Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator | Hacker News Reader

Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

martin.wojtczyk.de

631 pointswojtczyk395 comments

Comically, I didn't even notice those wobbly numbers in the first screenshot, I was too busy noticing:

- "Unicode" button label way off center

- The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position

- The indicators for bits 31 and 63 are not aligned with each other

- x and + not being horizontally aligned (I believe this is an icon-font issue, seen on HN before so knew to look for it)

> "Unicode" button label way off center

Its actually the center of the button, I made a video for context: https://imgur.com/a/1Y9O8dS

> The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position

Might be due to the image compression, it looks fine on my MB.

> Its actually the center of the button

Upvoted for putting in the effort, and because you make a correct point.

But the Unicode button is perceptually off center, because ASCII is a smaller word, and there's no visible boundary between the buttons. This comes up a lot in iconography, the classic example is a play triangle (like the media control) in a circle. Placing the triangle in the geometric center won't look centered, it needs to be a tiny bit to the right of that to account for the shape.

No separation between the buttons means you can't see the bounds which the words are centered in, so it looks off.

The 8 and 10 have the same problem, for the same reason. A visible background-gray line between the buttons would solve this problem, it should be 'squircled' to make it I-shaped and match the outer edges.

From zooming into your clip both ASCII and Unicode are wrong:

- ASCII is off center ~43/50 pixel margins

- Unicode is off center ~20/25 pixel margins

- Both have different margin sizes

- The button sizes of both are the same.

- The Hide button is offset from both 8/10/16 selector and ascii/unicode buttons

- Even if everything was correct, because there is no contrast between "Off" and background, it's going to look wrong anyway

The selector issue is very visible in your video still: you can see black pixels at the top of the selected number where it shows the selector background, but none at the bottom because it's misaligned and the selection bubble is slightly outside its box.

Edit: zooming in closer it's maybe not outside the box at all, but there's some odd aliasing artifacts or something making the space above the highlight look bigger than the space below.

Honestly I don't think it makes it any better if the Unicode text is theoretically centered; the fact that there's zero separation between the options, and such poor spacing that it's difficult to tell and feels awkward either way is still terrible design.

Arguably it also should be “1s’” instead of “1’s”. ;)

I'd agree with that. I wonder if it was a conscious decision to make it not look like 1 second or something?

Interesting. I saw the wobbly numbers instantly, but I didn't see any of that, and can't even see the 31/63 issue now.

The 31/63 issue for me is that they appear to be aligned differently to the 0s directly above them. The left-edge of the 6 seems to be further left than the left edge of the 3. The 3 in 31 at least looks vertically aligned with the 0 above it.

However, I suspect they both have the same ("Incorrect" seems too harsh a word... "Visually imprecise"?) layout constraints and they look different in practice because "63" is a wider number than "31".

> and they look different in practice because "63" is a wider number than "31".

Gah, I was just noticing this again today, in Finder! No sane font has Roman numerals that are not monospaced.

Lots of fonts have monospaced numbers, they just need to be enabled! Look for OpenType (TTF and/or OTF) fonts with feature "tnum", and enable it.

For CSS, use font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums.

The 63/31 misalignment looks to me like it's because they don't use a monospace font.

God, the more you look, the more you find. It's actually horrible.

Also, the "32" label sits directly centered under the bit above it, but literally none of the others do, they're wherever-the-fuck.

The x, + etc don't look centered vertically either -- compared to the numbers to the left of them.

2's and 1's look like they are a different font size to everything else.

The padding on the buttons at the top is hideous -- the downstroke on the y almost touches the outside of the button.

I fear how awful this looks in localized versions, if they made any.

It looks like a summer intern’s project made in Visual Basic.

A friend doing homework for a university assignment, circa Leopard or Snow Leopard, noticed that Calculator produced negative values when raising a negative number to an even power.

The bug turned out to be in CFNumber, in Core Foundation. CFNumber does a lot of fiddly stuff at the bit level for performance, and one of their optimizations for exponentiation was incorrect. Somehow it was never found by tests or due to buggy behaviors it created in other apps, but by someone clicking buttons and thinking critically about the output.

In Excel (and some other languages), unary minus has higher precedence than exponentiation, so that -x^2 = (-x)^2 = x^2. That can bite you (for example when calculating the normal probability density function “manually”).

Are there languages where this isn’t the case?

Python for one, and given that, I'd assume most languages.

almost all of them?

Standard mathematical notation?

It's arguably ambiguous.

Shouldn’t

    -3²

be the same as

    0-3²

?

Not necessarily. E.g. 2*-3 is not the same as 2*0-3.

In the UK at least if you don’t put the parentheses you will get flagged for a ‘bidmas error’ because indexes (exponentiation) have higher precedence than multiplication

Source: have made this mistake. Have been flagged.

I learnt this in NZ as bedmas.

Brackets, exponents, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction.

Bedmas, Christmas in bed!

Interesting, I started playing with spotlight and typing in (-20)^21 returns " = 0", which is obviously not correct.

And typing in "(-22)^21" gives "-71100888972574851072", but wolfram alpha insists it should be "-15519448971100888972574851072".

Looks like there are still bugs here.

Spotlight on Sequoia looks correct, though it limits precision more than wolfram alpha.

(-20)^21 = -2.097152x10^27 and (-22)^21 = -1.5519448971*10^28

Wow that's bizarre.

At first I thought it was just an overflow error but no it's nothing like that. The math is indeed very clearly broken, as I play around with it on Sonoma on my M1.

I'm genuinely shocked. I though this kind of floating-point math was rock-solid, tested thoroughly over the decades.

No bug in Big Sur spotlight:

"(-20)^21" = -2.097152e27 "(-22)^21" = -1.551944897e28

Hah,

macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 on M1 = 0

iOS 17.6.1 = -0

WTF.

Yes, it looks like spotlight math is broken on both.

The Windows 3.1 calculator has a fun bug where 2.01 - 2.00 returns the result of 0.00, not 0.01.

That always amused me.

Acording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Calculator#Windows_9x_..., the Win98 version of calc.exe got an arbitrary-precision math library for basic math functionality to fix this sort of problem.

also mentioned by Raymond Chen, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39... :

"Today, Calc’s internal computations are done with infinite precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and 32 digits of precision for advanced operations (square root, transcendental operators)."

And they fixed the square-root-of-a-perfect-square bug a few years ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/89s53g/microsoft...

Can this be true? Does the calculator have any irrational number? What if I enter PI * 2? Infinite precision, wouldn't that mean running until your RAM is full? Or would it simply work, because no irrational number is calculated to infinite (as many as the device could) digits and is therefore finite and can easily be multiplied?

Or another even simpler case: If division is infinite precision, and I enter (2/3) * X, does the calculator internally work with fractions? Otherwise it would have infinite digits to compute.

For 2/3, it does indeed work with fractions internally. For pi, it uses some floating point representation I think, you get about 50 digits.

For PI, calc.exe, in scientific mode, returns 3.1415926535897932384626433832795 which is 32 digits of precision (33 chars if you include the decimal pt).

Maybe they never had proper tests. Something as simple as exponentiating,which is a basic functionality of any modern calculator, not working for 50% of all integers? That looks to me like no one ever really tested that stuff.

There must be a way to do a mash-up between a spreadsheet and other languages like FORTRAN. Perhaps the language could be pluggable. You could mix and match and the spreadsheet formulas are the glue. Cell values abstract away the details of how that value got there. But, it accepts a refresh request.

Reminded me of this article about how centering things is the hardest problem in computer science (with plenty of examples).

https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/

Did he remove the cursor effect on his website?

You need to toggle the sun switch top right to moon, if you mean the "dark mode" effect.

There's (or used to be) a multiplayer cursor on the site. You'd see other visitors' cursors moving across the page

Funnily enough, even the "dark mode toggle" icon in the blog is not aligned correctly with the navbar text.

https://imgur.com/a/1xSCMWb

One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/.

That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.

I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.

This is not a software bug, but rather an optical phenomenon called "chromatic aberration". What's happening is that your glasses are bending light at different angles depending on the wavelength, to the red and blue and green are landing at slightly different places on your retina.

It's a hard problem to solve optically and requires specially shaped lens. It's a common issue in telescopes, with higher end expensive scopes having these specially shaped lenses to reduce this effect.

From the post:

> In conclusion, the off-center “x” is real and probably an artifact of the display or how it is rendered. It is unlikely that it is the result of chromatic aberration.

from the comment:

> That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.

