Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Apple's products are getting harder to use, ignore principles of design (2015)

jnd.org

535 pointssogen500 comments

The iPad was my gateway into the Apple orchard. I had never purchased an Apple product until about a decade ago, when I got the first Retina iPad as a gift for someone who didn’t use computers. I was so impressed by how intuitive the device and OS was for them, that I installed macOS in a VM on Windows to try iOS development. I fell in love with macOS (back during Lion) shortly before getting my first MacBook and leaving Windows forever behind, never to return.

Fast forward to a month ago. I purchased one of the newer low-end iPads as another gift for someone else who didn’t use computers.

It was depressing.

The setup process was kinda annoying. No, we don’t want Apple Pay, thank you. I had to enter the Apple/iCloud account credentials multiple times at different points before it stopped asking me to sign in again.

There were a lot of bugs in the system UI and the preinstalled apps.

I had to disable the multitasking gestures because they would be confusing for a new user.

They have removed labels for the Dock icons with no way to restore them, so I had to keep apps with less obvious icons out of the Dock, so they could have labels. Because a flower for photos is not a connection that many people can intuitively make.

I had to explain that dragging down from the right corner of the top edge brings up the brightness control.

Dragging down from anywhere else on the top edge brings up the notifications.

Dragging down on a blank part of the home screen’s background, away from edges, brings up the search bar.

Fuck.

Oh, you want to updates your apps? That's easy. Open up the App Store and then click on your profile picture.

Wait, what?

Wow, that's seriously dysfunctional. I get that Apple doesn't do UX testing but maybe they could do some UX testing?

Getting at least one user's opinion about a redesign might have nipped some of this in the bud

Yeah I think exactly one would be enough lol

THIS right there is what seems to be the core issue at Apple these days:

It doesn't feel like they have anyone who uses their own products anymore (dogfooding.)

The one thing about Steve Jobs was that he was a user like us, sharing most of the same annoyances and frustrations and in a position to make the engineers do something about them.

on the contrary, to me it feels like they have people who only use the latest product, and know it 100%. So when something new comes along, nobody is confused.

Just all of us who don't live at apple 24/7.

You got that right! I'm all for dogfooding, but at some point, it can turn into kool-aiding, if you don't take a look at how people out on the street are actually using your products (or trying to.)

The following, classic comic speaks more to Windows-style UI pathologies, but it seems appropriate here as well:

http://okcancel.com/comic/4.html

The inclusion of the Arcade tab on the App Store has pushed this change. I'm guessing that Apple feels like most people don't really update apps manually and just do an auto-update.

Presumably they have real stats not just guesses, but still, seems like a dumb place to move it to without any indication/affordance.

They could put an Update Applications pane in the Settings application - like next to the Software Update pane...

It makes way more sense when you have multiple profiles with a different set of apps for each of them.

I feel that this is a dark-pattern to force users to enable automatics updates.

They just needed the space previously occupied by "Updates" to promote their "Arcade"

Clearly, the solution would be to place Arcade under Profile. Easily accessible!

iOS 13 defaults to automatic app updates. How in the world is that a "dark pattern"? I get that people got accustomed to manual updates [1], and some illusion that this gave them some control, but from a rational evaluation it makes no sense.

[1] - I remember when Google first added enabled automatic app updates and one of the most common retorts, including on here, was "can you say bricked" and similar nonsense.

iOS updates apps automatically; system updates still require explicit user approval. I think it 's a decent trade-off, given that the options are "don't update", "update now", and a default of "update overnight, when/if the device is plugged in".

More stuff should allow for the latter option.

Hold the App Store icon until a menu appears. Choose "Updates" and done.

I'm not defending Apple here. I only accidentally discovered this shortcut. I feel that designers these days expect users to explore a lot of things out of blind faith in order to discover functionality.

only works if you know where your app store icon is. i dont use the icons from the launcher screens anymore, everything goes in one folder bar the 'sticky apps'

find it much faster to just pull down and search for apps

On the Iphone it works when long pressing in the search results too. (iOS 13.3)

Am curious what you mean by the 'sticky apps'.

Thanks for the tip. I always forget how to do it the couple times I've updated.

Somehow we've unlearned all those lessons about styling links to look like text and making users play Minesweeper on the screen

Haha I have for the past few months wondered where the "update" list had gone in the new App Store. Thanks for the help :) That is of course the most natural place to put that information - said no one ever.

“Upcoming Automatic Upgrades > 82”

Something must be going wrong here. It doesn’t appear the ‘automatic’ part of that is working :P

Yeah I've been having that issue.

Along with the email inbox bug they claim to have fixed but is still very much live and well on my iPhone 7 Plus.

A constant barrage of application update notifications, and the process of doing the same, was an unnecessary chore that led to update fatigue. Apple moved to defaulting to automatic updates, removed the various signals and notifications about updates pending, and now the average person just has updated apps within a reasonable window of consideration.

e.g. This was definitely a change for the better. They're pushing something that shouldn't be first class into the background, in the same way that you don't manage memory or decide which apps in the background to close.

Google and Netflix are horrible for this.

Want to switch which user account you're using? No problem, simply find the picture of the current user account that you definitely don't want to use, and click on it.

Clicking your user account picture to access actions related to your user account (such as, change account, logout, change this picture etc) actually seems pretty intuitive. Where would you expect to find this functionality instead?

I was expecting to find it there, but older people who I've walked through these interfaces would expect it to be under something like "settings" or "switch account" rather than "this account".

Also, it's really a stretch to say that an action related to account x is "switch to account y."

If N updates are available, they put a red badge with an N in it on top of the profile picture, the App Store icon, and if you have moved the App Store icon to a folder on top of that folder.

Yea this is awkward. It will then often show you a “partial” list of the available updates so you might have to swipe down a couple times to see the full list.

I also know the long press shortcut to get to updates, but often forget that. As well as the copy/paste swipe gestures.

As someone who does product design for a living and has used an iPad for almost 10 years now, I still get so confused with the Slide Over multitasking. There's no discoverability at all for this. You have to read the manual and memorize the gestures. Absolutely mind-blowing that they've made something this confusing.

I know when people say "it's like they don't even use their products" it is usually hyperbolic, but I don't know how they can explain the seemingly random continual prompting of Apple/iCloud login on OS X I see a few times a year.

It's a nightmare as well if you're trying to multitask an app that isn't in your dock. Often I'll have to do this dance of tap home, open the app I want on the side, it opens full screen switch back to that app and then drag it GENTLY to the place I want.

You used to be able to start dragging an icon from the home screen, use your other hand to open another app, then drop the dragged app over it to start split screen, but they nerfed it in iOS 13 for some reason. Completely undiscoverable of course, but at least it sped things up slightly. Having to open the second app full screen and then drag the other out of the dock's "recent" segment is just so clunky.

You can also drag an icon out of the search UI when you're in another app, but only if you have a keyboard attached, because other than Cmd+Space there's no longer a way to access Spotlight without going back to the home screen.

Absolutely bonkers.

Even this way to open second app from the Spotlight start working only on the iPadOS 13.2.3. It was completely broken in previous releases as bad as dragging apps from the folders in the Dock.

I assume they all have their cards info entered in the settings, however my debit card got stolen and I'm stuck with a temp card so I have decided to avoid this. I keep getting prompted to finish setting up my iphone. Sorry, but linking my card isn't part of setting up an iphone please leave me alone.

Or that bug with Mac Keyboard Shortcuts[1]. I don't know how to explain something like that other than, no one working at Apple right now actually uses the custom keyboard shortcuts feature.

[1]https://eclecticlight.co/2019/03/03/last-week-on-my-mac-keyb...

Honestly, The way I see a lot of things, e.g, control Center, etc is layered complexity. The simplest most consistent way to change all of this is in settings, if you want a shortcut, then use control Center, etc.

I fully agree, there is a steady decline in usability and its a bloody shame because for years the usability is what set Apple apart from the others.

A few things which hugely annoy me;

- Saving a photo from iMessage.... the option has disappeared. I get a popup to airdrop the file, interact with some apps and a huge copy button. In fact, I can scroll down in this menu but there is not a single visual indicator that I can scroll. No scroll bar, no icon... nothing. I've had to read somewhere online that I could scroll there, and I work in IT. How is this usable for people who don't work in IT.

- After updates I'm frequently asked to provide my Apple ID password, and yet iOS doesn't allow me to interact with Password Managers at this moment. I've got a 36 random character password, and it is a pain in the ass to enter this.

- 3D touch has been removed in newer iPhones. Fine, but why cripple older phones which still have the hardware to use 3D touch... Now it takes me an extra action to re-arrange my icons.

Idk about everything else but I just tried to save a photo from iMessage and it is literally the second option (Save). Tried on my Mac and phone, no problems at all.

Edit: nvm I think this is an issue on ios13. Definitely weird design choice, wonder what is the story behind this decision.

Yeah, it's an iOS 13 issue. Illustrated here: https://imgur.com/a/giqdiAR

First screenshot: "Wait, why is 'copy' the only option?"

Second screenshot: What shows if you scroll past "copy", for which there's no visual indication showing that's even possible.

There's no rational reason for "copy" and all the other options to be visually separated, either. They could've been obviously part of one continuous set of options and it'd be a lot clearer to people.

#3: just hold and drag immediately. This is how d&d works anywhere in the system. No need for a special action.

One caveat is that you have to drag away from the context menu.

The lack of a visual scroll indicator is a problem with the Apple Music app too.

'Repeat' and 'next up' are below the play/pause button. But the spacing makes it look like there's no possibility to scroll!

Not any longer -- now they're tucked into an "unordered list" icon to the bottom-right of the play button, in a row with buttons to toggle display of lyrics and to select the output.

> "Saving a photo from iMessage"

I feel like I see the root of this problem everywhere in "card"-based UIs. The share button opens a "card" on top and you can move the card up in the view. There should definitely be some consideration for how to represent that there's more "card" outside of your screen.

The simple solution is to design the card so that, at all display layouts, the last visible item is cut off -- it goes a long way toward saying "there's more in this list".

The new share sheet in iOS/iPadOS 13 is not great -- the two rows of horizontal scrolls (one for contacts, the other for apps) was much more discoverable.

Or, you know, a simple scrollbar always worked

I believe we came up with something for this in the 70s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrollbar

If you don't click on the image in the 'message view', but instead click and hold you can select save from there.

I'm the opposite, I didn't even try to click on the image and save from the screen that appears.

And 3D Touch on the virtual keyboard, which used to turn it into a trackpad with which you could move the text cursor freely and 3D Touch again to select text has been replaced with "Haptic Touch" which lets you long-touch the space bar to move the cursor but offers no way to select text so you have to revert to the old "touch the word you want to edit" UI.

Aand I just learned that long-touching the spacebar was a thing. Seems like something that should be more obvious from the design.

Now the trackpad is enabled by using two fingers on the keybard. To select, you can long-touch where you want the selection to start, and select more by using this trackpad gesture.

At least that's how it works on my iPad Air 2, which is a bit outdated, but has the latest iOS.

1Password works natively with iOS... In the standard iOS keyboard when you are in a password field, click on the key icon that pops up and you can select to fill the password from 1pass.

Not for system dialog boxes, like signing into the App Store. I know exactly what he's talking about.

Must be brand new, since I just set up an iPhone 7+ on the latest OS and I got a password autofill suggesting from Firefox Lockwise on the system Apple ID prompt (not during the setup flow, it was an alert dialog from Settings, if I'm remembering correctly).

> Saving a photo from iMessage....

I hate that apple doesn't let you export your iMessage history.

It's self serving on many levels.

Too soon to say never

I never really agreed with many of the core fundamentals of Windows/Microsoft, before I had even discovered Macs as an alternative.

Like the whole need for installers/uninstallers, worrying about drivers, separate menu bars for each window, and so on.

Some of those things will never change as long as Windows remains Windows.

"I had to enter the Apple/iCloud account credentials multiple times at different points before it stopped asking me to sign in again"

Yes! What on earth is this for? My girlfriend picked up an iPhone after a series of awful Android phones and it's still sitting on her desk in a half-setup state a few days later because she got frustrated inputting her iCloud credentials constantly for god-knows-what and dismissing unhelpful help messages. Next she's gonna ask me how to migrate her pictures to the new phone and I've no idea what to tell her ...

> Yes! What on earth is this for?

I would presume that it's an overreaction to cover their asses if users get "hacked", and also a more aggressive DRM authentication to keep making sure you paid for all those apps/books/songs/shows.

So there are additional layers of security which I appreciate. But this is different - the iCloud login prompt repeatedly pops up every now and again. Sometimes after an action, sometimes on its own. I had it before on my iPhone 6S when I upgraded iOS at some point ... then it randomly stopped.

I think that is a problem with session management across multiple backend systems that are not updated quickly enough when you are first setting up. Each one thinks that it is the first time you have authenticated.

What makes all this stuff even worse is if you want to ask a question and, naturally, end up asking it on one of the numerous web-based "communities", including Apple's.

It's like being dropped into a dungeon where helpless people are endlessly flailing about trying find an answer so they can escape and instead being told useless, out-of-date, or crazy information by other clueless users.

Oh man, wait till you try to develop for the latest Apple platforms.

But see they have to do it this way, because labels and easy-to-understand icons are skeuomorphic.

> Because a flower for photos is not a connection that many people can intuitively make

This icon only makes sense if you used earlier versions of iOS where the icon was an actual photo of a flower. Objectively bad design.

What makes it 10x worse for me is that the desktop Slack app icon looks 90% identical.

The Photos app icon is a blurred version of the Slack app icon. Ugh.

Edit: put them next to each other and took a screenshot to underline my post above: https://imgur.com/jPFJMx4

I think the core problem is that every manmade tool eventually has to choose 2 of the 3:

• Be intuitive for new users

• Have features for power users

• Sane number of customization options

Like the dock labels issue. I personally don't need or want labels in the Dock. But there should be an option to enable dock labels for people who are not familiar with all the icons.

In fact I would like to hide the labels for ALL icons on the Home Screen, with a tap-and-hold to show them temporarily, like the mouse hover on the Mac Dock.

Now you need 2 more options to satisfy everyone.

And then you need to keep the Settings app from becoming too cluttered or intimidating.

So I believe the cornerstone of all good design is a good settings/preferences system, that is easy to navigate, discover, search and filter. And to selectively restore defaults when you fuck shit up.

Two separate points:

1. You can largely escape the trifecta by hiding advanced customization options inside of the Terminal, where they're 100% invisible to anyone who isn't explicitly searching for them.

2. For a long time, Apple's way around the problem was to have different platforms for different markets. The iPad was a simple computing platform for very casual users, and the Mac was the more capable option for more advanced users. For some reason, Apple has now decided that their simple platform needs to be as capable as the more advanced platform.

> You can largely escape the trifecta by hiding advanced customization options inside of the Terminal, where they're 100% invisible to anyone who isn't explicitly searching for them.

Which of course makes them completely undiscoverable, too.

The Terminal/NSUserDefaults system is useless for navigation and discoverability of optional settings.

How would I see all the options available for an app? We're back to googling and peer support.

> For some reason, Apple has now decided that their simple platform needs to be as capable as the more advanced platform.

Because they were getting crap for it.

> We're back to googling and peer support.

Googling and peer support is much more acceptable for advanced actions than simple actions.

If I need to Google how to disable labels in the dock, that's probably ok. If I need to Google how to turn down the brightness of the iPad...that's not great.

Yes, exactly.

An interface can only ever have a finite number of discoverable actions. So choose what actions are core functionality, and make those discoverable. Hide what's left.

I absolutely disagree.

Nova Launcher is an example of a pretty good piece of software that fulfills all 3 requirements in my mind (it's a 3rd party launcher, or desktop, for Android). It's what I use personally so it fits my power user and ricing needs, but it's also what I set up for less computer literate relatives.

