retype, resend".
Auto-correct mishaps happen (especially when using multiple languages at the same time) but are fairly rare. It's a trade-off, it makes the majority of my typing much quicker and accurate, but I have to be careful about a few things.
Edit: as a non-native speaker, I don't really make spelling mistakes in English, either I know a word or I don't, so that's not a reason for me to use auto-correct.
Would be nice to be able to have an escape word and spell the previous word by letters. Or get out into some control sequence :)
Maybe there should be an app for that!
Survivorship bias: You cannot see the (usually much larger) number of words that were correctly autocorrected.
[0] Believe me I wish it was. everyday.
1+2+3=24 if typed quickly into the calculator, even on the fastest hardware
They got rid of autoplay next episodes in podcasts, and make it take three taps to play next episode. That moron swerving during your commute Monday? That’d be one of millions of people trying to advance to the next episode.
They also eliminated “mark as [un]played” in podcasts.
Alerts show on the lock screen, but are missing from the alert list.
The keyboard in messaging is completely different than the keyboard in third party apps (and it doesn’t have feature parity with itself across third party apps either.
If I enable speech in maps, using my car bluetooth, it pauses audio and plays silence during the voice prompts. After bluetooth drops when I leave the car, it happily speaks directions into my pocket instead of realizing I arrived.
The battery meter and lifetime were FUBARed for a week after I upgraded.
Calendars randomly opens to a useless year overview screen, even though I only ever use the “today” screen.
(and so on...)
All of these issues are regressions introduced between 10 and 11, and I’m sure I’ll notice more issues over time.
(Also, performance is terrible on my old phone. Web pages and apps swap out constantly, which I never noticed before. It takes Siri so long to turn on the microphone that it’s better to open the app I want, and type the query. Maps take 15 seconds to open. Time to first picture is unacceptable, and I swear the quality of the pictures is lower too).
But even if the location is wrong, three-day-old data for the wrong location is even worse than fresh data for the wrong location.
Why bother with the stock apps at this point ? They have had 2 to 3 times better alternatives for years and years now, some even free with basically no barrier to switch.
I feel like beating on Apple apps is a bit like crying about Microsoft making IE shittier or Google making another chat app. Why not move on ?
There may be workarounds for every single issue, and as a techie I could do them, but I pay specifically not to have to spend time & energy on any of that.
There’s not really anywhere to “move on” to, since Android is still [edit: also] a tire fire, and I don’t trust google (or anything ad supported) with my data.
The small players like Win Phone have thrown in the towel, or have unproven track records (to put it politely).
edit: Also, if I move to third party everything (even Siri is useless now), then it will break the cross-integration that I’ve gotten used to, like finding calendar invites in emails, or having the lock screen tell me the right route home and eta during rush hour.
Seriously, why did they think this was a good idea??
> They also eliminated “mark as [un]played” in podcasts.
I totally forgot about that too.
What a terrible update Podcasts was.
It's one of the 'tock' releases where they focus on under-the-hood improvements rather than messing with the UI. Those are the good ones!
Snow Leopard was a superior OS in every way, from my perspective. The only reason I upgraded was the increasing number of apps that required newer versions for no good reason.
Same with 11.1 and the 10.
This one is super widespread. I don't believe I had anybody text it to me before it showed up for me. Over-the-air model update perhaps? Could have been a virus-spreading situation but it seems like something else.
This is true love!
Antennagate. iBook solder fails. Bendgate. Apple Maps (for which Forstall famously apologized). Touch disease. Various Crackgate(s). MobileMe. Slowgate(s). Batterygate. Wi-Fi Assist eating excessive mobile data. Locationgate. Staingate. iTunes. The Mac Pro debacle. Keyboardgate.
When it comes to Apple, waiting for the .1 or .2 update (or the "refresh" release of a major hardware revision) has never been a bad idea.
This also leaves out the second gen white macbook issues with the bottoms falling off and failed motherboards, and so many other things. Although i could definitely dredge up more G3-G4 era stuff that wasn't mentioned(tons of tibook issues, other ibook g3/g4 issues not mentioned, failing imac g3 power supplies/displays in huge batches, imac GPU failures in the first few c2d generations, core duo imac display failures, etc)
I remember there being huge online discussions about these issues. A number of them generated tons of pissed off people online, and apple was resistant to fixing a lot of them at first or would only do it on a case by case basis until it became overwhelming.
Also, typing out this comment on my iPhone and autocorrect is exhibiting the exact behavior in the link... :-/
Seriously. Even though that was super laggy, it had less issues and i never had to hard reboot my phone. At least you could press the home button and bail on things.
It appears that somehow a rogue Unicode character gets in the dictionary, and it looks just like a capital I. It even shows up as an emoji in the recently used section!