Is this why, when I'm reading text on a dark background, red will appear on a different plane than white? I was just wondering the reason last night.

A different plane?

The red text seems to be closer than the other text. As if it were floating above the other text.

I get that a lot with default terminal colors - on black background, dark blue and dark red look shifted in opposite directions relative to baseline (white/light colors); when both colors are used in close proximity, it gives me a strong and quite distracting 3D effect.

I always thought this is specific to that color combination (red and blue on black) and LCDs, thus is perceivable by anyone, and could be used to create intentional 3D effects; I never considered glasses may be a factor too.

Sounds a bit like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis

> Another interesting reversal effect was observed in 1928 by Verhoeff in which the red bars were perceived as farther away and the blue bars as protruding when the bars are paired on a white background instead of a black background.

I have pretty strong high-index lenses, and definitely can get a kind of 3D effect.

The classic terminal blue and green text colors on a black background is the situation where I first noticed it: moving my head makes them shift in different directions giving a parallax or depth effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis

Chromatic aberration is mostly relevant further away from the center of vision. If there is an icon (or text) visually inspected carefully it is at the center where chromatic aberration matters least.

The icon is mis-aligned, or its the different color subpixels of the screen that are not produced at the same place. Tradidionally, red is to the left.

To be precise: chromatic abberation is lowest at the center of the lens. But with glasses we often don't look through the lens center even if we have something in the center of our vision.

>More expensive lenses have a coating to compensate for this chromatic aberration.

You can't compensate for chromatic aberration with a coating. You need a compound lens made from multiple elements each with a different dispersion, e.g.:

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

More expensive glasses lenses usually have worse chromatic aberration than cheap ones. The cheapest material for glasses lenses (PADC, often called by the brand name CR-39) has one of the best Abbe numbers (measure of dispersion).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CR-39

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

Can you link to something to buy?

I don't think anybody makes achromatic glasses lenses because they would be too thick and heavy.

AFAIK, every optician sells PADC (e.g. CR-39) lenses.

I can confirm this. I had annoyingly bad chromatic aberration with my previous glasses. I specifically asked for CR-39 lenses for my next set of glasses and now it's barely noticeable at all.

I would recommend this to any programmer who uses high-contrast syntax highlighting. To me, it felt fatiguing every time I noticed differently colored words scrolling slight further than other words on a terminal screen on the same line.

One thing to keep in mind is that CR-39 is not impact resistant. They will shatter and can do horrible things to your eyes when they do. Kids should always be put in impact resistant lenses.

If you’re a desk jockey, or impact resistance is not a concern, CR-39 will give the least aberration with the exception of crown glass.

The hidden hack here if you need/want impact resistance is to ask for Trivex lenses. Same impact resistance as polycarbonate but much better ABBE value. It’s often overlooked because it costs a little more than polycarbonate and most people don’t complain about the distortion.

Also, anecdotally, you get what you pay for with progressive lenses. I have a cheap lens in my sunglasses and a higher end lens in my daily drivers and I can easily tell the difference.

> It’s often overlooked because it costs a little more than polycarbonate and most people don’t complain about the distortion.

I just started wearing glasses. I asked about fringing and they had brushed my concerns off as me being new to glasses.

Deal with it for a few weeks, your brain will likely adapt.

This really bothered me many years ago, and I tried CR-39 and even glass, just for fun. I was never that happy with the results. I could always distract myself with chromatic aberration, and I think I eventually decided not to care anymore.

But right now, I have high index lenses and am reading HN with Dark Reader, and even if I use the maximum strength of my glasses (progressive bifocals), I can't really see any chromatic aberration.

I'm not sure if I should be happy or worried.

For those with stronger prescriptions who want higher index lenses to reduce thickness (and weight), look at http://opticampus.opti.vision/tools/materials.php and/or talk to your optician about available materials. (Personally, I've settled on MR-8 for my last couple pairs of computer glasses.)

TIL. Thank you.

I can’t speak to glasses, but limiting chromatic aberration in the binocular world does seem to involve coatings (at least as Swarovski, Leica, Zeiss present it).

If you cut some wavelengths, you won't get their contribution to the distortions ;)

You can’t eliminate chromatic aberration with coatings, it’s a physical property of how the lens interacts with light. The only way to fix it is to adjust your lens types or materials. Zeiss’ current marketing seems to agree https://www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/us/nature-observatio...

Coatings are still very useful to reduce other lens artefacts though.

I thought I got used to the color fringes in my glasses, but the real problem is that they actually reduce image clarity away from the center of the lenses. If you look e.g. at white text on a dark background from an angle, the chromatic aberration blurs (the color components of) the letters together. You can't really see clearly by moving the eyes to the edge of the FoV of your glasses; you have to turn your head instead.

This is directly contradicting the main purpose of glasses: to see clearly. So it's actually somewhat less safe to e.g. drive with glasses that have major chromatic aberration. No idea why optometrists brush it off as a minor glitch.

Another irritating thing that is captured in that image is the single pixel gap between the top of the application window and the menu bar. If the desktop background is bright it is very distracting. Not a mistake like the off centre X but drives me mad, nevertheless.

I knew from the very start of using macOS that it was designed around apps NOT being full-screen. Yeah, they are catering to the full-screen-apps people a little more nowadays, but embracing floating windows everywhere, and making good use of the distinction betweend CMD+Tab and CMD+~ makes it so much more powerful than just tabbing through full-screen apps, or three-finger-swiping. It also makes macOS way more beautiful to look at in my opinion.

It’s quite maddening if you use spaces (as workspaces) and same windows across them. An option like CMD-Tabbing being restricted to only applications with windows in the current space will go a long way.

Power users is an unknown concept at Apple.

I’m not sure that they’re an unknown concept, because macOS has lots of little things tucked away all over the place for power users. It’s one of the things I miss most when using other desktops, particularly those that go maybe a little too far on the minimalism thing (like GNOME).

It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those. The further one’s personal patterns deviate from that expectation, the higher the level of friction encountered.

> It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those.

That’s how you design generic appliances, not professional tools. While macOS is great for the users it caters to (that only use a handful of apps), it’s not for people that use their computers as computers (making it do pretty much everything).

It’s kinda tough, because a clean-cut, coherent vision of how the OS is intended to be used is necessary to build a great experience. The more you try to accommodate ways of usage beyond that, the more the vision falls apart and you end up with checkbox waterfalls and branching tunnels of config dialogs added in the pursuit of making everybody happy.

So realistically, judiciousness is required to keep it all glued together, and some usage patterns just won’t be accommodated.

For example, Apple doesn’t seem to be bending over backwards to make former Windows users happy, because the way that desktop works is just too different from what they’ve envisioned and what their long time users are used to. If they add a series of toggles to support Windows usage patterns, that’s a sudden 2x multiplier on the behaviors and UI that needs to be tested.

That said, I don’t necessarily agree with all of Apple’s decisions (I’ve never liked the linear representation of virtual desktops that in place since 10.7 Lion that well and preferred 10.6’s Snow Leopard’s 2D grid, for example), but the lines have to be drawn somewhere.

That gap provides contrast and separation between two similarly-coloured-but-not-quite grey objects. It would look worse without it, though I agree it is silly.

This is the same reason why window gaps are so popular in all tiling window managers. It just looks better.

When I got an ultra wide monitor I also noticed this for the first time on the macOS circular red X button, when wearing glasses. I guess a wide monitor has you looking at things off-axis more. It is really remarkable how much you can make the X dance around the red circle by moving your head. There's something about the colours and simplicity of that particular icon that really cause the effect. The effect is almost non-existent if you're looking at a more complex image, so I guess it's also remarkable how much your brain compensates for chromatic aberration in most contexts.

I mean horizontal and vertical centering is the hardest thing in computer science

Honestly what annoys me most is that it looks like a sideways traffic light.

My glasses cause a bit of chromatic aberration, but not enough that I'd expect to see this sort of effect except at the edges of their field of view.

Now that you point it out, the X is way off center on my up-to-date M2, so I took a screenshot with default display settings and zoomed in to look at the pixel work.

The X is rendered asymmetrically. It appears to be about 0.1 pixels too far to the left and down, since the antialiasing has shaded pixels "outside the X" but only on those sides. The antialiased render of the red circle is symmetric. This matches what I see without zooming in and rules out my glasses.

I wonder if someone fixed the bug for low-dpi displays where subpixel rendering mattered a lot, but did so in a way that hard-coded whatever Apple shipped 10 years ago. Maintaining tall piles of hacks is hard.