It has every option one could want, but they are organised sanely and are kept separate from the basic interface. I don't see why this is difficult.

As a power user you could easily set up your click and hold labels with KWGT or KLWP. Having this option available doesn't make the phone worse to use for normal users. All hail the android ecosystem!

For all the mocking apple did to Microsoft a decade ago for the cancel or allow? Fiasco... this las MacOS operating system feels exactly the same: every time some app is trying to do something useful with the computer I get 2 accept? prompts for the same thing opening a file? Access prompt. Turning on camera ? access prompt. Saving file? Access prompt.

It is super annoying.

> I had to enter the Apple/iCloud account credentials multiple times at different points before it stopped asking me to sign in again

They really need an option to tell it "Yes, I have an Apple/iCloud ID that I want to use with this device, and I can even tell you that ID now, but my password is a strong password in my password manager and I really do not want to try to type it right now...so how about we just finish setting things up without it, and then as soon as I get my password manager installed I can get that password for you?"

It should then finish setup without further Apple/iCloud ID prompts, deferring setting up things that need it.

Furthermore, it should but on icon on the front page named "Finish Setup" or something like that which kicks off finishing setup of everything that needs your Apple/iCloud password.

> Furthermore, it should but on icon on the front page named "Finish Setup" or something like that which kicks off finishing setup of everything that needs your Apple/iCloud password.

They do have that, but it may ask you to sign-in again when you download apps, books, music etc. or sometimes seemingly at random.

My most-hated thing is bringing up the brightness controls. Not intuitive, and isn't explained when you first set up the iPad. Sometimes it even takes me several attempts because I'm not close enough to the corner I guess.

> I had to enter the Apple/iCloud account credentials multiple times at different points before it stopped asking me to sign in again.

dear god yes. I stopped using my ipad because of this, and I would never purchase another one.

Apple Integration is still top notch, but I agree 100% about their UI. I don't run mac, but I've been an ipad/iphone user for many years and it's definitely gone downhill. I disabled automatic updates and live in fear every time there's a new major version.

Thanks for posting this. I completely agree, and I think that “put this in front of someone who doesn’t have prior experience of this device” is an acid test for design.

The other replies frustrate me as much as Apple’s design direction, in that they “get it” even less than Apple.

Bad design is not that I can’t figure out how to copy an image from mail. That’s annoying, that could be better, but you’re not even seeing the wood for the trees at that point - it’s the fundamental concepts of design that escape most people.

Like, what do these rows of icons even mean? What do they do? Why is it that tapping on them opens a window with their name in? Is that the right design? What does your user actually want to do, how are you guiding them?

There’s this conceptual clarity to design, and when you see it you shout “yes!” And when it’s absent you mumble a lot, and most nerds cannot even recognise those two modes, let alone approach devising the concepts that underly the clarity. The dead giveaways are the minor pedantic points vs how the entire paradigm is designed.

Android, for example, has this home screen versus the app grid, and it’s not clear why that exists. It seems like a hangover from desktops - here’s my “desktop display” and here’s my “app bank” and no designer would ever think of inventing that paradigm if they were truly reimagining how a omnitool should work. A mobile device isn’t “computing in your pocket”, it’s “a tool that allows you to do things that can change its face and use a network” and you go from there.

This is what Apple get and others don’t, but that should really be past tense as Apple have completely forgotten the thoughtful and deliberate design they’ve always made. Hold and press an icon and you can “share app”, you waaat, like how is that even a feature. Imagine you’re using a penknife and you can “share blade” or you can “share this channel” on a TV. You just totally don’t get it at that point, you’re not designing for the user at that point (cue comments of “yes, I love sharing apps that way” from the 0.0001%).

Despite their nosedive, Apple devices are still the best, and it just feels like we’re waiting for them to get so bad that Android is a cheaper version of awful, and no other company is coming to save us. Someone, for the love of god, start an electronics company that is dominated by a small team of great designers.

Will it help? These days, you either open the design as IBM famously did with their 5150 or earn enough to see yourself become Apple, the great hegemonist. (I'm clearly and biasedly on PC's side, so you may ignore my ranting)

I never owned an iOS device personally and when I offered my help to an older relative who wanted to bookmark a page on their home screen, it took me like 10 minutes to find out that I have to scroll horizontally on that Safari share menu. Due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut off icons to the right, I had no idea that scrolling horizontally was possible.

This gets worse whenever I see new Apple keynotes about their latest iPad gestures for multitasking or text editing. On the computer I have visible menus where I can peek the shortcut for each action but is there anything like that on i(Pad)OS? Just adding more and more gestures without giving the user some intuitive hints/signifiers seems like a degradation of usability. The scrollbar tells me that there is more to show and auto-hiding it was a first step into the wrong direction.

I am glad that Android got rid of the dedicated menu button which only worked in very special places without showing any on-screen indication for its availability and I feel like the Option key on Macs is still hiding important things from their users.

The now deprecated(?) 3D Touch on iPhones also seems to suffer from this issue. I was expecting some sort of visual clues to the user (like differently colored buttons) that certain elements offered special actions with a harder press but instead the 3D Touch-enabled elements continued to look the same and mostly the tech-savvy users kept up with where this feature was enabled and where not.

> Due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut off icons to the right, I had no idea that scrolling horizontally was possible.

This appears to be fixed on iOS 13. Actions are now arranged vertically. The app bar above the actions still scrolls horizontally but it now hints at that by cutting off icons.

Now due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut-off list items to the bottom, people have no idea that scrolling vertically is possible

https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/

But at least we've rotated the problem by 90 degrees :P

Oh I see. Didn’t occur to me because I discovered the list by coincidence. Apple indeed overdid it with all that minimalism.

Man, that was an infuriating read

Yes, and since there are so few varieties of screen size, having it cut off perfectly with no ugly hints (scrollbar, cut-off icon, or even off-centered item) is no accident and shows much higher they prioritize better-looking over more-useful.

When I got my first iPhone, my first touch screen device, I noticed their beautiful little slider switches for all the settings. They didn't work very reliably, though. I would use the touch interface to drag the slider, and it sometimes worked but often failed. Well, touch screens aren't perfect, right?

Until someone eventually saw me doing it and said, "You can't drag it, you have to just tap it." It turns out to be just a checkbox. A real slider switch has to be dragged and won't work if tapped, and an on-screen checkbox is the reverse, and they decided to use an image of the former as their standard implementation of the latter on a touch screen. Someone at the very top very deliberately decided that was what they wanted most.

UISwitches can be dragged by design. Prior to iOS 7, when dragged they followed the position of your finger directly, like physical switches. Post-iOS 7, they only animate after your finger has moved past a threshold, but the toggle graphic expands when held to indicate that it is still draggable.

It seems to be pretty pervasive everywhere. I'm a longtime iOS user, but have been helping my mom with some stuff on her Android phone. Most of the things I have been helping her with involve me working in the phone settings or Google apps. I've found them very confusing to navigate, and there's little clue as to what should be clicked on. It took me a while to realize that what I was looking at wasn't a list of feature names with their description under them, but the place I should click to make changes to the features. It was all just black text on a white background. How did someone think that was a good idea?

As a long time Android user, I really like that on Apple you can go to Settings app and have a list of settings for all installed applications. Settings on Android can be confusing, especially when it comes to things like the "Google" app.

This is a great idea, but so often it’s just one of multiple locations where app settings are located.

This is true, for some crazy attempts at 'minimalism' companies will hide all settings in the OS settings app settings directory, which involves sorting through a very long list of apps and other menus to find it.

The amount of designers who abuse minimalism because they misunderstand Apple's industrial design and other great design companies, because they only have a surface level grasp of Human Computer Interaction and the wider UX of accomplishing tasks, really bothers me.

It's a menu. The items in a menu don't usually look like buttons on any platform.

And I happen to like the gray text underneath the setting name that tells you the current value of the setting. It makes it clearer what the setting does, and saves you a tap if it's already set how to want it.

I was so confused and panicked once I accidentally overwrote some text from an important note on an iPhone.

For a few minutes I desperately searched for any menus, long presses, weird nearly hidden menus, finger gestures etc. but couldn't discover anything. Apparently there was no way to undo!

After some googling I found out you have to shake the phone a few times. Seriously?

I think there must be a lot of people who simply lost their notes due to a small mistake.

I once shook my phone because I was annoyed by autocorrect repeatedly messing up. The shaking undid more than half the text I had written. I couldn't find a way to redo.

"I'll show him to shake me..."

I know this is HN and not Reddit. But this made me lol.

I tried it and got an “Undo Typing” confirmation. Did you?

You get that and then accepting it deletes a large portion of the text.

That's what Undo Typing does...

He's complaining that Undo is overly agressive, given that there's no (obvious) redo function.

Just shake it backwards of course.

Huh? It usually pops up a message asking if you want to undo, which you need to tap. I'm pretty darn sure this is how the feature has worked since it was introduced.

Probably, but you do not necessarily expect half your text to disappear when you click accept right?

When a message pops up asking me if I want to undo my typing and I click yes, I do in fact expect the text I typed to disappear.

He's complaining that Undo is overly agressive, given that there's no (obvious) redo function.

That's not the question that was asked.

The question that was asked was obviously hyperbolic as the undo function doesn’t just delete half of what you typed.

You are right. I hadn't used this in a long time. Did it always pop up the dialog? I could have sworn it didn't.

As I said, I'm pretty darn sure it has always popped up a dialog. Certainly, the dialog has existed for a very long time, I recall seeing it on my first gen iPad, when I was in High School. (I graduated college three years ago.)

Shake once more, it'll offer to redo.

The gesture is now a two-finger swipe back. For some reason Apple couldn’t be bothered to add an “undo” to the cursor dialogue though.

Thanks for the two-finger tip, just lost a whole block of text in slack ;)

Slack has the worst text editor under iOS 13. I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated by the keyboard disappearing when I want to select and copy or paste text... If the keyboard stayed open like in every other sensible app, I wouldn't have such frustrations editing text, but leaving text edit mode, Apple makes it impossible to edit text with touch at that point...

I think it's a three-finger swipe, isn't it? Though while trying it out, I did discover that a three-finger tap now shows another menu that makes undo/redo a little easier.

ah, you’re correct!

And so this thread has highlighted the issue nicely

OMG! Thanks!

Let's not pretend this is a matter of how Apple "couldn't be bothered". Everything like this is an affirmative choice. All such choices (or their alternatives, like what is being asked for here) have both costs and benefits.

How do we really know this was a deliberate choice? There isn't enough information to discard the "Apple couldn't be bothered" hypothesis in this instance.

Starting with iOS 13, it’s a three finger left swipe. To redo, it’s a three finger right swipe.

Did you google on a separate device or was it able to preserve the undo stack even through app switching etc?

Yeah, luckily I had also an Android flagship device with me. Didn't indeed dare to switch apps at that point!

Android is even worse in this regard. There really is no way to undo changes in text fields! I'm generally a happy android user, but I find it absolutely infuriating that this hasn't been implemented. Text editing on phones is fiddly, and I've lost quite a few comments/messages due to this issue.

I have one of the few Android phones with a physical keyboard and I have the dollar sign key mapped to ctrl. I was pleased to discover ctrl-z works the way it should. This doesn't help the vast majority of users, I know, but it's one more thing I love about having a physical keyboard on my phone.

Oh nice! Mine has left-shift and right-shift, I mapped right-shift to ctrl long ago (so I can use screen when ssh'ing from my phone) but never thought to try - undo (and redo, ctrl+y) both work here too.

> I have one of the few Android phones with a physical keyboard

What phone? Do you recommend it?

BlackBerry KeyOne or Key2. I have the KeyOne and would recommend the Key2. Typing is not any faster than on glass, but it's purposeful and generally error-free, which is a much better experience in my opinion. Also, you don't need to look at the keys.

Not having to stare at the screen to type is such a huge thing for me, also I've completely disabled auto-correct.

I'm really sad that it feels like we're dwindling down on physical keyboard phones.

It must be a KeyTwo - Currency as control key isn't an available option on my KeyOne. Agreed about error-free typing, as well as it's usefulness for SSH.

I use right shift as the Control key on my KeyOne. The Key2 has the quick-switch key in place of right shift, so the extra options were moved to the currency key.

Sorry for missing this, but as other commenters noted, I'm using the Key2.

I can't recommend it for everyone, but since you're reading HN here's the hacker pros/cons:

Pros:

* Every physical alphabet key can be mapped to two app/action shortcuts (long press/short press)

* Good construction, satisfying to use

* Great battery life

* Great security and permissions management

* Unlocked version is more or less bloatware-free (bundled BlackBerry software is there but is either useful or easy to disable/ignore)

Cons:

* Due to hardening, not all apps are available (I do miss Ruboto)

* Due to hardening, root is not currently possible (I'd like to root my device but I appreciate the security of BB-hardened Android)

* Camera isn't up to iPhone standards (I don't care as much about this and find it kinda nifty that the camera app allows fine control over shutter speed, etc even though I rarely take photos)

* Some of the BlackBerry-specific features are pretty poorly documented (there's a hover gesture that's only available while the phone is charging which shows the charge level as a line extending around the edge of the screen. It's difficult to Google and not very useful, but I got it disabled.)

All in all, I'm happier with it than I've been with a phone in a long time. It's got two SIM slots if you care about that kind of thing. It hits a particular sweet spot for me. Ymmv.

> What phone? Do you recommend it?

I have a Cosmo Communicator. No comment yet on recommendation (or not). F(x)tec is another one.

No need for a physical keyboard -- if you have Hacker's Keyboard installed it comes with a Ctrl key, and Ctrl-Z works as expected.

The Klaus Weidener Hacker's Keyboard?

I'm not the parent, but yes. It's basically the keyboard if you want to ssh or run a Linux distro in userspace.

flow typing wasn't possible last time I used it, however.

This is the main reason why I use Hacker's Keyboard[0] when writing notes, because it has a full on functional keyboard with all modifier keys. Especially CTRL-Z and Arrows keys.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...

And when you shake it, in russian language it asks “Don’t apply typing of text” with buttons “Don’t apply” and “Cancel”. Years before its title was “Don’t apply (Input)” with same buttons.

Maybe because in russian Undo == Cancel and they had no courage to make it “Undo”: “Yes” - “No”.

Apple think if people panic they will shake they phone. Really clever

To be fair, many people don't really know how to multitask on Windows or Mac OS (alt-tab, cmd-tab, etc.) either. It's not like the buttons have icons or anything on-screen to emphasize the key combo can be used to multitask.

Not trying to defend Apple, but really just that interfaces in general haven't always been perfect and still have issues, not just one (mobile) platform.

People can still multitask using mouse only. It’s ok to have a hidden fast interface if you have a discoverable slow interface.

Sure, and you can do the same on your iPad by going through the home screen.

But you will never learn how to use the most important features of iPad OS without knowing the split screen gestures.

Using the mouse to switch to a given program in the take bar isn't necessarily slow. It's actually faster if you have a decent number if windows open; clicking on exactly the right one straight away is faster than repeatedly pressing Alt-Tab and seeing if the new window brought to the foreground was the right one.

Im sure you know this but in Windows 10 if you hold down Alt after hitting Tab the first time it’ll display which windows you already have open, and hitting just Tab again will cycle though them. You can even hold down Shift as well to cycle through the list of icons but in reverse.

I'm sure you know this, but, I think at least since Windows 7, while having the Alt+Tab "popup" open, you can use the arrow keys while holding Alt down to directly navigate to the window you want to open. Very useful if, like me, you have 20 windows of browser tabs open, and the application you want is in the middle of the list.

Yes - and you can also mouse over them and click now too. All three of these interactions are, imo, very intuitive and easy to do.

After the first Alt-Tab you can also use the arrow keys to navigate to the window you need.

