iOS First Impressions (2018)
basicbitch.software
basicbitch.software
This is something I have some gripes about. In the old days before backgrounding, pressing the home button literally ends the process. So implementing state preservation and restoration is a must for any non-toy apps.
With backgrounding, apps can linger in the background for a while before being killed. And now many iOS apps don't implement state restoration at all, including built-in apps like Photos. Quick experiment to verify: I open a particular photo, quit the app, reopen the app, and I don't see that photo any more. Instead I see the general timeline view or album view.
I hate this and wish more iOS devs would implement these things correctly. Docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/view_control...
I'm NOT paying a monthly fee for a feature that basic.
Every 3rd open is a "want to try premium?" popover, like some beggar on the street. Closing a video requires 2 precisely positioned and executed swipes. Everything looks like an Android app, like all Googles apps for iOS.
Just terrible.
I guess YouTube finally smothered all the competition with unlimited free money from Google and can now start to squeeze it's userbase.
I’ve been using Ivory for iOS as NewPipe replacement, but it’s still much inferior, especially when it comes to updates (for example, it cannot play videos right now due to YouTube API change, and past experiences taught me it will take at least a week before developer fixes it).
If you quit an app, open something else, and then come back to it, it should maintain state.
Personally, I'd prefer that going back via the task switcher maintains state but going back via home screen doesn't. i.e. task switcher is how you get back to what you were doing, home screen is starting fresh.
If I open the photos app on my phone, I don't necessarily want it to automatically bring up the last photo I was looking at 6 hours ago or whatever. At the very least, if it's going to resume from where I was, there should be some visual indicator IMO (e.g. on Windows taskbar, it's icons are highlighted to show that a window of that application is open & clicking will bring that up instead of a new instance - plus there's the option to middle click & bring up a new instance regardless)
As a developer, I know where this is built-in (many gestures and navigation components) and where other developers have spent extra time and attention on the details.
Jumping back and forth between xcode and android studio - it is SO SO SO much more enjoyable to develop iOS apps than Android apps. I cannot stand the emulators and the whole android development experience. If anyone out there disagrees and can point to resources to improve Android studio and emulator setup I would love a link.
I think most recently I compared it with a pixel 2. It was dropping so many frames compared to the iOS version which is really pathetic for a google app running on a google os running on a google phone.
Now IntelliJ... well, I think they only develop on NVMe SSDs. Android Studio works fine on my mbpro with the insanely fast proprietary SSD, but on my desktop with a SATA SSD the code completion takes ages to show up. Usually after I'm done typing whatever I needed completed.
Never got around to learning iOS development so I can't talk about their tools. In spite of my personal phone being iOS :)
It seems Android just is not willing/able to admit this is a huge gap and address it.
[0]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2012/07/12/getting-to-know-and...
I agree it's something Android should prioritize, but it also shouldn't be understated how big of a task this will be. Apple has invested a huge amount in this specific competency since the advent of OSX (and just look at the difference between mac os 10.0 and comparable versions of windows in terms of UI smoothness).
Ask a game developer: making computer graphics workloads perform predictably is a very difficult task which requires art as well as science. Building a UI stack which enables that, as well as having a nice front-end to work with for developers, and integrating well with arbitrary application logic is more than just optimizing some systems here and there.
The things I miss in xcode are mainly command clicking everywhere to easily find call sites and follow application logic. xcode also feels less snappy. When I used it last you could not refactor swift code but I think that's been added now?
I get the appeal of a more “complete” emulator, but such things are never perfect anyway—best to not even pretend that they are.
Not as intuitive but it's there: ⌘+Ctrl+Shift+H
> xcode also feels less snappy
Not sure what you're doing in Xcode but as long as you evade using automatically updating live UI views it should be pretty snappy.
> When I used it last you could not refactor swift code but I think that's been added now?
Well there's a small handful of things now but Objective-C never had a ton either.
You can go into a store 1 day after <XYZ> flagship release, try the hardware and have it stutter through menus like a Walmart PC trying to run Crysis 10 years ago.
Huawei phones seem to be the only ones getting Android to feel somewhat smooth, much better than "vanilla". Not going to buy Chinese telco phones though.
I like Android for some things but performance and feel isnt one of them.
I just bought an iPad (regular, not pro) because I wanted a tablet and got tired of waiting for a good Android one.
It's been infuriating to see just how smooth everything is on iOS compared to Android.
Honestly, this alone is probably why laypeople prefer iPhones. They're not more intuitive anymore, they're not simpler or easier than Android. The Android back button is a game changer, and multi-tasking is better designed.