Alternatively, maybe their font renderer is getting wobbly in its old age. The window manager is my #1 complaint about this laptop, but crappy font rendering vs. well-configured Linux is also on my list.

On mobile devices, Apple’s Calculator app has always been one of the most frustrating apps I’ve ever used, and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself. If you press buttons quickly, like you would a normal calculator, many of the key presses simply don’t register at all. I’m not sure if they’re prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality, but it’s incredibly surprising from a company that focuses on user interaction, supposedly.

The lock screen is even worse. I have to slow down to input my passcode or button pushes don’t register.

I’m glad someone else noticed this. I never manage to unlock my iPhone first time.

It’s pretty sad

I have a similar problem on my Zenfone, there is a weird delay between key presses, especially when repeating a character twice, so that I often fail my password.

I always continue to fail several times because after failing once the last press of my last attempt gets registered as the first press of the next attempt so if I’m going fast my next attempt will fail too, until I stop and enter it like my grandmother would.

I wouldn’t be surprised it’s using the same UI code as the Calculator app.

I'm sure the horrible lock screen UX is simply a dark pattern to nudge users towards Face ID.

Even if you use Face ID you have to enter the password, instead of your face, regularly

Assuming I get another apple phone, I'm really hoping they still do something with touchid. That was heaven compared to faceid. I don't think I can use apple wallet payments without faceid, otherwise, I'd ditch it.

I do a lot of stuff with blue/purple gloves, and I can unlock my touchId device wearing those. Doesn't matter why/how. The fact I can shows how it is easy to bypass.

Can someone else wearing the same gloves unlock your device? Otherwise seems more likely the capacitive sensor isn't bothered by a few tenths of a mm of nitrile.

I've assumed it's enough oil/residue left in place that just pressing a clean solid surface to contrast the residue is enough to detect the pattern.

Can someone else do it? Quite probably, as I've tried using a different finger from the the registered finger with the glove and it unlocks.

I use a full passphrase with alpha/numeric values instead of a numeric only passcode. I've never seen a sluggish entry on that. Does it behave differently with a numeric only entry? I definitely experience the calculator sluggishness, but never entering my passphrase.

I have the same problem with the bitwarden macos app. If you start typing directly when it opens it misses keystrokes drives me nuts.

Try switching focus mode from the lockscreen (by long pressing somewhere inbetween all notifications, widgets, the clock etc). Always takes me several tries and I end up feeling like something is broken.

This makes me angry literally every morning when I wake up and turn off sleep. And the worst part is that it used to work fine until they changed it to a long press for some reason.

I have this same issue, and the same frustration every morning. It’s to the point where I will probably set up a shortcut and train myself not to use it haha. I really miss when it just worked!

It’s very easy to reproduce this bug, even if you don’t go quickly. Basically, if your tap becomes a “swipe” that leaves the button area, then a previously registered “tap” that’s already shown up in the field will actually “unregister” and disappear from the field. Try it yourself: tap down on a button, watch the dot appear, then without lifting your finger, swipe out of the button, and watch it disappear. This happens a lot when tapping quickly since you are tapping and beginning to move your finger in the direction of the next button. You have to train yourself to make only up and down motions to be able to go quickly. It is indeed very annoying. The way these buttons should work is like telephone buttons (registering on the “mousedown”, not “mouseup”), and not like OK buttons (that register on the “mouseup”), but instead they chose a weird combination of both.

The "keypress" behavior is not a bug in my opinion, it's a well-established behavior across platforms.

You could do the same thing with a button+mouse on a desktop. The dot for the typed character appearing immediately is different from alphanumeric keyboard behavior, because you can't register any key press before releasing the touch (or key) there, due to composition.

In my opinion, this is sensible behavior and your vision sounds like it would be a nightmare in reality to me, accidentally pressing neighbouring keys or tapping instead of swiping all the time.

Is this any different on Android? I've used Android for most of my smartphone life.

And I can't remember how often I was relieved to be able to cancel an accidental tap by swiping away, when I accidentally tapped a link while scrolling for example.

This is even the default for mouse buttons, no?

It happens, while rarely, still regularly, that I notice I pressed the wrong button just after the mousedown, but before the mouseup. And since I can remember, I was happy that the UI was made so I could then just hold the mouse button and move out of that button to cancel.

Just verified your description of the lock screen code buttons. Not a bug, but the behavior you describe would feel buggy to me.

There are plenty of UX annoyances on iOS though, that is not what I want to deny. I also prefer GBoard over apples builtin onscreen keyboard.

There’s always been two button modes. “mouseup” is indeed the most common. However, “mousedown” is used in certain cases where the feedback is immediate, for example in the phone app where the number shows up as soon as you tap. However, notice that the lock screen uses neither of these, but rather a strange combination of both: it registers on “mousedown”, just like the phone app, showing a new dot in the field, but then will “unregister” if you move away and lift your finger, removing the dot. As far as I can tell, this is the only place buttons work this way.

Yes, but I feel this is totally Ok here?

I think it would slow me down even more if it didn't have this behavior, because of typing in extra unintended numbers?

I don't have any issues with typing my passcode in quickly, and tbh hadn't noticed the tweak with the immediate feedback on "tapdown" (and the possibility of the number disappearing).

Would have to try, but I still feel I prefer the current behavior to what you suggested, and I'm pretty sure it's intentional.

Anyway, thanks for bringing this up, hadn't noticed! I'll admit, for me this is good interaction design.

Your comment implied that this was following the traditional pattern where moving away cancels an action before it takes place. I hope we at minimum agree that the Lock Screen uses a unique behavior that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the UI. I really think you’re just confusing this third interaction mode we’re describing with the traditional mouseup mode that has existed for 3 decades everywhere else.

The simplest comparison point is the calculator app which behaves exactly as you described: if you put your finger down on the number 9, a 9 won’t show up until you lift up your finger. OTOH, if it worked like the Lock Screen, a 9 would show up, but would then be removed if you moved your finger away and lifted up. But again, nowhere else works this way.

If you think this is good interaction design, do you thus think the calculator app has bad interaction design? That it should instead be adding numbers immediately and then retroactively removing them?

No, I didn't think of that Code entry character "preview" before in any way. Especially since it's only a dot appearing in practise.

It's just that I usually attempt to enter that code quickly if I have to, so I never consciously noticed it.

It seems great to me because when I enter my code slowly, I'm probably having input problems anyway (e.g. rain, thin gloves, tiredness).

And in these situations, the behavior felt so natural to me that I only now notice it.

I agree it may seem weird from a coherence standpoint, but the character appearing on keydown like it does just felt natural to me, just like a Win98 native button-down state.

These buttons don't behave like physical push-button phone buttons.

Regarding the calculator, the use case is the exact opposite, and I wasn't arguing against this regular "keypress" behavior anyway, just against the original suggested "keydown" behavior, which I'd consider a nightmare when used for tapping an on-screen keyboard.

The "bastardized" version on the iOS lock screen just has suited me well for this use case, especially when talking about numeric lock codes

> I think it would slow me down even more if it didn't have this behavior, because of typing in extra unintended numbers?

Can you explain how extra numbers would happen if it simply triggered on press?

Do you often mis-press a number, then drag your finger out to cancel?

The bug is that it shows they character as entered into the passcode when it really isn't. The bubbles should only update when you get lift your finger, not when you initially press it down.

> The dot for the typed character appearing immediately is different from alphanumeric keyboard behavior, because you can't register any key press before releasing the touch (or key) there, due to composition.

That is exactly why the dot should not appear immediately upon the down event.

The lock screen has been buggy for me for years at this point. At least once a day I'll turn on the screen and for half a second or so the notifications will render with perfectly square edges and then switch to the correct rounded version.

Also quite frequently I'll swipe up to view notifications beyond the fold and they'll end up in weird places, like they'll jump further up than they should or jerk around.

I swear I’ve put in the wrong passcode before hastily and it unlocks. I wonder if it’s because of this lag the display doesn’t match the input so I really did input it correctly but it just didn’t look like it.

Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design when actually it's not. The thoughtlessness/pixel ratio might be worse than Microsoft in some cases, which can be hard to believe.

> Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design when actually it's not.

Which led to people like me making a fool out of themselves. Always been using Android, and listened to iPhone users singing the praise of the amazing UI and UX of iOS. Well, eventually iPhone 12 Mini released so I figured, "why not give it a try, can't be worse than my current Motorola Moto G gen4 right?"