One of the things that made multitasking on Windows much better for me was discovering that:

1. win+<number> opens the <number> program on the taskbar from the left. So having a bunch of pinned programs makes opening them very fast and easy.

2. Holding the windows key down then pressing the number multiple times allows switching between multiple instances of the program, similar to holding alt and hitting tab multiple times.

For example, chrome is the tenth icon pinned to the taskbar (counting from the left). So win+0 open chrome or if already open switches to the first window. Holding the windows key and hitting 0 allows me to quickly switch between multiple chrome windows.

So I don't have to mentally keep track of the current alt-tab order to switch between the second putty window and third chrome window. I just hit win+77 for putty and win+000 for chrome.

Perhaps so, but Apple _is_ the one consistently touting their design, UI, UX strengths. “It just works”, “we made it better”, etc.

I wouldn't necessarily call that a blanket statement, though. I'm sure they don't mean power user functions are easy to learn. I think at that point there's just a general expectation that those who will be power users / need that type of functionality will be more than capable of figuring it out.

I was lucky to have a book which introduced Windows 95 and 98 before I got my own computer in 2005. It never occurred to me that a total newb might not guess about alt+tab.

A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.

This, of course, was a long time ago. My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS. At the time this was simply hilarious.

In terms of iOS, the overloading of buttons and gestures makes for a situation where most users don't use any of that stuff. The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not. I know about it and never do it. In fact, when I do it is because I pressed it by accident and end-up unintentionally taking a picture or more.

I have another example that is unrelated to computers. We have these dimming light switches in several areas of our home. If you want to turn on the lights to the pre-established dimming level you single-click the switch. If, on the other hand, you want to go to full intensity, you double-click them. Despite having explained this, everyone uses the little tiny dimming lever on the side of the large push-button plate to go up to full intensity. And visitors, of course, have no clue because the feature isn't discoverable except for a fortuitous accident.

Progress isn't without side effects I guess.

> My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS.

Not for everyone. I could probably get by fine, if slowly, if you took away my trackpad. I can navigate with full keyboard access and shortcuts, and VoiceOver if necessary.

> The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not.

I do :( It give me feedback on whether I took the picture or not.

> couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled.

This doesn’t sound right. I once installed a corrupted version of OS 10 Jaguar on my laptop that resulted in a non-functioning mouse and touchpad. I managed to reinstall the old OS using only the keyboard. Prior to the post-Snow Leopard era when they started stripping down the file system and muddying the navigation, OSX’s interface was really easily navigable.

"Couple of decades ago" could mean Classic MacOS, which is indeed mostly unusable without a mouse

I don't remember the OS version at the time. I do remember it was the PowerPC era.

If there were pinstripes and candy colored buttons it would have been OSX. If the windows were boxy and square it would have been one of the “classic” OSes.

That's like saying you took the pedals out of a car and people couldn't drive, it's to be expected unless they are driving a Flintstone's car.

Perhaps you lack context. At the time navigating and running almost anything under Windows without a mouse was not a problem at all. Being that the OS was relatively new and evolving (transition from W3.1 to W95 era I believe) most everyone using these machines were used to learning and using keyboard shortcuts for everything. So, yeah, Windows users at the office had no problem if we removed the mouse. In fact the prank was pointless because it was almost a challenge to show us they could still function. With Mac users --again, at that time-- they just crashed and burned.

As a side note, this was also the pre-Google Internet era, with super early Linux (can't even remember the version). I remember using NCSA Mosaic!

You've missed the point. For Macs, the mouse is the pedals of the car because you absolutely need the mouse yo do basic things. On my Linux setup, I could do just fine without a mouse because I have multiple ways of doing the things I need to do

Yep, this is why so many cars come with a backup set of pedals in case the first set is disabled in a prank. Great to have multiple ways of doing the things that need to be done.

> On my Linux setup, I could do just fine without a mouse because I have multiple ways of doing the things I need to do

On your Linux setup, could you do just fine without a mouse AND without a keyboard?

Why is it OK for the keyboard to be an essential required device but a mouse should be optional?

A keyboard is not strictly required either. You can use an on screen keyboard with a mouse, text to speech, etc. And on anything that doesn't require text input, it's easy to avoid the keyboard.

The key is flexiblity. On Linux, I could avoid my mouse or my keyboard or my entire graphical desktop if I wanted to and still be productive. Macs don't have that flexibility.

I single out a mouse because it is a very low information density device. It doesn't really do much, so it is the low hanging fruit. Whether a mouse is required by an OS is like a litmus test of "can the user configure the OS the way they want, or does the OS dictate how the user will use it"

Computers didn't always have visual displays either; shouldn't they always be able to work with paper printouts?

Requiring a mouse and assuming it to always be present is not a bad thing; it's progress.

macOS has good accessibility features, so you can set it up to use it without a mouse if you really need to.

Yeah, if you break a machine it will stop working.

Glad my work isn't impacted by such pranks!

There's a much more evil prank than that:

A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:

It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!

Our variation swapped the m and n keys to the same effect.

My go-to pranks on Magic Mouse users are to turn the mouse around or cover the laser. Righting the mouse is usually only the second or third thing they try.

That's hilarious!

What's sad in this little sub-thread is to watch people down-voting and taking this too seriously. These are healthy jokes, just good fun. Nobody is saying Macs are bad or inferior in any way. Heck, I own a bunch of them, PC's as well. Lighten-up people!

...and then there was this time when I spent a full hour with an x-acto knife above the dropped ceiling carefully, silently, carving a hole right behind one of my co-workers to drop a firecracker right behind him. Yeah, that's how we rolled.

I have a feeling that today's workplace has become far more rigid and intolerant of, well, being human. People would get fired for probably every single thing we did back then...like wiring-up a fire extinguisher to discharge into someone's crotch (male coworker, 'cause someone is likely to assume the worst) when they sat at their desk. Or how about jumping out of the bushes with two water hoses to hose down someone when they got to work? There's more...we had lots of fun and worked 14 to 16 hour days. That was twenty years ago, we are still good friends.

Oh, I have to mention one more. I bought a new car and proudly showed it off to everyone in the team at the time. One of the other engineers rented a crashed version of exactly the same car from a junk yard. He had the tow truck swap my car for the utterly destroyed car in the parking lot. He also swapped the license plates. My car was towed and parked around the corner. Imagine my reaction when I came out of the office to get lunch and my car looked like Optimus Prime stomped on it! It was absolutely hilarious beyond description.

The crashed car prank is epic! Sounds like something Bertram Gilfoyle would do to Dinesh Chugtai's Tesla.

I wrote a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in 6502 assembly on the Apple ][ to drive my brother crazy.

All of this definitely required everyone to have a sense of humor. It developed over years of working together. The participants could take it as well as they dished it out. It sure makes for a lot of great stories to remember.

Here's a quick one: One of my coworkers watched my frustration level rise throughout the day as I was debugging one of my hardware designs. The thing was failing intermittently and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Being a hardware + embedded software project made it that much more difficult.

At the end of the day he calls me over to his workbench. He doesn't say a thing. He opens a drawer, grabs hold of a large knob on a variac, turns it down and all the alarms on my workbench --at the other end of the room-- go off. He turns it back up to 120 V, looks at me and smiles. The SOB got me good. Brilliant!

Actually, you could always access and navigate menus by the keyboard on Macs (Ctrl + F2 nowadays). It's just that this was/is a relatively unknown feature.

How do you do this on System 7.5? Would actually be super useful on a PowerBook I have where the trackpad goes wild on cold days before the machine warms up.

Actually, I don't remember how this really worked in System 7. :-(

I think, at least in Word you could Cmd + Tab (or pressing "." on the numeric keypad) to transfer focus to the menu bar. (Then simply navigate by cursor keys and use Enter or Space to select an item.)

However, Mouse Keys may be generally of help. I think, in System 7, they are part of the "Easy Access" system extension (be sure to have this in your system folder). Mouse Keys are activated by Cmd + Opt + Clear and allow you to navigate by the numeric keypad. (Up, down, left, right, diagonally, 5 is equivalent to a click, 0 to holding the mouse button pressed, the decimal point [dot] to releasing it.) On a PowerBook, you probably have to use the function key as well. (Using Mouse Keys, you may activate a menu by the 0 key. Normally, once the menu bar has focus, you can navigate by cursor keys and select a menu item by the space bar.)

I’ve had to navigate windows without a mouse a few times while troubleshooting a problem. It’s not too bad with the windows key, tab and arrow.

I had to use the key map once to type without a working keyboard. That was bad.

> A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.

I don't mind this that much. It just shows that Apple elevated the mouse to an essential input system that must always be available, as opposed to being an optional accessory, and designed the system around that requirement.

You can make the same argument about not being able to do anything with a mouseless computer if the keyboard was disabled too.

In fact, even if the keyboard was unavailable, you could still use a computer with just a mouse + onscreen keyboard ...or a touchscreen. :)

So a physical keyboard is actually more expendable than a mouse.

Way back, a long time ago, software came with large, detailed, paper manuals. The quality varied, but a well written manual was a godsend. I guess the constantly updating that goes on with current software does not allow for such a thing these days, but it sure was nice when you could get a version of some software and use the same thing for 5 years without learning new tricks all the time.

Can't help but quote:

«ng the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank. Of course, in later years, the check was replace by a credit card, and check clearance was replaced by the 15-day return period, but Steve’s and Apple’s focus remained the same.»

https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/

I mean you went from never having owned (and presumably used) an iOS device to figuring out the task in 10 minutes. Seems pretty good to me.

One basic rule of UI design is that the state of the application, and what you can do to it should be VISIBLE.

The rule works great and is easy to follow. But first you have to know it :)

Sadly, the company that taught me this in a previous century, now no longer follows it.

I think apple stopped designing for our generation a while ago. When I see my young nieces using their iPad, I’m amazed at how easily and fluidly they navigate the device using all the extra gestures that seem unintuitive to me.

I have a desktop Windows only product that I sell (10s of thousands of clients). It does not have the most eye pleasing UI design but it is very functional and ergonomic. All possible actions are clearly visible and / or discoverable. And every action can be accessed in less clicks then in any of competitor's products. I actually get some praises for it.

Still every once in a while I get support email telling me that the product sucks "cause it is ugly". Most of those complaining were Apple users who installed a product using Parallels. One of the emails actually was written by pro UX designer (at least this is who the author claimed to be). This got me curios to find out what is really wrong in my GUI that irritates some users so I asked for short interview on Skype/Phone. We had a discussion. Among the things he showed me the example of light gray text on white background and told me that is very eye pleasing an mine are too contrast. For fuck sake I could not read the example he showed to me without glasses and when I complained he said that the beauty trumps usability/ergonomics. I just bailed out. Maybe he is right but I'll stick to what I believe works.

> beauty trumps usability/ergonomics.

That can not possibly come from a UI designer. Usability is always first, and it’s possible to make it look good while maintaining a11y/usability properties.

Oh, it could easily come from some of the UI designers I've worked with in the past who followed modern design fads, especially regarding text:

• Contrast is bad and hard on the eyes. The less contrast the better.

• Decorative fonts with font-weight: 300 are better than ordinary normal weight fonts designed for readability.

• It's better to have a small font with a lot of extra line-height instead of just making the font bigger.

>Usability is always first

There are a lot of UI designers that missed that memo.

I mean, it's very possible to create visually appealing UIs that also have lots of contrast.

Apple used to do it...

> Maybe he is right but I'll stick to what I believe works.

He’s not. If I can’t use a product, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is.

I have had conversations with several "designers", some from FAANG, and all have held the general belief that having strong authority over how the UI looks and getting eye-candy at the cost of usability and ergonomics was 'without doubt the right choice'.

In my frank opinion, many designers hold a position of subjective judgement and thrive on the power that comes with that. This is like a developer making arbitrary decisions about a product because they like the technical implementation better.

Data, and actual user preference, should always be the key decider. Not some arbitrary rule-decider.

Be careful with data-driven design, you can easily end up fooling yourself into seeing evidence in the metrics for whatever you want to be true, I've seen it happen plenty. Accidental p-hacking by well meaning but misguided "data driven" programmers is not at all uncommon.

Furthermore, in my experience the data doesn't necessarily mean what it's believed to mean, with the favored explanation for the data being assumed to be the correct explanation. (e.g. "We want more engagement. This data shows users are staying on this page longer, that's a measure of engagement." It may instead be a measure of your users getting confused, lost, etc.) My point here is that an earnest attempt to be data driven doesn't eliminate the matter of bias. Being cognizant of possible bias when evaluating the data is important, otherwise you'll have a false sense of confidence.

The danger with data is it can keep you trapped in a local maxima. Also there's the whole thing with a lot of users seeming to be more and more annoyed with telemetry.

THIS. So many people don't realize that true innovation cannot come from existing data.

Maybe, instead of either just declaring what is the "right" way or observing users like some kind of behavioural scientist, we could just go back to, I don't know, asking them.

Innovation comes from experimentation. It's useful to have hypotheses and quantitative/qualitative data to back the assumptions up or disprove them.

Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day, or my opinion about data (which I don't see backed up by any data)? If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone.

On another topic, putting someone's job into quotes just isn't a good look for any argument. If you have to straw man to get your point across, it might not be that great.

The reason I put air quotes around "designer" was to convey the fact that I believe _good_ designers would base their decisions on logic discovered via some form of the scientific method. Studying what makes user interfaces understandable, and why.

Data doesn't need to be "track everything the user does and do A/B testing", it can come from many sources: user behavior studies done in the past, cognitive psychology, experience gained from mentors, etc.

Would you make the same "they do it every day so they must be right" argument for engineers? Product managers? Stock brokers before data-driven trading? Doctors before the rise of modern medicine?

"Who could be right, the multiple designers who do this every day..."

Those designer might actually be very good one's but they might have different goals. Their design might be all about eye pleasing hoping that mos potential customers will glance at it, like it and buy it. Ergonomics might not be their concern at all.

There are other UX designers though, making GUI for pilots, nuclear station operators etc. etc. They have somewhat different goals. I feel that my brain digests what they do way better then the stuff coming from a first group

I come from a different background where I learned to value reaching the goal in most clear and shortest way

If you read The Design of Everyday Things, you'd gladly remember that to each user-unfriendly design, the author sarcastically added "but it won a lot of design awards". Which implied that the givers of those awards had one-track mind. And since the book's author co-wrote the article that we discuss, aesthetics at the cost of usability is a major sin for him.

On the other hand, since (insert obligatory joke about $1000 monitor stands), losing customers is no longer their worry.

> If Steve Jobs had followed user preference he'd have made a faster flip phone.

Actually, would this be so bad?

This is a take that I had never considered. Given our apocalyptic predicament, perhaps faster horses would have been the better choice... What a twist.

Being stuck in a city traffic then answer might be:

Faster horses? YESSSSS !!! ;)

Also... are self-driving cars smarter than horses yet? I've wondered if it would be easier to train a dog to drive a car than a computer. Working dogs are just so crazy smart.

According to the old Tom T. Hall song, the secret to life is "faster horses, younger women, older whiskey," and "more money." Food for thought.

This is a subtle problem of incentives and information. The designer has the problem that the product will ship with only one of the possible designs. And the feedback process is patchy at best. There's no way to get a good overview of a bunch of forums where some people love it, but others hate this or that function.

What you can get feedback for is how eye popping or outrageous (no F keys!) your suggestions are. People in the office will react, and they are the ones who will decide what actually gets shipped.

Maybe putting engineers in charge of UI design isn't all that bad. We may not be good at making a UI work but at least (trying to) make things work is what we do. With designers, it's hit and miss.

> he said that the beauty trumps usability/ergonomics. I just bailed out. Maybe he is right but I'll stick to what I believe works.

