That, to me, is insane. It shows how shit the project management must be if they cannot even prioritize fixing critical bugs in the most important parts of the OS over releasing some useless feature that most users will never touch.
iOS keyboard input and text selection has been wonky for quite a while, and from what I've tried of Android, it doesn't feel much better on the other side of the fence either. Why can't Apple -or- Google get such basic interactivity right?
I also have a bug with their hardware keyboard. After a couple days of usage the keyboard can get unresponsive and the § key starts to magically appear in the next text field that gets focus, at least 10–20 times, as it would be stuck. Reconnecting the hardware keyboard usually fixes this issue, but it’s still annoying. The restarts that are required for software keyboard bugs are worse, though.
iOS is generally quite good at these things. Like any new platform, you can't expect it the UX to be identical to an old platform that you're more familiar with.
Is there a similar trick for selecting text? What about selecting text from another source like an email or website?
Next time: tap the cursor and hold. You’ll see it get bigger and you can drag it where you want.
ios 13 wants you to "grab" the text insertion cursor and drag it around -- but what are you supposed to do when the text cursor is not visible? and what are you supposed to do when an entire text region gets auto selected as in the url area ...
i would really love for someone to fix this issue
-- or if anyone knows how to do it ... here's the problem: say you have a long url that ends with a number -- and you want to change that number or select it to copy and paste it elsewhere. how do you do this on iphone in safari after ios 13?
I remember one of the main reasons I "jailbroke" my iPad was so I could install an improved/alternate software keyboard, but I remember reading they added the option officially a while back.
I'm curious: are they artificially limited or do they all just suck?
Every year, the phone OS has to keep up with new tablets and/or phones.
Every year, the laptop OS has to keep up with the phone OS.
That's basically it. At Apple, where the phone goes, everything else follows.
Fortunately I’ve got a 256GB SDXC card which I’ve installed Pop!_OS on - which has convinced me that now’s as good a time as any to extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem (which I’m all in on - iCloud, Apple Music etc). My next laptop will be non-Apple. First non-Apple hardware in this house since 2003.
I’ll try swapping the drive with my daughter’s - she has the same model. At least I’ll know whether it’s the drive or the logic board. Then I can sell the bits.
The usual build-to-order options like Dell or Lenovo being backordered due to the pandemic, I walked into a Costco and bought a LG Gram 17[0]. This is the first time I bought a laptop off the shelf, and the first time my primary laptop has not been a Mac, in over a decade. I installed Xubuntu 18.04 LTS on it with no fanfare and have been quite happy with it since.
The early signs of Apple's demise, indeed.
[0] https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17z90n-r.aac8u1-ultra-slim-...
I was kind of hoping it would be the logic board to self-justify a new laptop. Now I’m thinking I’ll get the cheapest 256 I can get and nurse the laptop along for as long as I can.
But I’m committed to switching to Linux. Still exploring distros.
I'm running a 6-year old MB Pro, updated within the first week of every releases' public beta availability, never reinstalled. I use sudo far too liberally to be good for system health, including (as long as it was possible) deleting all sorts of files in /System, /private, etc. when I run out of space and believe they're superfluous via cursory inspection ( i. e. sudo rm -rf /System/<asterisk>/{AMD,<asterisk>SCSI}<asterisk>).
And... it just works? I've never lost any data. I've typed in my WIFI password once and not changed anything since. Time Machine recently stopped working, and I had to follow the cable because I didn't remember where the HD actually was (taped beneath a cupboard, as it turns out; the power cable had somehow unplugged). Catalina did throw up a few permission dialogs after installation, but that took less than five minutes, even though I run a few low-level utilities (karabiner etc).
There are certainly some annoying UI bugs or inconsistencies. When you open an ePub in Books and immediately press cmd+f, for example, the search field loses focus repeatedly while the book opens. And why is cmd+f the shortcut for search almost everywhere, but not Keychain?
I recently installed Linux on a Desktop for some Cuda work, for the first in 15 years or so. Based on what I had read (mostly on HN), I expected Linux on the desktop to have made vast progress over that time. I'm sorry to say that it is, still, a complete disaster by almost any measure. I have no idea why the popular narrative sees the two anywhere close to each other.
Case in point: My installation of Ubuntu, using defaults, had an application menu with categories "Preferences", "Setting", "Utilities, and "System". Those all mean (almost) the same thing! There are two package managers now (apt and I forgot the new one's name), each with abpout five GUI and three CLI applications for installing packages. But both sometimes installed three year old versions of standard software (calibre, I believe). Good thing Homebrew is now available for Linux, because somehow they have no trouble keeping up.
Font sizes, margins, and contrast are all over the place. There are dozens of color schemes, yes. But much like unhappy families, each one fails in its own manner: with both a dark and a light one, I encountered parts of the UI where you'd suddenly have light buttons with light (invisible) text. Or, IIRC, light text on dark backgrounds. Which works -- until there's a link in the text.
There seem to be five different subsystems between my mouse and the desktop. None of seemed to allow adjusting scroll wheel acceleration. (Even pointer acceleration felt wrong to me. And even though I found the system of partial differentials that seems to be the official interface for adjustments, I failed to find the sweet spot. But this might be an issue of familiarity more than objective quality).
Good luck with that.
Apple used to maintain a 2 year (or longer) cadence earlier.
I suspect the first few months after each release used to be focused on hardening it. With the yearly release cycle they probably have to shift over to working on the next release almost immediately.
If the same thing happens today where everything is soldered and epoxied together, you practically lose the whole machine and all the data on it. Woof.