Well, it is worse. I still have the phone because it still works, but that was my first and last iPhone. Everything is dog slow, not because poor performance but because of slow animations. Same on Android by default, but at least I can speed it up. And the UX makes you jump through hoops, things are impossible to discover unless you watch tutorials on YouTube, and the amount of UI bugs seems sky-high for something that sells itself as "Premium".

And then CarPlay is just an abomination! Even the most basic things like "I'd like to answer a call while still being able to see the map I use for navigation" seems to be completely ignored and it honestly doesn't make any sense at all.

Ugh, I almost look forward to accidentally dropping the phone so I can go back to having a non-distracting experience in the car again.

Edit: I just remembered the most egregious issue: How can I see the current year without having to open up a separate calendar application/put a huge widget on my home screen?

> things are impossible to discover unless you watch tutorials on YouTube

My last Android phone made me watch about a dozen youtube videos to discover how to configure it... It's not an Apple thing anymore.

CarPlay is a thing because carmakers just can't seem to make a decent "radio" with a touchscreen no matter how they try. It would be nice to see a business school case study that reveals why.

That problem isn't limited to "radios." Have you ever used a smart thermostat? A touchscreen fridge? A smart TV? Horrible, horrible UX.

Radios don't need a touch screen. Old button radios are pretty intuitive. The display/touch aspect is because people want navigation, apps like deezer/itunes/Spotify, etc. Then you have to think about updates/real time data. How does that work? Does the car need its own data plan? Or do we do everything via usb and just do everything offline?

And then people still expect to connect their phones to the car, for calls/reading texts etc, so you still have to support that in some way... and people will expect that to play nice with the audio playback features (calls pause/unpause music, etc)

Since we're already supporting a phone connection, then it just makes life easier to bring your own experience. The auto maker supplies the interface, you bring your own apps, data plan, etc via carplay/android auto.

Personally, I find it's a huge step forward to whatever OEMs make in house which aren't updated/obsolete in a few years.

In theory you could use a smartphone as data provider for updates etc

> CarPlay is a thing because carmakers just can't seem to make a decent "radio" with a touchscreen no matter how they try

But CarPlay is 100x worse than Android Auto, even though Apple is supposed to excel at UI and UX, this was the point I was trying to make, not that car makers such at UI/UX.

Having used both, I disagree. What do you prefer with AA?

Well, for starters, if I'm using a map app on the CarPlay/Android Auto dashboard, then I expect phone calls to not cover the entire screen automatically, as I'm probably using the map for navigation.

Anything on top of that would just be extras, but something basic like that should work at least. Which it does on Android Auto, but not on CarPlay.

The biggest shock for me moving from Android Auto to Carplay was the complete lack of multi touch support in Apple's offering. Worked perfectly on Android.

I am happy CarPlay and Android Auto are a thing because I do not want to give any other entity access to my phone.

You can't feel the controls on a touchscreen. You always have to look at it.

>Everything is dog slow, not because poor performance but because of slow animations.

Did you try Accessibility > Motion > Off?

>Things are impossible to discover unless you watch tutorials on YouTube

There's a pretty useful manual built into the device itself called Hints I think? Did you read that?

> Did you try Accessibility > Motion > Off?

There is no "Motion > Off" but there is a "Reduce Motion" toggle. Seems to be turning things that were slowly animated into even slower fade, like when you switch applications. Doesn't seem to actually affect much, animations inside for example Apple applications is still there, no matter if that toggle is on or off.

> There's a pretty useful manual built into the device itself called Hints I think? Did you read that?

I've browsed through it, but I don't think it's in no way extensive? I tried to find anything documenting the "Hold on spacebar and drag to move text cursor" in the Tips application (that I'm guessing you're referring to?) and found nothing, which is one of the features I "discovered" purely by accident.

There's a manual for iOS. Here's[0] the section about the onscreen keyboard (ctrl-f for trackpad to find the spacebar thing).

Expand the Table of Contents + at the top to see all the sections.

(Like others, not defending the state of things, just trying to help.)

0: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-onscree...

edit: if you want it in an offline format, you can find it in the Apple Books app by searching iPhone User Guide.

Yeah, with the helpful title of "Turn the onscreen keyboard into a trackpad", not even mentioning "move/moving" or "cursor", and also using "trackpad" wrong? A trackpad is for controlling a pointer, like a mouse, not to control the "insertion point of text".

Great that it is mentioned somewhere, in some manner, I guess.

Yeah that was quite hard to find, even though I already knew about the user guide. I searched for both cursor and spacebar and came up empty. Finally checked each section.

Not great.

Disclaimer: I'm generally fine with iOS and use it and macOS as my daily drivers.

> There's a pretty useful manual built into the device itself called Hints I think? Did you read that?

I posit that if one needs to load up the Tips app to figure out how to perform desired functions, that's a problem with the UX and not the human trying to use the device/app.

The ideas espoused in The Design of Everyday Things[0] pops into mind right now.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

On the contrary I think it’s quite reasonable to gate functionality behind reading the manual. But one wonders why it’s a distinct application and not integrated throughout the system, such as through tooltips or a “question mark cursor”?

> The ideas espoused in The Design of Everyday Things[0] pops into mind right now.

the unfortunate reality of touch screens is that there are no affordances for things that can't be seen. design of everyday things goes over stuff like never put a pull handle on a push door kinda things. i think having to go to an app for some things is somewhat reasonable given the ui size constraints and only having so much touchable area... most of the functionality is there and self evident without an app.

I think you’re talking about iOS. If so, it’s Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion -> On

This doesn’t solve the problem. It just turns the animation into equally slow fades.

Wow, for just a second I was excited. And then I looked in Accessibility > Motion and there’s no “off”. I tried “Reduce Motion” and deleted an old Wallet Pass, and it still did a ridiculous and obscenely slow animation.

> And then CarPlay is just an abomination! Even the most basic things like "I'd like to answer a call while still being able to see the map I use for navigation" seems to be completely ignored and it honestly doesn't make any sense at all.

I totally agree that this is terrible. But this kind of behavior always makes me wonder if this is a "passive aggressive safety" thing. I have a 2019 Subaru Impreza, and I can't change the time on the clock unless I'm in park. I tried it at a red light once because I got sick of seeing the wrong time after DST and I thought something was messed up, but it turns out it was because I was in drive. I'm fully capable of changing the time at a red light without causing an 8 car pile-up, just like you're fully capable of talking on the phone and following directions while driving. Regardless of whether it's a bad UX thing or a misguided attempt at safety thing, it's still super annoying.

> I totally agree that this is terrible. But this kind of behavior always makes me wonder if this is a "passive aggressive safety" thing.

I'm 99% sure no one of the designers who created those UX flows have ever actually used CarPlay in real life, like the users do. It's really hard for me to imagine a designer coming up with an appropriate reason for blocking the map view because you answered a call.

I don't know why you are being down voted.

I know from first sources that it is true. The car dash design is completed independently of the UX/UI work.

And the designers/programmers never test it in the car. There is almost no iteration there. In fact the people I talked to worked remotes. They couldn't even try to get into a prototype car if they wanted.

I am curious where you perceive the slowness.

I always had flagship Androids before my switch to a 12 mini. Overall I am happy. There are plenty of things that annoy me lots but I never really noticed slowness.

Where do you notice it? Do you play games or use compute intensive apps?

> I always had flagship Androids before my switch to a 12 mini.

And I had budget Android phones (Motorola Moto G) before my 12 mini, yet the iPhone is worse on most points besides the display and sound.

> Where do you notice it? Do you play games or use compute intensive apps?

Anywhere where there is an animation/sliding/transition. Everything feels like it's moving in molasses.

But it's very much not a Apple-specific issue, designers nowadays seems to make animations in general way too slow. Which is fine when it can be configured (like on Android) but Apple doesn't like customization (or used to at least), so we can't.

This sounds backwards, based on my experiences. I keep thinking of switching back to Android, so I keep a recent-ish Pixel in my inventory.

I do not observe this on my 12 Mini that is on iOS 16. Comparing it to my Pixel 6a with stock Android 14, I’d say the iPhone is faster/smoother and less glitchy moving around the UI.

Perhaps something is up with your 12? That would still be a ding on Apple.

I think you misunderstand the complaint. What you perceive as "smooth", they perceive as "obnoxiously slow". They don't want smooth, they want the animation to be over so they can get on with life without waiting for it.