I’m with you. Speaking personally, I think he is wrong. My definition of true beauty is both appearance and design. Something that is pretty to look at but not very ergonomic is ultimately not truly beautiful, in my mind. For something to be truly beautiful, it must be both sexy looking and ergonomic (and high quality, etc.). When something cute looking has usability problems, it starts to annoy me, it begins to look cheap and not well thought out, and ironically ultimately ends up looking rather ugly. Once I see bad design, it affects how I feel about the looks.

Stuff around my house has ended up in this category. Throw pillows on the bed look great when the bed is made, but they’re not for sleep and they’re always in the way. Ugly. Cute glass jars in the kitchen that I can’t quite fit my hand into because they were made elliptical instead of round to have a low profile and be cute... they seemed like a good idea in the store, but it only takes trying to use them a few times before they really don’t look cute anymore.

I love industrial design. Because it mostly exposes function and quality. Stuff made for home use, sure it is pretty but they can have that plastic for themselves ;)

Did you consider giving the the user some way to configure the text color?

I only make configurable things that MUST be configured. I've long learned that my audience when it comes to handling software for better or worse has the average intelligence approaching that of my cat.

Not trying to insult here. Just general observation

I've observed something not too different. I suspect it might be that I and my users are at different levels of zoom with respect to the product.

They really don't think about it at all except for when they need to get specific tasks done that the product does well. They are max zoomed out.

I necessarily am zoomed in to the entire product, from every lowly line of code all the way up to the aggregate product. I am max zoomed in.

This leads to a sense of alienation when I observe the relationship between my users and my product. Sometimes it's simpler to think that I actually don't know my own product, so different is the perspective.

Really it's a matter of how much the product occupies in my mind versus theirs; they are using it opportunistically and would prefer to spend as little time as possible thinking about it. Which I suppose is a good argument against over-engineering; for a mass market product, core features beyond the third will only be used by the developers.

Anyhow, all that is to say I can understand your comment, and I often think that I'm lucky the emacs developers or GvR don't look over my shoulder when I use their software because they would give their cats Nobel prizes. :)

> Not trying to insult here. Just general observation

Sorry, still an insult.

But ok. So your users have the intelligence of a cat and are generally really helpless with your software. Then the obvious way forward is to include non-discoverable features, hard-to-read text and extra-confusing mouse gestures...?

Sorry, still an insult.

Sorry I believe it is not because I did say "when it comes to software". I freely admit to being an imbecile in Quantum Chromodynamics. Same goes with my users. Many of them are actually lawyers, dentists and other rather well off people. I am sure they're intelligent in many fields. But for many of them the software is not their cup of tea. That's just life and I do not see too many Leonardo Da Vincis walking around.

"Offering them hard to read text will help" - well I appreciate your sarcasm but allow me configurable option to ignore it ;)

> beauty trumps usability/ergonomics

That is just... Why is this person a designer if they don’t want to design? They should have become a painter or a musician.

What software?

> beauty trumps usability/ergonomics

I bet that beauty wouldn't have trumped usability (in terms of Apple's preference and an elite buyer's purchase decision) if it also wasn't positioned and marketed as an aspirational / cool product.

There's a lot of people that just want to own it because it's the goto for aspirational / luxury electronics.

That aside, I always buy only Apple because other products just deteriorate in terms of performance at an unbelievable rate. Have owned windows and android products and after using them for like a year, it's hard to believe that it's the same shiny machine that you thought would be a good buy.

It's windows and not the hardware. I've never seen an issue with android though, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there. In that case it has been hardware, both Samsung and Google, usually with overheating chips. I still prefer the Android world though, I find the products more intuitive.

"...other products just deteriorate in terms of performance at an unbelievable rate. Have owned windows and android products and after using them for like a year, it's hard to believe that it's the same shiny machine that you thought would be a good buy"

I use Windows and somehow my laptops and desktops do not deteriorate. Works like a charm. Same goes to my Linux setups. I do not use Android much beyond plain phone calls so can not really judge that one.

I've had my Windows computer for like five years and it still works about as well as the day I purchased it, as far as I can tell. My iPad of a similar vintage is not really that good for surfing the Web anymore (though to be fair I think we can probably blame the explosion of complexity of Web pages) and I can't seem to make any purchases in the App Store anymore. I think it's hard to make much judgment here without more serious data than one or two people's experiences.

Maybe just slightly change icon colors to similar modern material colors will please them.

You know what I hate? I hate the fact that every time I open an app (most of which I use relatively rarely), I get a bunch of popups trying to introduce me to a variety of features I never needed in the first place. That goes beyond iOS, but also websites including Slack.

E.g. Why does iOS, instead of silently allowing me to use it's new version, feeds me this gamified introduction to "what's new in 13.x.y.z?".

What I want is a piece of software that doesn't change. Or when it changes, it doesn't notify me of it - it just keeps working until I find enough time to actually go on my own journey of discovery.

I am not-so-subtly exhausted by every single half-capable developer spoon-feeding me their "new features". I've downloaded your app because of the features it _had_ - I mostly don't care about what you add later on.

I could not agree more. This is also what really bothers me about Windows 10. Notably in that case, Microsoft makes an enterprise version of Windows 10 called LTSC/LTSB, where you get security updates but never feature updates. Unless you're a huge enterprise, they'll refuse to sell to you.

1. You can buy LTSC with as few as 5 licenses. And they don't all have to be for Windows. If you need 5 MS licenses of anything you can get it. Don't spread misinformation

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/bbof9s/windows_10...

2. You really don't want LTSC on your desktop.

The link you gave makes it sound like it's a huge hassle to get LTSC as an individual, which is what I'd read in the past. You need to go through a reseller and provide details about your business.

> You really don't want LTSC on your desktop.

Because why?

I have used LTSC, and it is in fact exactly what I want on all my Windows computers. It's just normal Windows 10 except without the Windows Store†, and with a Debian-esque update model.

† And there are ways to add the Windows Store back in, if you really want it.

A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover even when you know what are you looking for. I don't have time for making those introductions, and end up getting feedback requests for some features my app already has.

Problem: Half of the time I'm not even familiar enough with the core features of the app, never mind learning the new niche features they just added in the latest version. And since many apps believe in updating a lot and often I see this "What's New" stuff way too frequently.

I imagine frequent users of the app would appreciate knowing what's new more than users that aren't so familiar with the app. I like to know what's new in iOS/macOS, since they update once a year and I'm familiar with it, and they make it brief.

A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover

Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition.

One suggestion might be to start by removing hieroglyphic icons, or at least augmenting them with text labels.

> Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition.

You assume it can be tackled. Here's a concrete example:

The tool automatically snaps new windows to where user wants them to be. Rarely the user wants to undo that. The core functionality (autosnap) does not require any visible interface whatsoever. If I want user to see the undo button, I have to place it somewhere over his app's window, which bloats the interface (the undo is uncommon), or outright impossible, since some windows have custom titlebars.

So there's a hotkey, configurable in settings. How can you make it more discoverable?

Does it show up when you hold down the Command key?

Well, the problem is that you have already been bombarding that user with a bunch of other useless features, so what they are going to do is to quickly skip through your tutorial and then end up swearing “why the hell did they decide to switch that functionality I am used to?”.

Also, I am yet to find a single piece of software that does snapping better than tiling window managers, so I am not so sure about your use-case.

Off the top of my head, do a highlight pulse on the two snapped edges, and over the app window raise an ephemeral notification "New window snapped, click here or press [hotkey] to undo".

This is just the first thing I have thought of. There are probably better options that require a little more thought.

Popup at the bottom of the screen "Autolayout applied. <Undo button (shortcut in parenthesis)> [don't show again checkbox]"

What if it happens to many windows at once? What if they end up covering each other? Are you sure user wants to see that popup he'd hardly ever use every time he starts an app?

not gp, but wouldn't that "don't show again" checkbox they mentioned fix this problem?

I think we’re in the era of notification burnout. Your pop up may not be the problem but it’s taking the blame - since these pop ups are optional to a lot of people.

I am going to be a little rough, but no-one cares about your difficulties! Especially when your inability of producing intuitive - or easy to discover - features blocking users instead of helping! A tool should help users not being the poor man's self advertisement medium! Otherwise there's no point using those. Do it properly or find a living where you are competent! Again, sorry for being rude, but hopefully it helps you getting the 'user perspective'...

The rude user perspective. Don’t be so presumptuous as to think your rude virtual exhalation of breath could represent all users.

Still a user, and that is the point here!! Many developers forget making tools for the user, forget who they are working for, putting there problems first, onto the user.

That is the real rudeness here!

That I am very tired about and which makes me reluctant to use apps. Too many lazy incompetence ruining app usage. I may be alone with rudeness but definitely not alone with the strong disappointment and reluctance. Just look around here!

It is entirely possible to put your point across without being rude; that’s sort of how things are done on HN.

We’re all disappointed about something or other, but we still maintain a basic level of courtesy in our posts on this site.

"Don’t be so presumptuous as to think your rude virtual exhalation of breath could represent all users."

It's representative of users that actually know what the hell is going on and have a clue.

Everything that has correct and up-to-date documentation is easily discovered. There’s no need at all for notifications or pop ups. Just create end user documentation.

It wouldn't bother me if it was one or two apps that I use frequently. It does bother me when it's every single one, and as you say, most of which are used rarely. Then it gets annoying on all of them.

It's less annoying with Apple since they only update apps/OS once a year.

But it seems like every software jumps onto the bandwagon and now you see a changelog opening up an app every other day.

That's the thing, each developer thinks their app is the most important one on your device.

I feel the same. Recently, I updated Spark just for the dark theme option. I don't mind the short introduction of new features. However, I hate when the app dramatically changes, as Spark did. Now, the UI of this version is significantly different to the previous one. I experienced the same issue on Pocket. They removed the "Open with Firefox" option when sharing an URL. I don't like these kind of updates.

> They removed the "Open with Firefox" option when sharing an URL.

Surely Firefox exports an action to open the URL in the app?

Your opinion here is completely valid and probably pretty widespread, but I feel almost entirely the opposite. Every time I get one of those "what's new" pop-ups in an app I already enjoy, it feels like Christmas morning for me and I almost always immediately go try out the new feature(s). I don't think I would find most of them (or wouldn't find them as quickly) for most apps without a nudge saying what to look for.

I constantly use: Slack, Datadog, Gmail, Sentry, JIRA, Confluence, Google Cal, IDEA.

And that’s excluding the apps. CityMapper, Google Maps, Amazon, WhatsApp.

Every day there’s something new released in one of those apps.

I can barely keep up with my email stream - you are either not using enough apps or you have too much free time on your hands.

OP literally started with, “your opinion here is completely valid” and shared a valid opinion and you responded with, basically, “you’re doing it wrong”.

Or they just indicated why the opinions differ, ie what might be the different usage patterns that lead to different opinions.

There are better solutions for that such as an ordinary notification.

Personally, I don't want apps that I'm not using to send a disruptive notification that there's something new in the app. I'd prefer that the app let me know the next time I launch it, as being described by OP.

A notification sounds like less interruption than a full screen modal "Click here!" that will fire the feature to demonstrate it. Absolutely hate those dialogs.

That's orthogonal.

My feelings on the subject are entirely dependent on luck. If I'm trying to do something, naturally most of the time, I'm cursing the notifications and trying to skip past them. If there's less pressure, I might read through them out of curiosity.

What I'd really like would be an OS service that could show me a random selection of features from any of the applications I have installed. And, presumably on an opt-in basis, you could share which features you use, thus a bit of analytics could even recommend features I'm likely to find useful.

It's much like how the design of Facebook constantly changes without adding any sort of benefits. I think that they have large design teams who have nothing to do because the product is already perfectly adequate, so they invent work for themselves.

I think it keeps more than the designers in a job. Half of these changes come with some exaggerated prose from a marketing or design consultant, explaining how their new logo or colour scheme or layout really speaks to the fundamental nature of the universe and our place within it, and how suitable that is for a chat client or an analytics platform. Throw a custom font in there too for good measure.

Agree. Catalina was what ended it for me. I understand that mobile OSes need to change somewhat generation to generation as we’re still scratching around to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I don’t want or need that for my workstation though. I built a tower, installed kubuntu 18 LTS and don’t intend to upgrade until they stop supporting it. It made sense for my workflow and I’m happy with how it’s worked out.

> I understand that mobile OSes need to change somewhat generation to generation as we’re still scratching around to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

...do we though? The iPhone came out more than a decade ago now, and I feel like we got it pretty darn figured out around 2015 or so.

Newer versions of iOS have brought some improvements, but also a lot of miss-steps, and performance decreases on older devices (the only place you'd notice).

The current versions of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 having obvious and frequently encountered rendering bugs in safari. If they let this out to users your expectation that they’ll allow the user experience to interfere with their awesomeness is surely going to be unfulfilled.

Not to mention those stupid flashlight and camera buttons on the iPhone lock screen whose only explanation is some manager somewhere wanted to make their mark.

I agree with everything you said until you dissed the flashlight and camera buttons.

I use those all the time, via muscle memory. Getting to the camera and flashlight ASAP is critical.

On my xr it's much quicker to get to either of them through control center than holding the button for two seconds. And the way that they are placed, about 15% of the time when I pick up my phone gripping it front-back rather than side-side I activate one of those two things unintentionally.

Plus the trailing edge triggered nature of them is annoying.

It's also anti-user that they can't be disabled/removed per the user's preference.

Very true!! I stopped visiting certain websites because of those useless junk blocking nonsense and iOS is very close to follow, very very close.

This is one of the reasons I disabled app auto updates. There are only a few apps that need to be updated regularly, like uber and some banking apps. The rest can wait until I decide to update them. Also saves space on my device by not always having the latest version.

> Also saves space on my device by not always having the latest version.

How so?

Bloat?

Many recent updates have actually reduced bloat. One of my apps shrunk by more than half as Swift libraries moved into the system.

Yeah after app thinning was enabled, most apps became much smaller because you weren’t forced to download assets meant for other device sizes. But these days I think most app updates are bigger than previous versions. Would be interested to hear about exceptions to this hypothesis, and reasons why!

I agree. When I open an app, it's because I want to do something. That something is not "reading release notes". This kind of bullshit is why people don't read warnings but reflexively close pop-ups to get the damn machine to shut up and obey their orders.

At the same time, people comment about 'hidden' features nobody tells them about. I support there is no 'one size fits all' scenario here.

On one hand, yes, tour pop-ups are often an admission that discoverability has been neglected, and every time a product discussion goes the orientation-popup direction it should trigger some reflection on that.

On the other hand... well, for example, I have a puzzle game concept I’ve worked up a prototype for and everyone I show it to needs some things explained that I haven’t been able to figure out how to just make a discoverable part of the UI.

Outright replacing visible affordances with gestures is wrong 9 times out of 10, reorganizing UX in a way that needs a walkthrough is annoying... but sometimes I don’t see another way to get certain things across?

I think this is related to the other issue that functionality changes are often not readily visible; everything needs an explanation.

At the other end of the spectrum several times I thought Google maps had removed a feature, only to find they had hidden it somewhere else.

> What I want is a piece of software that doesn't change. Or when it changes, it doesn't notify me of it - it just keeps working until I find enough time to actually go on my own journey of discovery.

Use one of the stable desktop environments on Linux.

This is the reason I've been using i3 and sway together over ten years already. My work environment never changes.

I remember as a child showing my mother how to do stuff on our family Mac with OS 7.5 and being baffled that she didn't 'get' the UI.

A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously.

Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and is becoming slowly less usable to me.

Suddenly I feel old.

I don't know if android is immune anymore. The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop icons and I didn't figure out how to get them back.

It's a sad state of affairs across the board.

> The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop icons

Try using a third party launcher, maybe? Nova is a great alternative.

LOL, this is exactly the problem. You shouldn’t have to download a third party launcher, desktop, app screen to use the device efficiently.