[1] https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/downgrade-ios-11-back-ios...
[2] My Windows computers at work and Windows Phone let you downgrade lol.
No Korean I know keeps Autocorrect turned on because of this, so I think iOS never learns which words are used frequently when, and never improves.
I have had autocorrect off on iOS for years because I cannot disable autocorrect by language/keyboard.
Similarly, Samsung has had a lot of traction getting into the Japanese market, and their autocorrect for Japanese is god awful.
Someone at Google should really be embarrassed that this got out into the public's hands.
e.g. The dog and its...
DWIM ("Do What I Mean") is another example of how somme people fundamentally se computers as "magic". Trying to guess your intention from a few typed words was a terrible way to handle typos and spelling errors when Warren Teitelman tried it at Xerox PARC[1] over 50 years ago, and it's still a terrible idea for the same reasons.
From[2]:
> In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed
delete *$
*$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Electricity
Electricity
The use of “electric” in Emacs is based upon alternative uses of the English word that have evolved over time, at least in the U.S. These are derived from personal experiences with using electricity. For example, a U.S. English dictionary lists both “electrifying” and “thrilling” as definitions for “electric”. Typical usage might be: “The lion act at the circus was electric. I sat on the edge of my seat the entire time!” So, when someone describes a mode or a function in Emacs as “electric”, they are claiming you will be thrilled or electrified by some of its features.
Electric modes tend to do some things “automagically” and/or very cleverly for the user. The electric features are typically continuously active while the MajorMode is active, taking control of things, monitoring and reacting to every input the user makes. Often, electric modes and functions require fewer keystrokes from the user to navigate and to enter data. Sometimes the behavior is “cool”, “clever”, “seems like magic”, and/or is “just really convenient”. You may or may not like what an electric mode or an electric function does while it is active but, whatever it does, it shouldn’t be routine. It should deliver some sort of “Gee Wiz!” behavior.
Examples include certain printing characters in CcMode which after being inserted also indent the current line and/or insert a newline, the ElectricBufferList, and ElectricPair.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/El...
26.12.2 Electric C Characters
In C mode and related modes, certain printing characters are electric—in addition to inserting themselves, they also reindent the current line, and optionally also insert newlines. The electric characters are {, }, :, #, ;, ,, <, >, /, *, (, and ).
People do like to exaggerate simple problems.
Computers need a sort of general 'debugger', you should be able to click on something and ask the computer why it did that, or what is this (a bit like web pages have 'inspect') ... so you could click on the unicode quote and ask "What is this? Why is it here? How do I change it?"
(cue yesterday's article about command line interfaces and reification, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619796 )
Not so sure - anyone who’s ever copied and pasted from an arbitrary WordPress blog that adds smart quotes to code snippets, for example, will have encountered this.
There’s a number of good code editing app on the platform (which won’t be affected by this), and otherwise I think it happens to most of us to just open a text editor and type a snippet we send to someone or run in JS or on a terminal.
In all seriousness—they look better, can be nested without escaping, and provide redundancy that makes for better error messages in the event of a runaway string literal. What’s not to love?
The problem is for my locale (danish) "i" (in) and "I"(plural you) are two different words and autocorrect should have some idea about when to capitalize and not.
> Hva skal du i dag? What did I say?
Since they work on one iOS for all devices, they had much less attention for bug fixes and stabilization, and they have a 1 year limit because of the new device cycle.
This update model sucks, because when there are big hardware changes, the software is less mature even for older devices, and they don't back port security issues, so you have no choice but to update...
The ridiculous thing is they do this with the ipad, and they've even done it with the phones in the past for certain versions
(Critics of Interlisp, particularly those who were proponents of MacLisp, often commented, rightly or wrongly, that DWIM seemed to be tuned to the particular typing mistakes to which Teitelman was prone, and no others. These critics were given to lampooning DWIM with such expansions as “Do What Teitelman Means” or “Do What Interlisp Means.” “Let the system automatically ‘correct’ programs? I take a very DWIM view of that, sir!” MacLisp proponents would remark that MacLisp used DDWIDM: “Don’t Do What I Didn’t Mean.”)
https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+forstall+apple+maps
---
Okay, so he was fired for refusing to sign the Apple Maps Apology in 2012. Then he was transferred to a paid board seat (aka "benched"). How much control did he have personally compared to all the others?
Using maps with verbal directions, Siri cannot pronounce 'onto' correctly. It comes out 'ont'. As "Continue on I-280 ont I-680". What would cause 'oo' in 'onto' to cut out, every time? I know what she means of course, but every time it happens, I just think 'wtf'.
What else can go wrong in this release ?
Keyboards are not necessary when we can speak to Sara.
Surely the platform supersedes Androad.
(A see what you dad there)