As the other commentator is saying, it's about the speed of the animation. It's the same on every iPhone, including mine, but it's too slow for someone who doesn't want to be "amazed by cool animations/translations" every time I switch pane/panel/window/go back/go forward.

> 12 Mini that is on iOS 16. Comparing it to my Pixel 6a with stock Android 14

Enable the Developer/Debug menu on your Android phone, turn off animations inside that menu then compare the "snappiness" between the two. While the iPhone puts animations/transitions/fades between everything, the Android will immediately "jump" to what you wanted, without animations. If you try this out, I'm sure you'll notice what I mean.

This is what I want on my phone too, or at least 100x faster animations.

Have you reduced motion in the accessibility settings? Sounds very similar to the devloper settings in Android.

Yes, to no avail. Mentioned earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409580

Everything is molasses and it irritates me to the point where I am hurting myself out of stress and anger by the simple fact that I have to constantly abort my muscle movements and train of throught to let the stupid software finish rhe animation/lag/burning my computer.

It turns out most people are not bothered by this. Somehow they are still slower than those animations.

On of my biggest suffering in life.

>slow animations. Same on Android by default, but at least I can speed it up.

Enabling the power user/developer menu in Android's settings lets me disable animations entirely. My old phone feel really snappy now and I'd do the same on a new phone too.

No need to enable developer settings, at least in Android 14 it's in accessibility>color and motion>remove animations.

I've used a few apple products -- the iPhone 3 was my first smartphone, and an iPad mini back when tablets were starting out. At the time of the switch to android, I didn't think too much of it, but definitely enjoyed the customisation.

A couple years ago I was gonna get a new phone and, half my family being Apple devotees, I was considering switching again so I could stop hearing the 'blue bubble' nagging, plus they seem to genuinely enjoy their phone.

In pure luck, a friend had a new iPhone 13 and hadn't switched from his old phone yet, and allowed me to use it for a couple days so I could see just how incredible the phones are and I should switch. After about 48 hrs, I was so done with the product, and like you, preferred to switch back to my old 'crummy' phone until I bought my next flagship.

I can't imagine being locked in till it dies, because as you said, the iPhone is such a miserable product. I'm sure you could resell and get a flagship for a similar price. You'd still net loss, but IMO it would be better than keeping the phone since you don't like it.

The older I get, the more certain I am that Apple products are designed from the ground-up as ad-watching appliances. On iPad, you're restricted to a sandboxed environment where you are not encouraged (or in many cases, allowed) to do anything other than watch ads. You cannot sideload apps that are Open Source. You cannot install emulators or fullspeed VM software. You cannot switch the browser out for one you would prefer with controls amenable to your satisfaction. You watch ads, because any holistic path to entertaining yourself is either sold by Apple or monetized through advertisements. On every Apple platform.

I remember watching those "what's a computer?" ads and laughing out loud. Yeah, what is a computer? We've gone so long watching YouTube ads and Music.ly sponsored content that half of us don't even know what one is. Are we even still connected, when companies like Apple mediate how we're allowed to communicate with each other and share ideas? Apple's design for a bicycle for the mind has been repurposed into a flywheel for cash generation. I don't meet a single person "riding" their iPhone anywhere more important than Pornhub or Instagram.

> You cannot sideload apps that are Open Source. You cannot install emulators or fullspeed VM software. You cannot switch the browser out for one you would prefer with controls amenable to your satisfaction.

Worth noting that while this used to be true, those things are now/soon geofenced features that only Europeans get to enjoy. Too bad if you happen to live in the home country of Apple.

I don't believe you're allowed to run fullspeed VM software or JIT-enabled browsers, even with the DMA. Nothing has been super set-in-stone yet, but those are the terms Apple is intent on promoting.

The intention is for people to be able to run whatever software they want, and Apple is currently figuring out if EU wants Apple to follow the intent of the law, or the letter. We'll see how it goes but I wouldn't hold my breath for Apple to get their will.

> I don't believe you're allowed to run fullspeed VM software or JIT-enabled browsers, even with the DMA.

You can. There's a new JIT entitlement for web browsers in Europe. It's still limited to _only_ browsers, so emulators are out of luck.

> Apple products are designed from the ground-up as ad-watching appliances.

That’s funny. I have virtually no ads on my Apple devices. I associate ads with Windows and Android.

And I have several browsers on my iPad, one reason being avoiding ads.

> I have virtually no ads on my Apple devices.

Virtually. It's great when you log into iCloud and only have to deal with the App Store's "Suggested Content" and the Google suggested results in Spotlight Search and the misery of the default YouTube client running 30s midroll ads. Then you can make the little storage nag go away with a convenient $2.99/month payment addressable to Apple Inc. Oh, you wanted sideloading? That's to the tune of $99/year... can't pass off the SDK for free, can you? We'll assume you ignore Apple Music, although it will certainly nag you to try it.

For cloud storage and basic sideloading capabilities, Apple will charge you $11.24/month for basic features of the phone you bought and still treat you like garbage. The premium brand-halo surrounding their products is the well-documented Reality Distortion Effect - you are being fooled into defending nonsense because you think this grifting benefits you. To be clear, I think Android and Windows both suffer from similar problems, but their users aren't fooled because it's explicit. Apple uniquely abuses their position as OEM, and the problem literally extends to them advertising to their users and convincing them it's harmless when Apple does it. If you don't understand it by now, just read the affidavit once the FTC wraps up their case.

> And I have several browsers on my iPad, one reason being avoiding ads.

You have one browser, with multiple interfaces. When Apple serves you boot, your browsers have no choice but to lick.

Sideloading is free (no need for a developer program subscription) and cloud storage isn't a "basic feature of the phone you bought".

> Sideloading is free

Not if you want the nag to go away

> and cloud storage isn't a "basic feature of the phone you bought"

I agree, but Apple thinks otherwise if you want the Settings nag to go away.

Yes, if you don’t want your software and services to be ad-funded, then you have to pay for them. I thought that was sort of obvious.

So you're coping. That's fine, just make sure you never use Android and discover how green the grass is on the other side. AOSP has fewer ads than iOS in it, and that's just an unfortunate fact.

On Android you install Firefox, have real ad blockers and have effectively the same system as any desktop computer.

On iOS you install a variety of shady ad blocking browsers because the Safari system of extensions doesn't really let the ad blocker extensions block what is needed. You are also trapped in Safari, which is not a good browser, just something that prevents Chrome from ruining everything.

> I can't imagine being locked in till it dies, because as you said, the iPhone is such a miserable product. I'm sure you could resell and get a flagship for a similar price. You'd still net loss, but IMO it would be better than keeping the phone since you don't like it.

I'm not locked to it but honestly I spend so little time on my phone that it's one of the smaller problems in my life. I do despise it, but not enough to sell it before I can't use it anymore.

Along these same lines, the tabletification of Mac OS is annoying. A friend asked me to help with importing photos from the Apple Photo app on his brand new desktop Mac.

The sequence of events was:

Lightroom Legacy needs photos imported because the new Lightroom (cloud/subscription version I believe) has a different workflow, interface and apparently, features, so he's using both for the time being.

So he follows guides on Adobe to import from iPhoto through a plugin.

I had to learn after much google-fu that iPhoto has been replaced by the new Photo app. No compatible libraries found, says the unhelpful error message.

No way to import his Photos library into it without first exporting all photos into a separate folder and importing that one into Lightroom Legacy. Why there is no compatibility shim/layer for that functionality I will never understand...

He refuses to export and reimport all his photos because he has A LOT of them. He does photography as a hobby primarily, but has been using his iPad and iPhone for a while without a Mac PC and was astonished at not being able to do such a simple process.

Part of my troubleshooting involved looking for a potential directory where the Photos app stored the files. It's some sort of package file that creates what seems to be the equivalent of a virtual directory. So I search for the Mac Drive icon... that took me to google, to then Finder, settings, and enable showing the drive. Why the hell does Apple hide the frigging storage device?!!! (I know why... but it's maddening)

One more reason to never want to use or support any Apple product in the future.

See, the file system is a fine system for general data, but if you have data of a specific kind, then there’s often a better way than just dumping them in the file system. That’s always been Apple’s approach: let data assigned to a specific app be handled by that app [1].

Apple’s approach has also been to allow export of that data into standard interoperable formats (be it music, photos, emails, contacts, calendars, etc.).

And FWIW, the photos are in “~/Pictures/Photos Library” - that must have been very difficult to find.

[1] it had two pieces of metadata, content type and creator, for files in Mac OSes prior to OS X, when it regressed to the windows/Unix way of handling things with inelegant file extensions.