I think iOS and Android are both shit shows. I pick up an android device and it’s a pain in the ass to figure out. That’s terrible design.

iOS seems to break their own rules and hide more and more in the name of minimalism. It’s asinine. 3D Touch was moronic. More than three gestures is moronic. Context sensitive swipes off the screen are moronic.

All of this became abundantly clear seeing my 77 year old grandma, who used a old android phone for years, have so many WTF moments on iOS 13. It’s not clear what is a button. She accidentally gestures and thinks her phone is busted.

My father literally can not send an iMessage without triggering "gentle effect." It has been highly annoying getting that every time he sends a message for the past three years with no way of disabling it.

If you're still wondering how to get the icon labels back on your tablet, one way is to install a third-party home screen app. (Unlike on iOS, on Android the "desktop" is just another app. If you don't like the one your device comes with, you can download a replacement on the Google Play Store.)

Apps like this are usually called "launchers". Personally, I've used and liked Nova Launcher, an app that tries to be like the default Android launcher but with more settings to customize everything: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teslacoils...

When I read the HIGs -- whether long ago on the Mac or Amiga, or later OSX it made sense, and the rationale for why something was some way made sense. It was actually quite easy to code something to fit, as the rules were clear, simple and (mostly) logical. There felt like an internal consistency that has slowly eroded over the last decade. Mainly thanks to phones.

Both Android and iPhone have internal inconsistencies along with hidden features that annoy or are gratuitously clever, often added in the yearly fit of featuritis and change for yearly change's sake. Windows and MacOS want to move further away from the desktop metaphor to phone+.

End result is I think just about everything - laptop, phone, tablet, stereo in the car :) is getting worse for usability. Peak on each was half a dozen versions back.

I am old, but I kind of hoped for more. :)

Do they even read the HIG themselves anymore? The latest iOS is a shit-show and full of inconsistencies between iPhone, iPad, and whatever you think would be considered “common sense”.

If you think iOS is a shit show, I give you App Store on MacOS [1][2] :)

If there was a competition on how many guidelines you can break in a single app, this would take all the prizes home.

The addition of Apple Arcade only increased the amount of WTFs.

[1] There are Apple HIG, and then there is MacOS App Store https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P

[2] Here's a quick and easy way to see which apps are currently being downloaded in app store https://grumpy.website/post/0SU9WNFXB

[3] Apple Arcade was made to explore https://grumpy.website/post/0SpwtkNB_

Apple's "services" apps–App Store, Music, Podcasts, TV–are the worst apps on the platform, period. They're so awful that I cannot understand how a sane developer could ship something like that.

Music (on iOS) has become so obtuse to use.

To enable/disable shuffle after selecting a song, you must tap a bar near the bottom (which gives no visual indication that it expands); once expanded, you must then tap an unlabelled button with a “list” icon. This will show your upcoming queue, but also holds the control for shuffle and repeat. These are also unlabelled, but at least the icons are fairly unmistakable.

Interestingly enough, Eddy Cue's org consistently puts out the crappiest software while operating with the biggest ego (internally).

> while operating with the biggest ego (internally)

Source? I know the apps are horrible but I haven’t seen much to make it seem like he’s specifically more full of ego.

My personal opinion as an engineering manager who worked closely with that org for years.

May I add — shudder — Books.app: http://macos-design-review.com/books.html

Wow. Thank you for this!

My recent gripe is the Recent list: https://grumpy.website/post/0Spuij-7C

That was fun to look at, but I see you also have an issue with UI/UX on your website: you cannot easily reach the footer when scrolling down because of that infinity scroll.

It's a joke by the creator of the website :)

I see. A quite ironic approach. I like it.

Edit: I feel kind of stupid of thinking everyone is stupid on the internet except me.

Hint: there's a handy icon in the top header (looks like "refresh") that allows to easily access the footer.

You’re not old. Apple has a software problem these days.

(copy and paste of my own comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21354314)

" This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.

I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.

I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI. "

New gestures introduced in iOS 13:

  Copy: three-finger pinch
  Cut: three-finger double pinch
  Paste: three-finger pinch out (expand)
  Undo: three-finger swipe left (or three-finger double tap)
  Redo: three-finger swipe right
  Shortcut menu: three-finger single tap

While doing all that they broke "slide finger across screen to move cursor easily"

Now that's press and hold on the keyboard to move the cursor without your finger being in the way so you can never figure out where the cursor is going to land in "teh".

You could always figure that out thanks to the maginfication you had. The took that away

For me the magnifier didn’t help since the cursor would always move as I lifted my finger.

I would never guess any of those gestures. It's very much the opposite of intuitive.

I was really excited to see multitasking coming with iPadOS 13. Unfortunately, it turns out to be absolutely horrible to use and insists on turning itself on with annoying regularity...

This is fucking horrible. Worth an episode in Silicon Valley horrible. What I hate most about the new Apple devices is that I always do something that produces a gesture or a hidden function. Grab iPhone quickly by the sides - get a screenshot. Swipe with four fingers looking North shaking - get something else. Who the hell needs all this crap?

> Grab iPhone quickly by the sides - get a screenshot.

That’s not a gesture, that’s you pressing the side buttons.

Or just use the long-press menu like you have been for ten years? Nothing changed.

I could make a similar comment about how keyboard shortcuts are "fucking horrible".

> Who the hell needs all this crap? Who the hell needs keyboard shortcuts?

My first Apple product was a iPad Pro I got last year. I consider myself quite tech savvy, but the gestures was a huge pain-point when learning the device, to the point that it soured the whole experience for me:

When trying to find the WiFi toggle button (which is accomplished by "pinching" the screen) I basically just tried every possible gesture until I found the right one (I know that some gesture opened it from watching others). By far the worst and most memorable UX problem of the year.

Why wouldn't you just Google it? It would have taken you two seconds and then you'd have known all about control centre and how to access it.

Besides, none of those gestures are actually necessary; you could have gone settings app > Wifi > turn wifi on/off.

> Why wouldn't you just Google it

You shouldn't have to Google for basic functionality such as WiFi toggle button.

Right, and you don't. Going to settings and toggling it is fairly obvious.

I think that after disabling WiFi, there's no Googling possible.

> Why wouldn't you just Google it?

What if the problem was how to turn it on?

WiFi toggle is in the Settings app where it's always been. What's so confusing about that?

Anything that needs 3 coordinated fingers is surely an accessibility hurdle.

I have no idea what any of these gestures are and I’m using iOS 13, and I just tried a couple of them and doesn’t seem to do anything. How do you copy with a three finger pinch?!

Is anyone trying to back this up with a proper scientific study of whether users find it easier or harder to use? Seems just like opinion and debates about aesthetics otherwise?

If I wanted to claim that JavaScriptCore was getting slower and I didn't post any data to back that up people would laugh me out of the conversation.

As long as we miss SI unit for the "hard to use" attribute we will have to fall back to user opinions and debates - and potential randomly constructed half cooked polls.

The opinions and debates are not looking well for Apple though.

You still could set up a study where you have tasks that users must complete and you get countable results. But this would quickly get expensive, so you need a sponsor. This could either be Apple, Google, or some other company in the market interested in making their opponent look bad. And I wouldn't take such a study for granted.

Not only expensive but making a comprehensive one that people actually finish is practically impossible. And there are many many further aspects that make the measurement non-reproducible - and so unreliable - or biased.

Right. Like I said, the only parties interested in taking all that effort and that have enough money are probably Apple, Google or maybe Samsung. Independent companies won't go down that hole.

> we will have to fall back to user opinions and debates

So what's the point? If it's all just random subjective opinion why are we indulging in it? If you can't even demonstrate any issue in the first place then why bring it up?

I believe that repeated, persistent and enthusiastic user feedback may be considered as demonstration... ;)

(the lack of reliable and exact measurement does not equal to the lack of existence...I thought it is evident)

But that's a great example of what I mean - are HN users grumbling a statistically significant result? Do they represent average users? Should Apple listen to it or ignore it? I don't know - do you?

We already have usability testing, but there are more dimensions to usability than can be encapsulated by one SI unit. As an example one measure might be the number of seconds required to perform a set sequence of actions such as copying text from a web page to a Notes entry. That's a completely different task to copying a pre-written comment from Notes into a web page, even though they both involve the same apps and are measured in seconds.

Nice isolated example that tells nothing about the "hard to use" factor. We can repeat such for days without yielding reliable empirical results. The issue is too compound.

Opinion of the users, especially repeated ones ought to be enough to justify a concern. There are too many to doubt its validity even without exact but half cooked partial numbers.

As far as I know, the last time anybody used science to help make a good UI was for Windows 95. If you can find "The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering" you can see they were thorough. I would love to be wrong, but I don't think anything like this was posted for any more recent Windows, or Mac OS X or any of the many mobile operating systems.

There was a whole series on the office 2007 ribbon UI. (see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of...)

Apple has fallen into the same trap that Microsoft has -- changing their UI not to advance the state of the art, but just for the sake of changing it so they have something new to sell.

This comment makes no sense.

Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes.

It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.

> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X.

So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestures.

Pardon my math but to me that sounds like ignoring 3 core design-principles just to appear trendy and have something new to sell.

I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics.

I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today.

Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.

I came here just to say the same thing — Apple really needs to track the statistics on success rate for text selection ...

“User Selected the text they wanted first try”

“User Selected the text they wanted within 30 seconds”

“User Selected the text they wanted within 1 minute”

“User Failed to select the text they wanted”

I hit that last case probably more than 30% of the time nowadays — and very often it’s not because the text representation on screen makes it impossible — but because it’s just fucking horrifically bad ui and I can’t select the text I’m interested it despite trying for frustratingly long amount of time. I hit categories 2 and 3 frequently when I really need to get the data selected — and that makes me want to throw my Apple iPhone into the sun ...

Maybe it’s because idiots don’t know/care about selecting text to begin with and their products are more and more targeted to them, as opposed to people why (try to) do real work on their devices as opposed to scrolling social media?

I don’t know many people who would be unable to derive value from the use of text selection on their mobile device - that should be a low percentage of the market, because everyone should be succeeding at using the functionality ...?

In my experience a lot of non-tech people struggle to use it or are not even aware of what the feature is for and consider it an annoyance.

What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features.

Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s

> I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics.

Seconding this. It literally took me months after I updated to iOS13 until I was able to reliably use copy & paste again.

At some point I had given up completely, but then later on I randomly read an article which explained how this core feature has been changed, how it was supposed to work now.

A seriously wtf moment. Definitely not cool, and definitely not good UX.

Is this the butterfly-keyboard equivalent for touch-interfaces?

I was gonna post about this as well.

How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it?

The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as each attempt has a delay before the feature activates (3D Touch solves this on my iPhone 8 but they removed it from the new models).

Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? It makes no sense, has no “prior art” so nobody is used to it (and why would there be prior art for the dumbest UX ever) and it always gets in the way when trying to scroll (in fact I tried the space bar trick first to avoid this but couldn’t move down with it so had to scroll the text box directly and ended up moving the cursor instead). If I recall correctly even themselves had an embarrassing moment trying to demo it at the Keynote.

> Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly?

I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks. It’s definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.

Tap and hold between words used to bring up a cursor and a magnifying glass above your finger so you could move it and know where you were. Plus moving it away from the currently visible line would start scrolling infinitely allowing you to navigate beyond what you see on the screen.

Both of those behaviours are now gone. Moving the cursor with the finger now scrolls both the text field and the outer page, at a speed high enough to make it unusable.

The “space bar trick” on the other hand doesn’t scroll the text beyond a couple of characters, making it impossible to get to the end of a long URL in the address bar for example.

I still don’t get it either. Apple platforms are full of bizarre gestures and 4-keys shortcuts but it didn’t creep to the most basic features until now.

Supporting this argument: I remember googling how to switch apps since the new iPhone X's feature didn't explain it. I've had to verbally explain it a few times to others who use my phone.

> fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason

Except making room for the one thing iPhone has always been about: the touch screen.

Not fundamentally changing the design is a plus for usability and accessibility.

It would be a disappointment if I had to relearn a UI I've been using over a decade just because I upgraded my software. I don't have time for that. Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there.

> Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there.

And here I am, using Window Maker, utterly unchanged for decades, older than the distro I use.

Alternatively: let developers do what they want!

The dozens of us on Linux are excited and entertained that we're now the leading desktop experience.

The iPhone has become a 2-handed device instead of a 1-handed device.

The iPhone SE may have been the last true iPhone IMO. Too bad Apple seems hellbent on the much less usable 6” monstrocitious these days.

Typing this on my SE. Only thing that makes me remotely interested in newer models is the improved camera abilities. Not sure it’s worth it to give up the form factor and affordances.

Also gonna hang out on iOS 12 for as long as possible if what I’ve heard about text selection for 13 is true.

I am planing to keep my SE and buy a small/medium Fujifilm or other camera.

(text selection/navigation in 13 makes me a madman! why the f hey had to fiddle with this, are they f bored to make something f different instead of something better, they are insane! they do this - making differently but not better - repeatedly!)

Text selection as well as copy paste are horribly broken on my up to date iPhone 11 Pro. It’s crazy bad and it bothers me every single day. How has this not been fixed by the .3 update? Crazy.

I’d take the complaints about iOS 13 text editing with a grain of salt. I’m on board with most of the criticisms of iOS 13, including that the new text editing functionality is hard to discover, but now that I am familiar with it I would not want to go back to the old UI.

Just curious, which parts of the new UI do you prefer compared to the old one? To me it seems like a huge loss in functionality (loss of the "long press + magnifying glass" method) with subpar alternatives being offered ("picking up" and moving the cursor without seeing what's under your finger, hold space bar to get a rudimentary touchpad, etc).

Picking up and moving the cursor in iOS 13 shows the cursor about half a centimetre above my finger as soon as I move the finger up or down at all. The precise location it will be moved to is perfectly visible to me. Is this not how the feature works for everyone else?

I never liked the magnifying glass method. I don’t need to zoom in, I just need to put my finger somewhere other than directly on top of the text I’m trying to edit (the “pick up” method does succeed at this, although it’s not immediately intuitive). So from my perspective, I lost one subpar method and gained two slightly less subpar methods.

What's funny is that before Apple released the large iPhones, people were leaving the iPhone to go to the larger Androids. There were very loud complaints about how Apple was behind, and larger phones were the future.

I switched from an iPhone 4 to Android, and went back to the iPhone when they released the larger size - the 6 IIRC.

Just gone from a 7 to an 11. It’s weird, if I didn’t know the history I’d say this device feels older.

It’s bigger, fatter and heavier with a cheaper feeling finish. The 7 feels positively elegant if you hold one after the other.

And apart from the slight camera improvements the performance feels identical.

The over-reliance on gestures and other hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem. It's a complete about-face from their classic 90s design policies, which were about ensuring applications were fully discoverable and did not hide any state from the user.

> hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem

I’ve had an iPhone for around 5 years now and I still have no idea what 3D Touch is.

I hear it’s not supported on all models, so my phone may be lacking it, but if it does, I wouldn’t even be able to tell.

Pressing hard on a UI element, like an app icon[0], tweet, etc will show certain actions. On the newer models without a pressure-sensing screen, you can hold the UI icon for about a second to perform the same thing.

0: https://imgur.com/a/wOTDT3s

I.e. it never really mattered. My girlfriend still swears by it tho.

> On the newer models without a pressure-sensing screen, you can hold the UI icon for about a second to perform the same thing.

On all devices that run iOS 13.

Hmm interesting. I always knew I had to press and hold with different pressure on songs in my library to pull up different menus but I didn't realize that this is what that was. Thanks

They disabled the pressure sensing on old devices in iOS 13 so it wouldn’t feel like a downgrade on newer phones without pressure sensing.