But the butter smoothness...fuck.
But the development experience is not as impressive for Xcode. It is far slower than Android.
Deploying an app to the Play Store is ridiculously fast and frictionless while deploying to the App Store feels like installing Windows XP
Reading through this thread it sounds like there are probably some config options to improve the emulator, but I cannot find a way to speed up studio vs xcode.
It takes < 3 seconds to launch xcode and open a source file. Studio takes 15 seconds to open and even then it takes another 5-10 seconds before the UI actually unlocks.
I don't regret the decision, it's just frustrating that this one thing is so far behind everything else.
If you don't want notifications, iOS is much better.
To be fair, Android's do-not-disturb/prioritized messages system is way too complicated.
In my experience people do, however, care about iMessage being green insofar as the loss of functionality is concerned. Specifically with group messaging, a mix of iOS + Android users will result in weird quirks that aren't experienced "when everyone is blue". For example I've been in a mixed thread where the android user would receive a reply individually by every participant, while iOS users would not. Reactions, et al are unavailable in a mixed environment etc.
I'm not convinced it's a superiority complex, but rather the loss of extras that are lost when texting outside of Apple's ecosystem.
Also : Some boomers believe they know everything because of their experience and some know better.
The rest of the world uses WhatsApp or Telegram or something similar for group messages (and pretty much ALL messages).
And that's part of why.
The color is used as a proxy to discuss the functionality. "Chatting blue" is more about the features that come with it than the actual bubble color, though the latter is easier to mention quickly.
Personally I've been surprised what an impact even just a now-typing indicator has on the conversation and find "green" conversations can feel a lot more disjointed.
I wonder how much undiscoverable features like this one I'm still missing.
I have been using Google Fi on iPhone since they allowed it. Supposedly still in beta but works great. It's true that it's limited to T-Mobile (sadly) but it does include international data, same as in Android. Still one of the main reasons to stick with Fi, honestly.
[1] Yes, this is my opinion and not everyone might agree with me.
The SpringBoard?
I don't know if the gaze detection can be fooled by a corpse with its eyes open, but supposedly Face ID checks for body temperature as well.
Hah, the badges had this color scheme in a job I interned at years ago. Never thought to make that connection. :)
It's sad how something as simple as a different color can get the worst out of people
It's a diminished experience because SMS is a terrible protocol, the color just lets us know what to expect.
Extremely succinct. Apple's the only company possible that could get a patent for turning a page in a book.
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/apple-now-owns-the...
That doesn't necessarily excuse it, but there's definitely more of a motivation than 'because we can' behind what these big companies do, especially considering that most of these patents never get used for anything inherently money-making and so are just cash tossed down the drain in filing fees and time spent.
Please show us just one example of this.
Because it's a myth that gets perpetuated that this is how patents work. You patent a specific implementation of a concept not the concept itself. If you implement a concept in a different way it won't infringe the patent.
How about the patents at issue in Alice v. CLS Bank? Or any of the “hundreds” of patents, according to Wikipedia, that have been found invalid by lower courts in decisions citing Alice.
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xer...
Every other history piece I've read said Xerox got a good chunk of Apple shares in exchange for them using their research. Perhaps they decided it isn't enough when they saw Apple was successful and sued for more money?
Apple didn't get their start by copying Xerox. They got their start by building and selling the Apple 1/2/3/Lisa. Xerox only came into the picture during the development of the Mac. And there is this myth that Xerox invented all of the GUI metaphors we know today. But actually about half came from Apple e.g drag & drop file manipulation, multiple file system views, drop down menus, clipboard.
Also only one person was fired from Apple and that was Scott Forstall. After whom quite a number of memorable iOS gestures were invented i.e. when the click button disappeared.
"got their start" was obviously intended to mean "in GUIs."
Frankly, yes, regulations should exist to serve consumers not companies.
80,000 Apple employees.
~330,171,224 residents of the United States of America.
330,171,224
- 80,000
------------
330,091,224
I would.
And really, optimizing for the rights of the consumer helps everyone, including all Apple employees. And this helps the producer, too, because it allows them to ignore software patents as well.
Software patents weren't for the good of anyone but executives and legislators when legislators first forced them on everyone against the protests of software devs everywhere decades ago, they aren't suddenly for the good of the common man, now, either.
This article explains far more elegantly than I will as to why software patents don't make sense.
It's a design patent. It's for specifically how it looks not for the actual functionality. And they are basically just given out like candy to anyone that applies since they are only useful in situations where companies do an exact 1-1 copy. Otherwise it doesn't infringe.