Windows has a Pictures folder. Before they started screwing with the OneDrive directories, it used to be in ONE location. Now it's in OneDrive\directory location, which works, even if it annoys me. The upside being automatic backup and restore. That Pictures folder is accessible systemwide and is accessible through EVERY application that can browse directories.

The Photos library on the Mac was not accessible via Lightroom Legacy. He (& I) could not locate it through the "Browse" functionality within the application. I think I could open the photos through finder, but could not import them through Lightroom Legacy. I could, however, Open With: from the Photos app, which then imports into the application just fine. This irked him enough to not want to do it, and I explained that it was the only way to do so, or otherwise export and import the desired photos in bulk.

I see what you're saying, but Apple's approach was clearly not intuitive for me, nor the Mac user. It's what it is, but Apple needs to facilitate working with their virtual folders/libraries natively through applications, not force users to resort to using workarounds... to export into interoperable formats for applications that run natively on their OS. Either Adobe is screwy or Apple is screwy here, but I'm leaning on Apple so far.

There has always been a vision in computing where you can access the same data with different tools.

In the Kernigan and Plauger Software Tools book that describes the Unix user space you could use tools like wc, awk, sort, uniq, and grep, bound together with the shell, to do all kinds of things on plain text files.

As a photographer of course I want to share images between Lightroom Classic and DxO and as a computer graphics “artist” (I almost want to say “technician”) I want to work with images in Photoshop, web editors, tools I write to create images, etc.

Shouldn’t I be able to make music with GarageBand and then listen to it in iTunes and then write a program that plays it through my smart speakers at sunrise to wake me up?

Office 95 revolved around COM which meant that a Microsoft Word file was a composite file that could also contain data from other programs like PowerPoint and Excel so I could embed a small spreadsheet in a word document. (The fact that this system was documented and open was a weakness as much as a strength because you never knew if the recipient of a file had all the applications to open it)

Currently Office uses a documented XML and ZIP based file format. It is easy-peasey to load data in Excel format into pandas to do data analysis (less error prone than CSV even.). It’s not hard to write a program in PHP or Java that makes an Excel sheet complete with formulas for somebody to fill in then have them upload it back to a web site and suck the data out.

Locked in data is one reason why the cloud and mobile age feels like a step backwards than forwards, never mind the possibility of losing your data because you couldn’t pay the bill or your vendor got bought by Google, etc.

UI is designed by designers for designers. Then management and marketing. End users are a tertiary consideration.

Yes I'm bitter about the Jetbrains New UI abomination.

You can answer the call and switch back to Maps while the call continues, right?

> You can answer the call and switch back to Maps while the call continues, right?

Yes, I can, and currently have to, but absolutely 0 times I've answered a call in the car and want the Phone app to cover the entire screen, no matter what I had there before.

It's just extra dangerous when I'm using maps, as maybe I have a turn I have to make in that exact moment, and having to go back to the maps just because some designer at Apple want to showcase their contact/name/phone number layout in the Phone app sounds like asking for trouble.

Sometimes I quickly want to just say “I’ll call you back” and end the call.

You could disable animations on iOS through accessibility options. As a rule a flagship iPhone is at least 30% faster than flagship Android (by which I basically mean Samsung Galaxy) on realistic workloads.

> You could disable animations on iOS through accessibility options

No, you cannot (mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409580). Makes it even worse in the cases I tested actually.

> As a rule a flagship iPhone is at least 30% faster than flagship Android (by which I basically mean Samsung Galaxy) on realistic workloads.

That's cool, but not what I'm talking about. Even my Motorola Moto G4 (released in 2016) allowed me to turn off the animations, so even that one "appears" faster than my iPhone 12 Mini only because iOS forces you to wait for animations to finish.

A phone doesn't spend much time doing "workloads". UI animations in particular should never be close to CPU or GPU bound.

And they aren’t. The op probably just didn’t like some hyperparameter, like duration, because it had a different value than on Android.

Yes, I agree, that is what they meant by slow animations. So why did you bring up compute power? They specifically said "not because poor performance".

Also I don't think "just" is the word to use here. Slow is slow, and when it's on purpose it's harder to avoid.

Slow is in the eye of the beholder. Of all the legitimate complaints one could make about Apple, “slow” is somewhere towards the bottom of the list.

The threshold of what is too slow is in the eye of the beholder, but there have been good studies done on that topic and small delays do cause problems.

But the general idea of things being slowed down by animations is objective. It could be done in a frame or two, it takes X frames. And you can add up those delays when you're navigating and reach significant numbers.

> Edit: I just remembered the most egregious issue: How can I see the current year without having to open up a separate calendar application/put a huge widget on my home screen?

I'm not a fan of Apple for many reasons and I agree with your overall sentiment (though not with the same voracity), but I'm really curious how _this_ is the most egregious issue for you. The calendar year changes so infrequently, why would you need it featured so prominently?

> but I'm really curious how _this_ is the most egregious issue for you.

Because it's so basic. Add a switch that lets me decide how I want the date to be displayed on the lockscreen/notifications centre.

> why would you need it featured so prominently?

It doesn't need to be more prominently than where the date is right now, I just want the current year next to it as well.

>Because it's so basic

Exactly, it's such basic knowledge to know - it'd be a waste of space to show it ... What UI even gives you the option to have year next to date/day and time?

> Exactly, it's such basic knowledge to know

Well, for some people, they know exactly what date it is, and what week number it is, does that mean we shouldn't show that either, because it's such a basic knowledge to know for some?

I'd prefer to accept that different people remember different details, that's why we let our personal computing devices be customizable, because not everyone is the same.

That must be baffling to so many, but people's memory work in very different ways, and not keeping in "RAM" the current year or one's age is a thing. It comes back after a moment of thinking, but it's just not instantaneous.

And that's of course worse in countries with two calendars.

To be fair: I also can't find the current year on my Pixel 4 (Android 13) in the clock app or the settings. I have to open Google Calendar.

Shocker: you have to use the Calendar app to open the Calendar.

The egregious amount of time wasted playing the animations is really the worst. For a great demo of how bad it is, even on my 15 Pro Max — try this: go into a Messages conversation and hit the + next to the text entry field. An ugly, blur-filled animation has to play for about 1000ms EVERY TIME you open this menu up, which is now the way you have to add a photo to the conversation. Heck, I don’t even want the menu, I just want a photo button which instantly shows my most recent photos.

Back in jailbreak days there was a global animation timer hack you could do — changing the animations to take zero seconds — so they would all just be skipped. It made the phone so fast.

(“Reduce Motion” is useless for this because yeah, the fades are just as slow.)

I take your overall point, but for this specific complaint, there’s a shortcut: long press on the “+” button to take you directly to the photo pocket in Messages.

Thank you! A year on this crappy UI and I never discovered that organically. Such a great discoverable UI.

> most egregious issue: How can I see the current year

What do you want/need this for? Not something I've heard before

A full-year calendar. I’m not GP, but I’m pretty visual when it comes to planning things for the coming year. I don’t need coloring to show what’s available and what’s not, just a full year view of the calendar.

This is probably at the center of it: only a portion of users want this, and thus it will be a PITA on iOS.

Apple perfected optimizing for the 80/20 split, where 80% of users will experience very little friction, and the other 20% can go pound sand. And that was obviously a clever marketing decision up to a point.

> What do you want/need this for?

Some things don't get stuck in my memory, like the current year or my own age. My own age is easy to calculate as long as I know the current year, but the current year isn't always easy to remember for some reason, especially the first 6 months of each year. Most of the time I just have to think for 10-15 seconds to remember it though, so isn't the end of the world exactly.

And no, my memory is generally fine, it's just some "sometimes changing" numbers that just don't get persisted correctly, or they're stored correctly but my retrieval microservice is too janky to retrieve stuff fast enough.

That might have been true once, but I don't think that's really true any more. Most users are not awed by their iPhone experience as they were ten years ago. Everyone realizes that iOS and Android are essentially identical for most practical purposes and usability, and most are not choosing the platform for that reason any more. I also think plenty of people in-house at Apple are well-aware of these issues.

Today, it is more about maintaining your suite of apps, the Cloud with all your data, the little blue bubbles in your group chats, and a host of other issues that are more a priority for choosing one platform over another, for most people. If I were to switch to Android now, it would be a huge PIA considering the 10+ years of platform integration and thousands of dollars of app purchases, iCloud, etc, that has made up a significant part of my digital life. I'm sure it would be similar for people going in reverse. Apple knows this, hence why services have become an essential part of their business.