What? No, I have both an i11 and an i8+ and the 8+ is noticably quicker at showing the 3d touch menu since it has the 3d touch screen.

I believe 3D Touch is disabled by default on devices with 3D Touch. You may have re-enabled it in Accessibility...or you have Touch Duration set to Fast on one and Slow on the other. Or I could be wrong and Apple changed it so 3D Touch is enabled by default on those devices that support it, but it was certainly disabled by default during the Beta phases.

Regardless, it's still available as an option for phones with the 3D Touch hardware.

I want to add on here—the problem isn’t gestures, it’s gestures for core functionality. Gestures should be like keyboard shortcuts—optional pathways for advanced users. It’s okay to never discover them.

I'd use macOS’s three finger trackpad swipe for switching workspaces as an example of a great gesture. It’s just one of a ton of ways to switch workspaces.

> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases

A whole lot of design department got insulted just now! Seeing their focus in product design almost the whole Apple! :)

Jokes apart even I - design/visuals/very-cool-new-feature-wow agnostic - can see serious changes. Changes that are f*ing up my workflow and user experience!!

I’m sorry, what?

Their phone UI used to have a button you could tap on the bottom. That button powered many things and now it is gone.

Now ‘take screenshot’ and ‘turn off screen’ are nearly ergonomically indistinguishable. Now ‘shut down’ is somewhere random.

Seeking through text has changed, too. It used to provide a bit of a zoomed in view when you slid your finger across the text, so you could see where your cursor was going. This is gone now, to usability’s detriment, and now you’re required to use the undiscoverable ‘hold space bar to turn keyboard into a seek function’ to see where your finger is moving, if you want precise control.

The swipe down features on the newer iPhones where the side of your mammoth phone needs to be selected to view calendar or help apps is also new and random and forgettable.

iOS UX has changed a lot and a lot for the worse.

Thank you so much for the space bar trick. I have been cursing the broken text seeking. How on Earth am I supposed to have known the space bar now seeks? I actually like idea but I went months without knowing that.

The Apple TV app is a great example of half thought out design.

* You start downloading a movie. It doesn't show it downloading anywhere that I could see it. The only place I could find it was by going back * I had to login about 5 times * The Apple TV app is so new that you can't give Apple Feedback because the app isn't listed. * Supposedly I get a free year of apple tv with my new mac. I have no idea where to find that option to sign up. * When in you own library you can't seem to search your own library.

It just isn't thought through. And don't even get me started on the migration assistant. Buggy, and a poorly tested pile of crap.

Apple TV without a doubt has the most poorly designed UI of any Apple product.

There is so many problems with it it’s like they invented AppleTv+ solely to raise money to pay a team to basically entirely rewrite AppleTV.

It’s hard to believe Apple even sells the AppleTV.

What kills me about Apple TV apps is the inconsistency between apps. Ex, the video player works differently between every app. To see how much time I have left do I swipe? Press the main button? I never know, and end up moving the currently playback time.

> The Apple TV app is a great example of half thought out design.

ugh the TV app on the Mac is riddled with bugs and BS.

Just trying to see all the things I get with an Apple TV+ subscription is a labyrinth of clicks here and there.

Or the episodes of a show. Multiple different pages for show, episode, downloads and unintuitive ways of navigating between them.

Only a single player window allowed.

Clicking on "Resume Episode" if it's already open in a player window, fucking closes the player!!

I’d play the devils advocate re. it being a “trap”. People get bored of things. Changing UI for the sake of changing UI is a sensible business decision if it scratches the customers’ novelty itch. At least a good short-term decision.

Yeah. When a company doesn't make changes they get complaints about using the same 'old' or 'tired' design. The general market likes new regardless if it is better. To quote a recurring snarky remark from HIMYM, "newer is always better" /s

How much of the "novelty itch" is something put there by software-company marketing to drive sales?

Sure, some of it might be. But so are many other habits that we have. Marketing is a part of our culture know, and is inevitably influencing us, for better or worse. Charles Duhigg talks a bit about this in his "The Power of Habit".

If you're a professional and you have a tool that works and is central to your job, the manufacturer changing it feels more like a betrayal than it does catering to your need for novelty.

Office is a tool that works. People still complain about the Ribbon UI change, despite (possibly jusifiable) assurances that it really is a better UI.

The silver lining is, now that we've all lived through Apple's Jobs years, we at least know that that kind of quality, consistency, attention to detail, etc. is possible.

Sooner or later somebody will take all the good ideas from Apple's heyday and make another good OS. Maybe, if we're lucky, it'll even be open-source.

It's the kind of thing I dream of doing myself one day. But if someone beats me to it, that's fine too :)

I share your optimism, that people who remember what good Apple design felt like, will carry on the torch.

The generational knowledge transfer seems to have broke down somewhere within Apple, that only the superficial aesthetic is being carried on, while the fundamentals - user-friendly design, repairability, extensibility - are getting left behind.

> ..take all the good ideas from Apple's heyday and make another good OS. Maybe, if we're lucky, it'll even be open-source.

There are a number of open-source community projects that impressed me as having such a vision, going back to the roots, keeping the dream alive and designing the way forward.

One of the biggest gripes I have with modern UI (both Apple and Android) is animation times. Try exporting an image from Dropbox app to Photos app on the iPhone. There are so many animations that take up precious time. Do it 10 times and you're tired.

I feel like designers today want "sleekness" more because it sells when people look at it. Ohh...look at that shiny animation, so impressive.

I want instant actions at the expense of not knowing where something poped-up from. This is usually the case made by designers that animations help you understand the "Context" of where something came from. I feel like this needs to be toned down a bit. UI would feel 1000% faster.

Oh I’m so tired! Too tired to find the switch that turns off the animations if they bother you so much.

An easy solution for developers would be to decrease the animation duration the more often a feature is used. But I have yet to see this approach in the wild.

Fearing (correctly) that the laptop I had refurbished for my mother was soon to die, I bought her an iPad. She is not in any way computer literate and dislikes change. Surely, I thought, they would have some "cheat sheets" available to boil down the basics. I bought a few on Amazon and found them to be either insufficient or crowded with esoterica.

So I set about making a set of laminated cheat sheets of my own, with a consistent design, using screenshots of all of the applications I had installed, and so on. One points out all of the buttons on the iPad, another one shows the different screens, and a third was a diagram of common gestures.

Finding the gesture list itself was ... well, quite a bit harder than I thought it ought to be. Everything seems opaque. I am reminded of one of those escape room puzzles where one must painstakingly iterate through an array of taps, drags, swipes against each and every corner, edge and pixel. It seems that one must flail about against all of the idols, oh, I'm sorry, icons, hoping that one of the motions I have just performed will propitiate the gods. Watch for signs.

It seems, from my vantage, that learning the Apple Way was done with the very first Apple products and that now there is an expectation that everyone has been following along all this time. Certainly, that was my experience with my first smartphone, the iPhone SE. I was constantly having to look up how to do the smallest things and hoping that the information I found was not outdated. I also had to pester other Apple users for tips. My high school computer science teacher would be appalled at the lack of forthrightness.

While I think I did an alright job with the cheat sheets, she never did use that iPad much.

The sad part is, it doesn't have to be that way.

The problem is, the gesture metaphor is deeply rooted in manipulation of window pane of desktop based OS, which normally has menu bar and controls.

What does iOS lack? Both. Most gesture-based controls are torturous workaround the absence.

I have new ipad and it pains me to look at this cheat sheet.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/16-gestures-that-will-make-you-l...

Would you mind sharing your cheat sheets? I know others who might benefit.

There's one key difference in modern, big company software, vs. the software of yesteryear, in my opinion - 20 years ago, most software was written by people who would use the software. Today, software is written and designed by people completely disconnected from the user, or, in the case of things like apple, people whose status as a designer matters more (legitimately) than what they design.

This is the case with most of open source software. Three notable cases:

1. GIMP, which is unusable to such a degree that somebody actually decided to make a version with a decent interface, called GIMPshop... what happened to GIMPshop you can only guess [1].

2. LibreOffice which is much much worse interface-wise than Apache OpenOffice, although hyper-aggressively promoted. That being said, neither of them are even remotely capable of licking the knee of Microsoft Office.

3. systemd, which "suddenly" found its way in all distributions, even though it goes against everything that GNU/Linux or Unix-like philosophy represents.

All this makes me think that unusable interfaces are an intentional "feature" of "some" software.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190608205114/https://en.wikipe...

I actually think the real problem with those is the exact opposite. Those projects were initially hacked together for their own specific workflow, and are now going through the "growing pains" of becoming popular and somewhat ubiquitous.

On GIMP: There have been various forks throughout the years led by various groups of artists, but they have typically been very hacky. Currently the Glimpse fork is planning to do a redesign of the UI.

On Libreoffice: This is the result of the split from Oracle -- the project is now driven by consultants and ISVs. It works if you're willing to pay one of those or become one yourself. If you pay $0 and expect to get a perfect clone of MS Office then you will be disappointed.

On systemd: The design seems to be heavily inspired by the "giant ball of C" design that is already used by the Linux kernel. I would argue that GNU/Linux in general is too decentralized to have an overarching philosophy.

From my perspective as someone who does UI on open source projects, ultimately a lot of the high-level problems come down to lack of resources. It's hard to find good designers who are willing to contribute to open source, and it's expensive to put together a focus group to gather feedback. The typical corporate methods of gathering telemetry and doing A/B testing are not really useful to any of those projects you mentioned.

First of all, they won't get more popular than they are now. Second, I doubt any person who uses said software for professional or amateur reasons has the skills or time to cobble it together. Because they either do one thing or the other.

GIMP: "Groups of artists." See, there's your problem. As much as I despise Steve Jobs, I finally came to understand why he was so appreciated.

Libreoffice: What you said doesn't explain why Apache OpenOffice is still better. I do not expect an MS Office clone (although an MS Word clone would be welcome) but I do expect those writing the software to check out MS Word and point out why it is better... and then slowly but surely move in that direction, not away from it.

systemd: You can't compare an init system, which has the role of starting daemons and whatnot, to a kernel which is basically hardware drivers.

As for your perspective... if you are working for 0$ do not complain about lack of resources. You said it yourself, didn't you?

You have asserted that systemd is "written and designed by people completely disconnected from the user". This is not true at all. The systemd people most definitely use systemd. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of any system or service management toolset where its authors were not also some of its users.

Moreover, the headlined article is talking about graphical user interface design, something which is largely inapplicable to systemd, and to system/service management toolsets in general.

Apple made a huge mistake when it launched iOS 7: it failed to improve its UI. I don't know if it was a matter of the best and most capable designers leaving the company or bad decisions by the managers, but the truth is that iOS 7 was never a good UI for iPhones, especially the biggest ones. There are many things that are missing that are obvious, such as being able to organize the icons on your Home screen as you wish like you can do in Android, and I suspect that many of the things that are excellently solved in Android's Material Design, at Apple can't because of patents. I think it all boils down to patents because I don't believe that a company like Apple has such a poorly designed operating system.

Not sure why you are talking about iOS7 since it was released 7 years.

But anyway the reason Apple doesn't allow for customisation of the home screen is because it adds complexity. And given they are trying to sell to people who are computer and technology illiterate you don't want complexity.

I feel ios7 had lasting negative impact not just on ios, but also general usability on the web. Even Apple back peddled on some of its design decision in subsequent updates.

iOS has gotten already too complex that I don't think avoiding complexity is a strong enough reason for not offering home screen customization.

Many of the problems started there: the departure of Forstall, Steve Jobs getting so sick and dying, departure of many important roles at Apple and moving Ive to the head of design in the digital part, in my opinion brang the company to a disadvantadged position. In opposite, Google moved quickly and cleanest with Material Design taking Android phones to a new level Apple couldn't reach. Nowadays iPhones are the minority in every market.

Compare iOS 7 to iOS 13 and despite the time that separates them, are still very similar, but compare iOS 13 to iOS 6 and the difference is night and day. iOS 7 is still pertinent to bring up when talking about iOS software usability because they changed so much in one version; much of the changes in iOS 7 set the direction for future iOS versions, and for better or worse, those iOS versions have inherited iOS 7's design language.

I always wonder what iOS 13 would look like if they didn't dump iOS 6's design so thoroughly.

I agree, they went off the rails with iOS 7, both with regards to UX and graphic design. They have never recovered.

It's SO nice hearing that I'm not the only one who thought this - it was actually around this release that I just gave up on iPhones and moved to Android phones. The amount of fiddling/setup/googling I've had to do since has been dramatically less.

I've sold my iPhone 5 and bought Pixel phone with Android KitKat back then and it was the best decision I've ever made. Now I'm considering to go back to Apple just because the privacy level.

There are many things that are missing that are obvious, such as being able to organize the icons on your Home screen as you wish like you can do in Android,

This is bad on a mobile operating system. I had the displeasure of trying a device running Android's default UIs a few weeks ago: it felt like a Fisher-Price toy. Apple's model of organization is better in every way.

You could just organize things Apple's way if you wanted to though.

Sometimes it seems like Apple's lack of choice is the primary reason people prefer Apple.

Constraints make things easier sometimes, and it isn't a bad thing.

A lot of times, it's easier to write something like a narrative when you're working within certain rules. Or to design a powerpoint when you're given a corporate style guide.

Starting from scratch is difficult because it doesn't give any ideas to bounce off of. And with something like a smartphone - which users need constantly, but never seem to have the time to configure - any half-hearted configuration by the average user is going to benefit dramatically by having basic rules in place.

For power users - like all of us on Hacker News - sometimes the blank-slate approach is preferable, but there's nothing wrong for liking Apple because of the lack of choice.

It's like C++ versus an elegant language like k. k is obviously better, because of its constraints, not despite them.

That's a false premise. Sorry, but the rest of the world don't have problems with that, we don't even know if that is a problem. For me, that option is really important because I can organize the icons in the order and in the spatial order I want. Same for my elderly mother, I leave her a few icons in the middle of the screen. Easiest way to organize icons on the screen instead to top bottom groups, icons.

This was absolutely my experience. Say about the looks of iOS 4-5-6 what you want, but gosh, was it easier to use. It used to be so intuitive, and very little of that is left.

I feel that for OSX, everything past Mavericks has been a downgrade. What's the point in having a beautiful hiDPI display if you're going to flatten all UI elements into a solid color?

Everything past Snow Leopard. Lion was a disaster, and there is literally no feature I use that I prefer in any Mac OS created since then. What's more, the OS has become uglier and buggier.

Edit: actually, I like the addition of Finder > Cut, and Finder > Rename. So, hey, there is something!

For me, Panther (10.3) was the last release where every new feature or addition was something I wanted. Spotlight and Dashboard in Tiger (10.4) were dog slow on my G3 back in the day and got disabled immediately.

But if you’d had a faster machine, would you still have disabled Spotlight?

I’d say Spotlight was a pretty big deal on the whole.

Just picked up a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard (10.6).

I can confirm all (95%?) the features I've grown to love about macOS and regarded as innovative human design are still there.

Edit: I do however think iOS has been steadily improving, with some mild-moderate missteps. iOS 8 on my first 5s is a far cry from iOS 13.3 on the 11P. For comparison Snow Leopard was 2009, iOS 8 was 2014.

I agree. 10.7 was when I left the Mac platform. Sometimes I miss os x 10.6 but I'm not a fan of anything past that.

I really love sidecar.

Snow Leopard (10.6) also lacks batch file rename, automatic file versioning, full screen app support, trackpad gestures, and autosave. IMO that last one is huge—I remember losing many hours of work in Snow Leopard as a high school student, because whenever I got into the "zone" of writing I'd stop remembering to hit ⌘S.

Lion (10.7) has all of these features—Apple added a lot in that release. And while Lion itself was a buggy mess, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9) are basically just Lion with stability fixes.