So feel free to create your own iBook clone knowing you won't infringe on this.
Also, you're either completely wrong or completely misleading, and I can't tell which (maybe both) because of HN's history with completely misinterpreting patent law. They've gotten other software patents before (on things no more based on functionality as the above patent), and utilized them to sue opponents.
"Slide to Unlock" comes to mind.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/2/5676776/samsung-found-to-i...
Companies should be encouraged to innovate on a design and arrive at their own implementation. Otherwise you would see large companies simply duplicate en masse the works of smaller ones.
Utility patents like "slide to unlock" are obviously more about protecting an idea by patenting the most common implementation. But again in this case it was trivial to workaround since we've seen many unique phone unlock mechanisms come from the Android ecosystem.
[1] https://androidcommunity.com/google-axed-android-multitouch-...
To me that sums up the era when Jony Ive and the anti-skeuomorphic crowd took over the asylum. There are so many UX flaws since iOS 6. Luckily for Apple, Google and the Android crowd came out with Material Design that is a bad imitation of what went wrong with Apple instead of copying what went right during Steve Jobs era.
Skeuomorphic design is a great enabler for Human Computer Interaction and allows the layman to quickly grasp things.
And why is Airdrop and the toggle for the Hotspot hidden in the control center of the lock screen when you can fit umpteen icons onto the real estate? I have had to show that feature to multiple friends who have always been iOS users. Function has to come before “prettiness.”
And the notch is not pretty by any measure. I prefer fingerprint on the screen or behind the phone like Google did with the Nexuses.
It was a lot of fun working on apps during the Skeuomorphic design era, but I'm not sorry we've moved on. For one thing, we used to have to ship apps with a lot more image assets, which increase the bundle size substantially, but only really serve to delight the user the first few times they open the app and become invisible after that.
Also skeuomorphism was a lot easier to achieve when there was exactly one screen resolution to target. We used to really count pixels when designing screen layouts, and it pains me to think how many different asset versions we would need now to support all devices cleanly.
Ultimately I think it was a useful metaphor when touch screens were new, since it gave people useful information about how interacting in this format differed from a PC or laptop screen. But the thing which is really unique about touchscreen interactions is how the content can move and react to a user's touch, and it's much easier and less costly to do interesting things in that realm with simple lines and colors than with fully textured surfaces.
https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/p...
Also I do not understand the criticism. The box represents your phone; the arrow pointing outside represents sharing/sending something from your phone to outside it (to Twitter, to another person etc.)
The only valid criticism IMHO is that the share button is often used to do stuff that isn't sharing.
More specifically, the box represents the app running on the phone, and it shares content outside of the app. For example, you can "share" a picture from Safari into the Photos or Files apps to save it for later.
It's a very, very leaky and ill-defined abstraction.
Wireless headphones are a $8 billion/year business for Apple. Headphone jacks are dead forever.
Isn't that a good thing?
e.g.
* I want to be able to have syncthing pull down my keepass database and have keepass2android open the current version in launch without having to navigate a file picker every time.
* I want to use my browser to download rpg rulebooks from drivethrurpg then open them in my PDF viewer without either of those two having to specifically integrate with each other. It would then be nice if that pdf reader could display a list of recent files on launch rather than reopen a picker.
They're mostly my gripes with Android 10's lockdown but iOS doesn't even want the filesystem exposed. I won't deny there's security advantages to this model, but it should have an out as it just encourages your app to own your data and only use it in ways they foresaw rather than giving control to users.
I wish Apple made this easy, and just stopped doing whatever they're doing with iTunes. I hate needing it to upload photos.
If the developer takes the time to set it up, this is exactly how the Files app works -- each app will appear either as a folder or as a provider.
> I want to plug in my iPhone and see the filesystem for the Files app.
This is how it works currently on macOS; word is that this will be coming to Windows once they finish splitting up that version of iTunes.
> I want to be able to "share" any file from any app into Files. This would either be "Save to Files" or simply exposing it to files.
Again, this is up to the app developer to implement. On apps that support it, there's literally a "Save to Files" option on the share sheet.
On the other hand, Microsoft didn't get a say about LibreOffice being able to read it's files.
But if you want to share files, you can now with the Files app.
And not only that, new bugs are getting introduced and the old features removed with every OS release forcing me to look for workarounds, mostly to find out there are none, and eventually the only option is to get used to live with that
I've been using Apple products for 5 years now, but by now I've really grown tired of being forced to "think different" every now and then, and I believe the Apple products I currently own (this includes MBPs, iPhones and ATV) are the last I ever buy