It’s really the cross-device stuff that keeps me in Apple’s ecosystem. Taking phone calls on my mac, having recent browser tabs from all devices on every device, etc. of course each individual thing can be done on windows / android / linux, but the out-of-the-box, no-config-required experience is really very good. Even if it is frequently and frustratingly not perfect.

Android has a lot of those features through KDE Connect now.

Calls on computer? Like Signal allows? Tabs from other device? Like Firefox offers?

The thing is, it is very easy in comparison to offer this cross device functionality, if you lock in your users and can simply make lots of assumptions about what software the user will be using. How much of that cross platform stuff works for non-standard browser or non-standard messenger?

Well the phone calls work on every device. I suppose there’s a case that phone numbers are non-standard, but I think it takes motivated reasoning to get there.

And the cross-device stuff is based on cloudkit, so it’s easy for third parties to adopt and get those benefits using apple id rather than additional signins. Of course that has some lock in, which I recognize is so offensive to some people that the upsides aren’t worth it.

The thing that keeps me on iOS is that Android just doesn’t feel right, and none of the tweaks that can be applied (launchers, etc) can fix that. Animations, interactions, etc just feel… off somehow, like I’m using an early alpha build of software that has placeholders strewn about.

It’s not a “it’s not iOS” thing, either. There are certain desktop Linux setups for example that don’t bother me nearly as much. It’s just Android that feels “wrong”.

If only the entire front end of Android were interchangeable like Linux DEs are.

I think it's just the lack of consistency in app designs

I'm in the same mind. As much improvement as Linux GUIs have made over the years, there's always just been that last bit of polish they are missing that makes them feel just a bit klunky in comparison to an Apple OS. Does it affect performance, no, but it just has that OSS feel to it. I totally understand the $$$ differences involved, and modern *nix UIs have come a long way, but it's like that last mile problem they just can't quite get there. It does not make it unusable, it's just the thing that always makes it noticeably different.

considering the outright insane hiring practices of canonical im not surprised...

> Animations, interactions, etc just feel… off somehow, like I’m using an early alpha build of software that has placeholders strewn about.

It's funny that I'm the complete opposite. I was fine with Android, switched to iPhone (as mentioned upthread) and everything feels off, like no one cared about the UI and UX, and bugs galore everywhere. If someone handed me my iPhone 12 Mini today I'd say they're running a beta version of iOS on it.

Maybe it's just a "get used to" thing as we're surely not the only ones having very opposite feelings about this. I've now had my iPhone for 4 years it seems, but I still feel like the OS is beta-level quality, should have gotten used to it by now...

QA for iOS has slipped in recent years, but I feel that’s a different matter. The issues I have with Android aren’t bugs, it’s more like odd choices for things like animation timing curves and nitty gritty things like that.

Bugs aside, it feels like touches more “directly” control iOS whereas with Android it’s like interactions are all passing through an additional layer, leading to an impression of disconnectedness. It’s not entirely unlike the phenomenon that used to be observable on some Linux desktops a decade+ ago when computers were weaker and you could “feel” the layering of X11, GTK, your compositor, DE, etc all kind of slip-sliding and not acting fully in concert, where Windows and OS X usually didn’t give this impression.

Apple used to be the epitome (or close to it) of UI design. There was care and attention to detail that usually went into their designs.

The past 10 years or so? Everything has gone out of the window. No one is left at Apple who cares.

I switched to an iPhone a few years ago and I really miss the Android calculator app. It showed the entire expression typed so far and its current value! In desperation, I have resorted to SSHing to my desktop and using `python` as a calculator.

Well, if you really want that on your phone you can get other calculator apps that are quite advanced. Might be easier than doing what you are doing.

Other calculator apps that might have different privacy policies, and who might call home to Google and Facebook despite reporting "no data collected", and which might disappear from the app store because it costs $100/year to have the privilege of providing a free app (e.g. as happened with OpenCalc. https://github.com/breeko/OpenCalc/issues/3 )

Believe me, I looked for a while. Nothing quite scratched the itch while also being free, ad-free, and private. I guess I sound quite picky, but SSH + python checks all the boxes.

You can use Siri Search on iOS as a calculator, which works the same way as Finder on a Mac — this keeps track of the entire expression when you’re doing it

> You can use Siri Search on iOS as a calculator

With the added benefit of having to press not just one, but two buttons in order to add a "+" sign. First press "123", then press "#+=" and now you can add your complex mathematical characters :)

I'm with you.

If I have to use the default keyboard to enter arithmetic expressions, I'd rather SSH to my own server. I'm not exactly sure of the privacy implications of typing things into Siri.

If you rely on a calculator then you owe it to yourself to check out pcalc. One of the few apps I maintain paying for these days.

I'm happy this isn't just me. Apple's calculator app is a showcase for some of their most obtuse UX decisions.

IO-blocking animations are everywhere on iOS, and sometimes they result in overlap (e.g. you can activate a widget and open an app if you press an app icon too fast after opening a folder). But having buttons on iOS animate in response to touch but not engage any further is mindblowing and infuriating.

It's also filled with obtuse interactions. (Did you know the iPhone's calculator app has extra buttons? You have to use the control center, unlock your screen rotation, and then rotate your phone to access it.) (Did you know you can erase digits by swiping left or right on them? You can't _access_ the hidden digits of precision this way.)

Maybe it will be fixed in Apple Calculator for iPad (soon to be released 2024) in iOS 18?!?

Of course not. Apple would not release a calculator for iPad that doesn't honor the bigger form factor and Apple's uncompromising design and user friendliness, nothing that doesn't make users go "Wow!" in slack-jawed amazement!

It needs to work on it for at least five more years, meanwhile you can buy one of the many inferior iPad calculator apps that are not hindered by Apple's vision of greatness.

This is about the beta iPad calculator in iPadOS 18 from a month ago:

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-18-calculator-app/

Similarly in Google Calendar Android app: https://youtu.be/7z-82Hi5dtc

> prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality

This describes iOS in a nutshell.

Anyone who has tried to play computer games semi seriously on a Mac has experienced some level of bewilderment due to Apple's decades-long refusal to include an option to disable mouse acceleration in their settings.

My "favorite" macOS mousing sin is that the reverse scrolling options for touchpads and mice are linked, despite there being two distinct checkboxes.

Meaning you cannot have reversed (aka natural) scrolling on a touchpad, and standard scrolling on a mouse at the same time without 3rd-party software.

It’s not just animation causing the problem.

There are so many cases where I touched a button and it’s so slow that I tap again, but when it finally responds, it does the thing twice or changes the UI under me and I tap a different button.

Or it changes color/flashes to acknowledge the touch, but does nothing until I’m super patient and try it again and it works.

Or it does nothing to acknowledge my touch and doesn’t execute the action, so I question my sanity.

The point is that it’s so inconsistent that I don’t have an evidence-based guess at the root cause. My gut says it’s the overuse of dispatch queues.

> and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself

I’m not surprised. Apple’s first party apps have always seemed like afterthoughts that were lower priority than other things. (E.g. relative to what I consider great quality hardware.)

Maps was terrible for several years following the release, and is still not great.

Screen Time, especially the parental controls side of it, is almost unusable.

Find My Friends used to have all sorts of disconnects where it wouldn’t work, though admittedly it seems to have finally gotten better over the past couple years.

These are just some examples I can think of. But this bug in the OP doesn’t surprise me.

Maybe now is a good time to remind everyone: your vision will deteriorate. Keep this in mind when designing.

When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable.

According to my eye doctor the screen time is causing eyesight issues earlier. We're not designed to stare at a bright light 40cm away all day.

May want to look at some eye exercises - or at least something far away.

Very few screens are bright enough to compete with the normal brightness of outdoor sunlight. There's no evidence that close focus or looking at bright screens causes eyesight problems. Bright light actually seems to protect against myopia. Here's a good overview:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/

Once I took apart an LCD monitor (with LED backlight) since one of the backlight elements was broken (I got it broken for very little money). I thought I'd see whether the LCD element can be used in front of a window to make a sci-fi type screen. Turns out the backlight is much, much brighter than daylight, and the LCD lets almost no light through. The LCD was too dark to make a cool sci-fi screen, and the backlight sitting separately was blindingly bright.

From the same article:

"In contrast, long-wavelength light is growth-inhibiting and short-wavelength light is growth-promoting in rhesus monkey (57) and tree shrew (58)."