I do prefer Snow Leopard aesthetically for it's higher contrast UI, but 10.7–10.9 are still well ahead of modern macOS in that respect, and there are even some individual visual elements I prefer in those versions, such as the Dock.

Mavericks is my favorite release overall. Launchpad is stupid, and probably the first place where Apple really began to break OS X's internal consistency, but it can be hidden away easily enough. Yosemite (10.10) is where things got really bad.

(Just for fun: Mavericks > Snow Leopard > Mountain Lion > High Sierra > Sierra > El Capitan > Mojave > Lion > Yosemite > Catalina)

autosave is awful when mandatory, as it is in FCPX. when optional, like Office, it’s great.

Gave my sister a Macbook Air to replace her crappy laptop.

First thing she couldn't figure out is where the "cut" functionality is.

I think the UI looks great on Retina displays. The main point for me is the smoother fonts. It's extremely crisp. I also loved the Windows 2000-style UI which was almost pixel perfect. I guess that's why I love Apple's new design direction.

One of my "favorite" paradigmatic UI changes (Mac): the Finder and Open/Save dialog sidebar. Up to and including Snow Leopard, these would include custom icons, once the flagship feature of user customization and personalization. However, this also served productivity, just assign a simple colored bubble icon to any of your current project folders and a few decent, but recognizable ones to the major entry points into your file structure, and these were easily recognized and located in any file list at a glance, without even reading a single character.

Then, Apple decided that this may endanger their precious industrial design. Finder icons, especially those for folders, are to be clean and uniform – and to be exclusively chosen and delivered by Apple. (Also, color must not serve a purpose and isn't allowed to transport any information.) Icons are not for everyone, quot licet Iovi non licet bovi. Now, it's all about reading, or, if you maintain a really clean and short sidebar, about position. Still, every time a Finder window or file dialog is accessed, some precious seconds and some maybe even more precious focus is lost. However, these are apparently not that precious as Apple's pristine looks. – OK, Apple, now I know, where I rank in your esteem. Thanks for letting me know.

They made lot "invisible" improvements in 10.15 (apfs is finished, kern speedup, metal, ml, fonts on 4k etc..) but not sure about this iOS look on my MacBookPro, Now my os look like web page from '98. Way too flat. Icons are broken on toolbar, hated how it looks.

Suggestion:

1. One Pro OSX version for Pro users (cut all services that eat ram and can be security hole) and add more options for advanced users.

2. Cut price around $800 or if you can cut more without damage in "real" performance and quality. Because not all apps use all power anyway.

3. And most important, fix broken flat UI, find balance. We have lot talented designers without job.

4. Don't break old apps with new update, find way for LTS.

MacOS is still my favourite BSD distro and mac from 2013/15 is perfect HW. So, if you do not know how to improve it, then keep what works and what users like or ask.

One of the biggest time wasting annoyances Apple has created is the touch bar virtual escape key. I'm triggering it constantly. How did they not know this was a problem before they brought it to market?

Thankfully, they're going back to a real escape key in the latest MacBook Pro.

And what happened to the backlit Apple on the lid? Another sacrifice to the god of thinness?

Like getting rid of the Kensington security slot. My first MacBook had that and I used it with a cable lock in coffee shops. Also sacrificed to eliminate size and weight, I suppose.

The lack of haptic feedback is the most confusing. And that it’s not a Retina display while the screen is, that’s baffling.

As a developer, the Touch Bar as a whole is trash. I want to type without looking at the keyboard, and now I suddenly always have to look at the keyboard.

Accidentally pressing the escape key is just one of many issues I have with that "feature".

I really doubt Steve Jobs would have given the touch bar a green light.

I've wanted to like Apple's way of doing things for years - Unix-like and support for MS Office, "ecosystem" integration - but every time I've used their products I've returned them or passed them off to my family members hoping they'd get more use out of them.

Nowadays, I get more questions than ever asking for help on how to do X Y or Z thing that seems really trivial on Android/Linux/Windows systems (like copying files without iTunes/iCloud, a frustration I remember dealing with even almost 10 years ago). It's now to the point where I just recommend 3rd party apps and alternatives for basic utilities for Apple's macOS and iOS to my family.

I've passed off excessive tech support calls for a few people by suggesting they get a Mac. Not because it's easier to use, I really doubt that is true anyways. But for the simple reason I don't know how to use them being an Android, Linux and Windows guy. The calls went away fast. I first started doing that when the bosses wife called me at 12:30 at night and had the audacity to expect me to do a home visit to help her.

I never got how people could even get past Mac window management or rather lack of window management. They've never had a Maximize function and they always pushed that stupid Zoom functionality instead, which every window implements differently. Then they moved onto making Full Screen the default which I find utterly frustrating as I wait for some junior programmer, who chose a Macbook, swiping furiously to find that lost window. Many other times, they'll put the pointer too close to the top of a full screen window and window chrome will expand downwards to get in their way.

And that's just one tiny facet of a single set of features that they got terribly wrong. There's so many other things wrong with Macs, macOS, iPhones and iOS... I could go on for hours and hours detailing these things.

Despite all of that, like you, I will happily recommend a Mac to beginners because they do have system stability down to a science. I also use an iPhone and I recommend them to everyone since they're just safer and more secure than Android as far as I have seen. I'm hoping one day I can stop giving Apple money though because I don't want to support their shit attitude towards power users. I used to only buy used iPhones, but now I stay about 2 or 3 models behind their current offering (and I buy them at a deep discount - my new iPhone 8 was only $350 with no contract from Boost Mobile which works just great for my needs).

I'm really hoping my iPhone 8 will be my last iPhone because the task switching shortcut for the newer home button-less iPhones is very finicky from what I can tell experimenting in stores. Maybe they'll bring the home button back one day or I'll finally switch back to some other mobile OS.

BetterTouchTools for window management and Alfred for feature discovery is indispensable to my MacOS use. I couldn't imagine using MacOS without them.

The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)

>The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system.

Unfortunately, the Mac's error dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode!

And Window's error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!

> Unfortunately, the Mac's error dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode!

'''could'''?

There's a point where a device's insane amount of computational capability has to be balanced with usability given its available inputs.

I definitely agree with the general idea of the article, but, on the other hand, a typical non-technical user doesn't have to know every little nuance of the system to use it effectively.

The original iPhone didn't do 10% of what smartphones are capable of now. It couldn't install apps. It couldn't copy and paste. A massive amount of functionality has been added since 2007.

In the end we are limited to a small screen that can fit in our pockets. Adding buttons to the phone really isn't an option. Adding a plethora of menus and buttons to the screen UI to make everything infinitely discoverable isn't really an option, either: again, you're working with a relatively small screen here.

Since the article was written some improvements have been made. I find that the new pop-up long-press menus you can find around iOS 13, like on the home screen icons, are an improvement. Removing 3D Touch is an improvement.

Things like the three-finger copy, cut, and paste gestures sound completely ridiculous, but they aren't for non-technical users. They are for power users who will absolutely remember those gestures. macOS is praised for its extremely smooth, useful trackpad gestures but it isn't like my parents are using any of them.

I see a lot of comments complaining about things like the multitasking gestures in iPadOS, the app switching gestures on iPhone X and above, or those aforementioned undo/copy/cut/paste gestures, but on a smartphone or tablet, very few people actually end up needing them. Remember, there are still copy/cut/paste context menus when you select text.

Not only that, when you look at the competition, I don't think Android has a standardized Undo function at all? I could be wrong about that. If you Google that sort of thing you are met with a good amount of confusion, or suggestions to install add-on apps.

Is Alt-Tab (Command-Tab) discoverable? How about Command-`? Or any keyboard shortcuts that power users insist on during their daily lives? No, they're not discoverable outside of a manual or keyboard shortcut screen. But we wouldn't live without them. And the fact that non-technical users may never learn those shortcuts doesn't make the rest of the system unusable or unintuitive.

>There's a point where a device's insane amount of computational capability has to be balanced with usability given its available inputs.

Exactly the same could have been said 40 years ago. Computers have (almost) always been outperforming humans and certain tasks, even if just calculus. The increase in capabilities due to more computation power has been happening constantly for several decades. It lead to some revolutions in terms of human-computer interaction, like the switch from text-based UIs to graphical ones.

The challenge of spreading between simplicity, discoverability, and capabilities has always been around, just the topics are shifting over the years. The reason for the decline in user-friendliness as in the article lies in the motivation of companies building software: They expect higher returns by oversimplifying things (as plain-looking sells easier), or nagging users about registration (as they can send promotional content later), even though they're perfectly aware about the usability trade-off.

When Jobs came back to Apple, and continuing after his passing, there seems to have been a conscious decision away from "the computer for the rest of us" (aka 'entry level' 'easy' computer, and thus hard to sell to the aspirational) branding to various forms of luxury branding. The point of the UI in the iOS and OS X era is not so much to be easy to use, but to provide a consistent luxurious experience. A kind of marketing sheen -- like the styling of the interior of a BMW or Mercedes -- more than a UX approach.

I think that an opaque interface actually helps sell a luxury product and making it more difficult is intentional and strategic up to a point. A lot of features on, say, a BMW don't actually improve the experience, like say soft-closing doors or automatic wipers. But what they do is they constantly remind you that you have a luxury product while you are getting used to it, and after you have gotten used to it, you are constantly reminded if you drive anything else, because your reflexes and expectations are tuned for the "special" way of doing things.

It's a way to inhibit people from switching to a competitor, but of course it's possible to go too far. People joke about BMW drivers not using their turn signals, and as it happens, the traditional turn signals on their car work quite differently than on other cars, so quite likely many drivers simply never figured them out. Recently they have changed them to work the same way as on Japanese cars.

"Good" design is insufficient for aspirational/luxury products in general, because you can get it on mid-range products and incrementally higher pricing can't pay for substantially better design. So anything for the high end has to be ostentatiously or subtly different.

This article is just a rant without many concrete examples, studies, or suggestions for improvements.

My suggestion would be to just stop adding new features to iOS, macOS, Windows, etc... They are done and only need updates to add support for new hardware, fix bugs, reduce resource consumption, and close security holes.

At least the Mac needs a few things.

- a low power mode

- a restricted data mode

- a modern scripting interface , basically port Workflows to the Mac

> - a modern scripting interface , basically port Workflows to the Mac

What’s wrong with AppleScript? Genuine question as I don’t use macOS.

AppleScript is like the uncanny valley of programming languages. It tries to be English like but it ends up being more verbose and trying to figure out the right syntax is obtuse.

It’s also been around since the early 90s and was the spiritual successor to HyperTalk - which was much better because it had a smaller domain.

Apple dismantled the original automation team (https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1359425) years ago.

Workflow is much more modern and is already partially ported to the Mac.

A low power mode feels like resource consumption improvements and a restricted data mode feels like a security improvement.

Workflows doesn't need OS support beyond the current regular API, does it? On iOS at least, it was entirely a userspace program.

A low power mode would mostly be useful for laptops. When you turn it on you it would do things like disable power boost, basically starve background processes of cpu time, etc.

Restricted data mode would let you disable processes from accessing a network when on a metered or slow connection and inform other applications to be careful when they are using a network that you flagged as metered.

Workflow was initially a third party app and somewhat limited in its automation capability because of iOS restrictions. When Apple bought it, it integrated it more tightly with iOS and can now do things that third party apps can’t.

This preliminary article has a link at the end to the “real” article, with concrete examples and suggestions:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...

Okay. Now let’s see where he is wrong What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product?

You both get the option to decide what size text and display you want when you start your phone for the first time and the option to change the zoom isn’t under “accessibility” in settings it’s under “Display and Brightness” as are they other settings he mentioned.

Apple does provides a “back” arrow in some locations, but, unlike Google’s Android, where it is universally available, Apple’s undo and back buttons are at the option of the developer. Not everyone, including Apple, implements these features.

The “back button” on Android was so badly implemented that Google got rid of it. But the back link is system controlled when you open an app from another app on iOS. It is not controlled by the app.

Consistency is still listed in the guidelines–but it is not followed. The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why?

Because these are all different devices with different means of interaction. Statistically, very few iPhone users are Mac users and even fewer of those are desktop users with a mouse.

Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed.

This hasn’t been the default behavior for at least two or three years.

But after all no one bothered stating this article is four years old. He’s talking about iOS 9 - we are now up to iOS 13.

That article was published in 2015, and the HN submission ends with "(2015)".

> But the back link is system controlled when you open an app from another app on iOS. It is not controlled by the app.

That's the back link to switch to the previous app, but it does not let you navigate within an app.

Having said that, yes, that criticism mostly applied to the "flat" iOS 7 (released in 2013), and some of the problems Apple has fixed in the intervening years, fortunately.

Unless I am going crazy, the (2015) wasn’t there originally.

The functionality of a universal back button was never consistent with Android.

Besides, the entire tenant of the original iPhone and every smart phone thereafter was to get rid of buttons and let the UI decide what made sense in certain contexts.

> Unless I am going crazy, the (2015) wasn’t there originally.

Quite possibly, it's often added later.

As an iOS user since late 2008 I recently tried to use GarageBand on my iPhone 8+ - it was such a non-intuitive nightmare.

(Actually, I just wanted to create a custom ringtone out of an song fragment. It was the most epic fail I've ever had on a macOS and an iOS device).

On MacOs, the behavior of Home/End/PageUp/PageDown (or Cmd/Fn + Left/Right/Up/Down), and further on, combined with Ctrl/Shift, varies dramatically across different apps. I can never predict what will happen when I press these keys on the first acquaintance of any random app. It's never been a problem on Windows.

Previous threads from 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559387

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552932

iOS was never designed to be a general computing platform. It was designed to be minimalist mobile consumption only and light interaction.

You can tell this in the original iOS which lacked multi-tasking completely. Only later was it shoe-horned in (along with undo, copy/paste, the concept of a cursor, etc)

The result of what we have now has been an iterative journey, the product of a bunch of user requests who insist on trying to create the same experience on a mobile phone with limited and far different interaction modalities.

At a certain point, you need to know when to stop and just open up your laptop rather than cursing something that was never originally designed for the task you’re trying to accomplish.

Right tool for the right job!

Or perhaps Apple wanted to get the iPhone out to the market quickly, so they kept multitasking, copy/paste, and other features for later iterations.

Kinda like HTML. Original purpose was just to show documents. Now we have to shoehorn Javascript and CSS so that we can make apps to it.

I just inherited a 2009 MacBook 13" Pro from a family member. It has 2 gb of ram and a hard drive, which I plan to upgrade for about 50$. Note that it is trivial to upgrade these things. Even without these upgrades it works fine.

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro that I bought refurbished during undergrad that has been the best computer that I've ever had.

I prefer both to my work computer, a Touch Bar 13" MacBook Pro. In fact I suspect the 2009 will become my daily driver soon. Making a solid computer that lasts over a decade doesn't erode Apples profits- in fact I suspect this opposite is true. It is the same reason Toyota is the biggest auto mfg there is.

Imagine if the newest Camry was unreliable or something.

"The fonts are pleasant to the eye, but difficult to read". Felt joy seeing someone who actually worked for Apple says this.

I recently went to the Genius Bar to get a replacement Airpod since the left ear stopped pairing. They told me to go home, charge the device for 10 minutes and it should "just work."

Guess what, it didn't. I was following the instructions online for more than an hour. I was about to schedule another Genuis bar appointment when I decided to try a factory reset. Sure enough, that worked! I wish they just put that in the instructions as something else to try. A quick Google search revealed that I was not the only one confused as to how to re-pair replacement parts.

After a lifetime use of Android and Windows I switched a month ago to Catalina MacOS, as my very first mac experience. The experience has been amazing so far, at the moment of unlocking I instantly fell in love with the instantness of the logging in. On windows this will, always, take atleast 1 second of black screen.

While I am relatively up to speed with most basic things of this OS, I must admit that I severely underestimated the scope of change. All the tiny things, like copy pasting a snipping tool screenshot into a chat, or just saving a file to a certain location, need another approach. I enormously miss the omnipowerful CTRL x/c/v combination windows had, and I still have a hard time teaching my motorics to differ between the CTRL and CMD and OPTION when manipulating the cursor. Also the WINDOWS LOGO BUTTON + arrow keys, to move screens around the display is missing and I need to buy an App for that. The price seemed to be around 8eu for a 2 year license but I'd wager that'd be pretty default behavior for an OS - even Ubuntu has it. Though it's somewhat refreshing to buy an app and knowing you're not still the product, but I expected to be their either way.

Overall I really do love the experience on Mac and I think that in a year's time I am above and beyond my productivity on Windows. Also one thing I'd like to commend Apple for is the readability of their privacy policy regarding their use of data for advertising.

Look at spectacle for snapping windows to left half right half etc.

Some where, some place in the past, I read that Ford had made a very successful car, maybe the Sable, but was unable to figure out why or how it happened. Apple made things of beauty - but it seems now that they do not understand why or how they did that. If it wasn't so sad it would be funny.

Personally, I believe that Apple products used to be works of art that were the result of a combination of talents and skills orchestrated by a master artist. Now they are just products.

I agree with most of the stuff the author is mentioning. But i think most of his points only apply to large devices (iPads, and Macs). Small devices such as iPhones and Apple Watches are so limited in their screen real-estate that helpful UI decisions - e.g. putting labels next to cryptic icons - will only clutter up the UI, making the user even more distracted.

I'm not an Apple enthusiast and the main reason is their products' underpowered, oversimplified user interfaces, from the standpoint of a power user like me. One manifestation of this is a chronic lack of buttons on their hardware. I've long preferred the extra functionality afforded by a right-click button on mice and a middle button or scroll wheel. I've preferred the extra buttons on Android phones over iPhones. Not a lot of buttons, mind you, but enough to perform certain common tasks through tactile memory, without having to look at the screen. My latest gripe is with the Apple TV remote. (My family was recently lent an older Apple TV model.) This remote could definitely use a home button, since as it stands, I frequently need to press the Menu button around 5 to 8 times to get back to the main screen (to get from watching a Netflix video to watching a YouTube video.)

Went to jnd.org on my 14" thinkpad.

Thin, small grey fonts on white background, makes me want to tear out my own eyeballs.

Eat your dogfood, perhaps ?

> 14" thinkpad

That would make me cry too.

the thinkpad?

Undo on iOS manages to be ineffective and embarrassing at the same time. I give the phone one good shake, feeling like I'm playing D&D, rolling for a saving throw or whatever. Maybe you roll a good number, maybe you don't. It's embarrassing to pay so much money and still feel like you're begging and the technology is deciding whether to work for you or not. I know from spending enough time around people using iPhones in public that the vast majority of the population has decided it's too awkward and attention-getting to be worth trying at all. Being old, married, and less susceptible to embarrassment, I do give it that one shake, and sometimes it works.

The Apple Mail client in iOS 13 has terrible half-thought out UX. Open a message you get a bar on the bottom with a trash icon and a reply icon. It is laid out for right handed users only with both icons on the right side. The icons are adjacent and the delete operation requires no confirmation. The reply action is actually the menu for all of the mail actions. Why it is reply icon rather than the more common "…" ellipses icon when it does not actually reply?

Besides being extremely buggy, the UI for the new Reminders app is even worse. I can't imagine the iOS 13 UI would do well in user testing at all. I can only assume they didn't do user testing.

I don't have much to complain about the usability of the software, but they are making hardware that should not be made.

I'm the unfortunate user of a MacBook Pro company laptop with 8GB RAM and just two USB-C ports.

This sort of hardware should not be made anymore. The memory is insufficient (my laptop is always paging) and the USB-C is forcing me to always carry a dongle, not to mention that just two is not enough considering that one of them is used for the power cable.

It really feels like the people who designed this laptop never actually had to use it.

I wish they would be forced to use it for a while to get a feeling of how crappy it is, so they stop making such terrible hardware anymore.

nobody that knows better is buying this spec hardware. it is made to satisfy purchasing departments. i’m sure it’s fine for word or google docs users that want to feel like they have an elite (“pro”) laptop so it also ticks that box.

rather than be upset that it is made, be upset that you had this spec hardware forced on you by your company policy.

> nobody that knows better is buying this spec hardware.

He literally showed you that some companies do buy that spec.

I bought my first Macbook Pro when OSX was first released, having previously been a fan of NextStep. Was a loyal Apple user until earlier this year. Bought a ThinkPad P1 Extreme. Running Windows 10 Pro with WSL for unixy stuff. Could not be happier. The only thing I miss from my 2015 vintage Macbook Pro is the gesture to click and drag with 3 fingers. I have to tap and drag with one finger.

I bought an iPad for my mom this year. I likely won't buy another one, period. Not sure there is a good enough alternative to my iPhone for when I need to upgrade next but I'll be looking.

AAPL needs to stop making jewelry and start making proper computing machines again.

I switched to Android after 5 years of iOS. Here are the reasons: 1. The price, no explanation needed. 2. Short of functionalities, such as split screen and Miracast. 3. Browser, android Firefox can install adblocker.

Has anyone tried the free "Getting Started" sessions that Apple offers, when you buy a device? (Edit: I think they're online. In-store would be easier to learn the UI.)

Although you probably need an annual refresher.

Edit2: https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/11/06/apple-offers-30-m...

I think you mean the user guides.

- https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados

- https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios

There was a good reason for Apple to fire John Ive

  * butterfly-switch keyboards are uncomfortable for many and unreliable
  * touch-bar was missing esc-key driving many pros away form Macbooks
  * Apple TV remote is beautiful, but entirely impractical
  * MacBook Pro 2018 and Mac Pro 2013 had cpu overheating issues
  * until releases 2019, iPhone and MacBook Pro had less that day battery life for many users

Agreed. As Apple’s made more money, they have this pressure of growing at any cost. Some of the recent decisions of pop ups in your face and a whole of magic hidden gestures really make it seem they aren’t doing their due diligence like they used to.

I have as much respect for iOS/OSX as I did for pre-we-track-everything-Windows. It’s just clunky and shit gets complicated and slower on every version

I just made the move from Android 10 to iOS 13. I was shocked how complicated the process was. Not saying that one is more intuitive than the other.

But man...

No back button. The password manager didn’t integrate well. The keyboard didn’t adapt to the language I was typing in. Parameters were hidden in the settings app but sometimes also in the app itself. Force touch is impossible to predict without trying it (actionable notifications). The cloud is incompatible (I lost my WhatsApp history). The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel). What the hell... the notification panel looks like the lock screen... Some control are stuck on an inaccessible and not obvious corner (abort the reorganization mode of main app starting panel).

I felt a bit stupid and understood the frustration of my 70 year old mother trying to learn how to use an iPhone. How am I supposed to explain it to her if it doesn’t make sense to me?

Nothing in the tech is really intuitive unless you truly know the product.

I felt hopeless and a bit depressed for y couple of days.

Thank god the hardware is gorgeous and the product feels great! :)

> No back button.

Swipe from the left edge of the screen, or tap the chevron in the top left.

> The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel).

The lock screen hides historical notifications. You can scroll down to see them.

I’m sure I’ll get used to it, those were first impressions. Controls aren’t as visible as they used to be.

Thanks for the tip with the lock screen!

I think this trend is seen in many areas, e.g. architecture and landscape design that looks and sounds great in a magazine but is actively hostile to humans. Products vying for the attention of a society obsessed with the latest shiny thing. Is Apple catering for the market, or creating the market?

Just like the original Mac OS became complex as the hardware and software added features, smartphones now are feature-rich computers.

Part of me misses the early gen iPhones because of the simplicity.

I’m not really sure what the solution is, aside from swiping left and searching. Or Alfred on Mac OS, or the search bar in Win 10.

The thing that annoys me is that devices like iPad and iPhone have so much trouble doing simple things such as uploading a set of PDFs so you can read the PDFs offline.

Maybe I am just dumb who can't get it working, but it involved some sort of syncing with a computer with iTunes and an iBook app.

The massive amounts of white empty space in iOS 7+ makes me long for the skeuomorphic days.

The dark theme helped, but should have been an option since day one. Pre iOS 13, the sheer amounts of white space drove me nuts.

And why did they remove visible UIButtons? I miss the real days of iOS.

Windows 10 too, it tries too hard to look chic. I've tried many it many times but I always return to 7. And the font is just always blurry, I guess you either use 4K display or don't use 10.

Apple's hardware recently improved by reverting some changes done over the last few years. Many attribute this to the departure of a certain designer that was also in charge of iOS 7, so I feel like there’s hope.

> And why did they remove visible UIButtons? I miss the real days of iOS.

As a developer that meant a ton of work to fix the UI of my existing apps. Just a floating blue word instead of a real button. You used to just drag a UIButton into Interface Builder and call it a day, the current default is super confusing.

Glad to see Don Norman getting some attention. I’ve always liked him. The Design of Everyday Things should, IMO, be required reading for anyone that designs anything.

I think that Tog feels similarly. When OSX came out, he wrote a polemic, slamming the Dock.

My biggest gripe is how ridiculous bluetooth connection is on iPhones. Apple for some dumb reason decided to remove headphone jack before making Bluetooth connections easy and convenient. How does this make any sense? It still is bad - long pressing bluetooth button still takes multiple steps and is buggy (doesn't register, or long pressing leads to mistakenly pressing on the following pop up screen listing the available connections).

There should've been software/interface changes before ever even thinking to make hardware changes (removing headphone jack).

Interestingly, they criticise Apple's choice of OS font, but he's using the default system font on his blog.

Yeah.still haven't figured out the odd diagonal new ios13 swipes. Esp since second phone is still on ios12.

Disagree with this wholeheartedly. iOS is the only platform I used which seems to make regular usability upgrades. Not new features but actual workflow improvements. I used iOS to get 70% of my work done and it all works together very nicely. You might call me a technical user though. I watch all the keynotes and learn to use the new/different features.

I remember having to install standard system software updates through iTunes. In windows you have to press the "start" button to shutdown the machine, but in iOS you have to open a music player to upgrade your OS (or at least, it used to be the case). Which is worse?

First I'll say that accumulated knowledge counts for a lot here. There's a vast difference between someone starting to use these devices now and someone who started 10 years ago who slowly adds to their repertoire of knowledge.

This, I think, is why I personally find Android devices so incredibly hard to use. I don't have 5-10 years of built up knowledge on how to use them and they seem utterly unintuitive to me. I also think the multiple hardware buttons were a huge mistake.

I really do think though that Apple has really suffered without having Steve Jobs to say "no" to Johnny Ive as a lot of the bad ideas of the last 5-8 years I don't think ever would've gotten passed Steve Jobs and seem to have the user less in mind and seem solely aimed at increasing ASP (average selling price) of various product lines. Examples:

- Force Touch. This added weight and cost to devices for a feature that had no discoverability and was used inconsistently by developers. This from a company that for decades eschewed a second mouse button for lack of discoverability. I honestly think this never would've gotten passed Steve.

- The 12" Macbook with _one_ port. So began the dongle blues. This was a terrible design that was an ode to thinness that had Johnny Ive's fingerprints all over it. Compare it to the 2011-2015 era Macbook Air, which was a fantastic device and a nice compromise between price, weight and power. The 12" Macbook shows what happens when you solely optimize for one metric: thinness. And it wasn't good.

- The 2015+ butterly keyboard. Absolutely terrible. A rare reversal by Apple to ditch it in the 16" MBP.

- The Touch Bar. A great example of a solution looking for a problem. Again, the motivation seemed to be to drive up MBP ASPs.

- Face ID. This one actually works OKish on a phone but is awful on an iPad. It's also an accessibility nightmare as anyone who is visually impaired has to move the phone further away to get the right field of view for Face ID to work. What I'd give for Touch ID back. Also the false negative rate on Face ID is really high.

This one is motivated by making the full front face of the phone a screen by getting rid of the home button. I'd really like a fingerprint sensor on the back (like a Galaxy S9 I tried to use for 5 months had). Apple claims the false positive rate was too high,. I call bollocks on that. And that should be my choice.

But getting rid of the (great) home button now creates a UX problem. How do you get to the home screen? Well, you swipe up of course. But wait, which direction you swipe from depends on the orientation of the app you're using, which isn't always clear. Some apps auto-rotate orientation and some don't. You know what always worked? Pressing Home.

- USB-C. Not only was this a loss of MagSafe (/cry) but we moved from a world of where if the plug fits, it works to a world where every plug fits and nothing works because it's now based on what the cable is designed to do and there's no visibility to that. Some carry power, some don't. Some carry data, some don't. The amount of power or data they can carry can vary. Do they carry a video signal? Maybe. No cable can do everything.

- I think the current version of copy/paste on iOS is decidedly worse than the original version, probably because the unintended gestures that now exist.

- The other day I couldn't move a tab on Safari on an iPad without iOS thinking I wanted to split screen. I still don't understand split screen gestures and the fact that I get this as unintended behaviour is an indictment of the implementation.

USB-C cables desperately need better labeling but it's not as bad as that. They all carry 60 watts, and they all support USB 2.0 to give you >300Mbps.

What about their password reset?

Does it take several weeks? For every user?

So true.

I used to be an iPhone user for many years until iPhone 5. My Android phone broke and even though I also own an iPhone 6 for testing, it was so frustrating to use that I'm using my Android tablet as a phone until I fix my actual phone.

iOS is just stupid. You have to memorize all these gestures for no reason. No discoverability, I bet most people don't know about 80% of all available gestures. To go back to the previous screen I have to press firmly, then swipe—but all the way to the right, or if I stop I trigger overview mode or whatever is called.

macOS suffers the same problem, but to a lesser extend.

Unfortunately, Johnny Hive has completely lost it. He's been obsessed with out things _look_ instead of how people are going to use them—and that's why people keep hitting his glass walls at Apple's HQ. Steve Jobs kept design at bay and insured a mix of beauty and usability. Now that he's gone you can tell that products got worse and worse in terms of usability (but 1.2 millimiters thinner, and so beautiful).

Maybe with Hives gone things will improve. The MacBook Pro 16 is a step forward (besides ports).

Ive, not Hive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jony_Ive

Ha! You're right. Thanks.

Apple is just a cult. if Steve Jobs was great at anything, he knew how to create a cult and then the money will follow. It's not about engineering, design, users or any bullshit you see in the ads, press, your annoying friends shilling, etc.. . It's pointless to argue with cult believers. Cults are only removed with new cults.

I just do not understand apple.

I have an iphone through work. I have no choice.

In a text box if I misspell a word, such as impaitant, I cannot go to the middle of that word and delete 'ti' and replace with 'it'.

On their file browser if the file name is long the middle is truncated with '...' and if i hold down my finger on the file to see 'info', that too has the truncated name, despite it being the only file name on the screen.

There are many other frustrations. It's inferior to Android. Yes the privacy thing is better, but most aren't buying for that.

Itunes was horrible also. Apple make terrible software. I am frequently annoyed by their un-intuitive interface.

Seems to me apple are really good at advertising and people cannot think.

>> In a text box if I misspell a word, such as impaitant, I cannot go to the middle of that word and delete 'ti' and replace with 'it'.

If you hold your finger on the textbox it should turn into a cursor which you can drag to the required position to make the edits.

This is not intuitive. Why can't I just press on the middle of the word?!

Or just highlight the word and a spelling correction will be suggested, or just use the backspace when you make the mistake instead of continuing to type.

Thought of another one in the same spirit: never mistype a word. And never use a word that is not in the dictionary!

I tried this. It's dreadful.

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