Modern monitors have high amount of shortwave spectrum, blue is unusually shortwave.

The "in contrast" is to chickens and guinea pigs, where the opposite occurs. What relevance this has to humans is unclear.

It happens in primates, blue light causes problems. So yeah very much relevant. Stop cherrypicking.

Outdoor daylight typically has more blue light in it than indoor light, yet outdoor light appears to be protective. So yes, "unclear" is accurate.

No this is incorrect. Spectrally, LED light has far "bluer" spectrum, with a very sharp peak at 450nm. Sunlight has its blue part smeared all over the range, with the most energy in cyan 500 area .

Depends on the LEDs. High CRI LEDs are available for those that want light closer to sunlight.

Just want to endorse this point about considering accessibility when designing interfaces. Small low contrast fonts are a real pain as you get older.

Doctors would say the stupidest things. We are not “designed” for anything.

Evolution by natural selection of often regarded (somewhat by analogy) as a process of ‘design’.

If you like, replace ‘designed for’ with ‘suited to’.

'of' --> 'is', of course.

You can get grumpy about it, sure. Or you can just accept that any use of "designed to" in respect to humans can be replaced with "adapted for" without loss of meaning.

Most people who say "designed" here aren't ignorant: they don't care about the distinction and say what's idiomatic.

> When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable.

FWIW in Firefox (and i guess Chrome and other browsers) you can have per-site zoom. Also addons like Stylus allow you to setup site-specific CSS rules (and HN uses a bunch of classes in elements that use the same visual style by default but can be altered with custom CSS). For example in HN one thing (among others) i have is to use a slightly darker background for every other comment to make it easier to distinguish between comments when scrolling.

Haha, off-by-one pixel error!

I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH), but I also have a documents folder that I’ve accumulated over decades. I still use various .txt files in the docs folder as my low tech note taking apps.

I use the Spotlight or Alfred keyboard shortcuts (that also use spotlight index?) for quickly opening the files when needed - and annoyingly my most important file - notes.txt - regularly disappears from the Spotlight index and suggestions. It’s been like that for at least 5 years, probably closer to 10. I’m not even trying anymore, will just open the file from command line with vi as the fallback step.

Speaking of bad vision for a moment I thought I read “I still see MsDOS as the best choice” and almost yelled out what patrician taste!

Well, you can run multitasking in TSRs & keyboard interrupt handlers (the original event loop)… implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader…

> implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader…

I'm pretty sure both of those have implementations available for DOS already.

I recalled something from distant past - MSDOS multitasking with DESQView (apparently the same vendor who built QEMM):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

Funnily enough a simple fgrep is super fast on SSDs and actually reliable. Even across TBs of data.

With Spotlight you can never be sure. And to be fair, the Windows equivalent sucks just as much.

Yeah I sometimes use ripgrep for this. It’s suspiciously fast!

> I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH)

If it' just "this", Linux is perfectly capable and IMO even superior.

Which Linux laptop do you recommend?

Try a Lenovo (thinkpad or ideapad), or a System76, or Tuxedo. Those are generally the most Linux friendly devices.

It should be noted that the build quality of the ThinkPad are much higher than the IdeaPad. I have both and the IdeaPad is more or less on par with other cheap consumer laptops.

For sure, but they are also much cheaper

>It should be noted that the build quality of the ThinkPad are much higher than the IdeaPad.

And still, they've fallen so low in recent years I don't see it being drastically better nowadays. Had a T495 for a while. Worst laptop I've had in a decade.

Thinkpad P14s series with AMD, they make sure it is fully supported on Linux. I would take the just arrived gen 5 AMD because of the new Zen5 cores. Same perf than with Zen4, but much lower power consumption.

I have a P14s Gen4 AMD that works like a dream with Linux

Huawei mate book 14 (2024) the grey one (800 bucks) or the green (1200). The mate book pro is superb too but to expensive.

You'll love the OLED screen and it's ratio 3:2! What a beautiful thing.

For the described usage pretty much any laptop would work, even a Chromebook.

Dell XPS are quite nice on the high end developer category of laptops

If you're looking for an occasional laptop, I bought a Lenovo V14 ADA for the few times I travel; got it brand new for less than $275. 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 4 threads, good Mesa support. Perfect for travel / now and again usage. It can even play some games on low graphics.

EDIT: I should note, this is the AMD variant of the V14

I just checked Lenovo's more recent offerings in the US; the IdeaPad 1 15" AMD Abyss Blue.

Not sure if the build quality is as good as the EU SMB market laptops (which are generally really good value with good build quality, for me a perfect compromise between price and build quality, steel internal framework with solid plastic case, not sexy but definitely robust).

This IdeaPad1 looks like it has the same specs as the EU model (V14 G4 AMN). Just check if the build is solid enough. The IdeaPad1 can be bought at Best Buy.

I have an oldish Lenovo Thinkpad T470 which is bulker but it's very good nonetheless and a Dell XPS (4 years old, and the battery sadly is the weak point since I used it 95% of the time connected to an outlet and never cared for battery health)

Yep I should have written "mostly browser/SSH". But then occasionally I have to print something or run a (customer-provided) VPN client or open some corporate Excel file, etc. And there's the convenience factor of keeping my current setup. But should the MacOS thing become untenable for some reason, yep next step would be a Lenovo/System76 laptop known to work with Linux (including audio/bluetooth/wifi after resuming from sleep!) or even a Chromebook...

P.S. I've ran Linux/X (plus VMWare VMs with Windows) on my desktop machine with few complaints since the '90s and it was always the laptops that had issues, causing me to switch back to Windows after a couple of weeks of trial & frustration in the 2000s. I got Windows pretty performant & usable though, even attended Mark Russinovich'es Windows Internals class in London back in 2006 or so :-)

Laptop issues have dropped markedly in the last 3~4 years; especially battery life on AMDs in the last 6~12 months, the kernel perf / scheduling changes have been pretty good.

Just a cheap Chromebook would probably be even better IME - nothing to worry about, it is really very much just a keyboard and screen and gets out of the way.

Less can be said about your typical Linux experience in in the 2020s where you will still inexplicably find yourself having to mess around trying to get Bluetooth/audio/webcam/sleep working reliabily.

Does anyone remember NDISwrapper? You took Windows drivers for your laptop WiFi device or whatnot and the wrapper allowed to load them into Linux kernel (still didn’t work for me reliably though, not surprised). Even when I was young and had lots of free time, it seemed insane to have to deal with this.

I use linux on the desktop, but I still run a MacBook for my laptop.

Nobody else offers the same combination of battery life to performance/weight, build quality, keyboard, trackpad, and screen. Of course it's not perfect for everbody and you might have different priorities but I think the MacBook gets most of them right for most people.

Some come close on a few of those points but if you want official linux support your choice is very limited. Perhaps that doesn't matter to you but I don't want to even think about if updating my daily driver is going to result in a broken webcam or flaky wifi or bad power management.

I'm holding out hope for the new snapdragon based laptops. They seem pretty close!

Even when expanding scope to include laptops that run Linux well despite not officially supporting it, the selection available still have major issues, whether they be with build quality, screen panel quality, battery life, standby time, sleep/wake, overall lack of fit and finish (e.g. unthoughtfully placed ports) or some combination thereof.

It seems like a near impossibility for other manufacturers to not phone some of those things in. There’s always a catch.

The x1 carbons running Linux are better than the Mac in every aspect except performance for the battery life, but personally I don't want to use my laptop for that long at once anyway, so w/e.

>> Nobody else offers the same combination of battery life to performance/weight, build quality, keyboard, trackpad, and screen.

Exactly this. And also a decent sound. I would definitely want to have a linux laptop again as OSX s*cks in many ways but Macbooks with M chips are still far superior so I keep monitoring the situation and waiting...

It is not a problem to find a laptop with high specs but then battery su*ks, it's made of creaking plastic, has a plastic clickpad hard to click, bad key travel and response or audio sounds like a 5y old cheap smartphone. This is something I am not willing to spend money on and torture myself at the same time.

> I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH), [...]

Almost anything will do for those?

Recently windows has become much better for things a linux or macOS user takes for granted, like using ssh (a quick google search tells you how to install it using powershell), but is missing a lot of features. Two recent examples for me are taking 5 minutes to figure out how to install and use rsync, and taking 10 minutes finding a program to add/delete pages from a pdf file that's not a trial or demo of some kind.

SSH clients have been easy on Windows for at least 20 years: just use Putty. And there's also at least on Chrome extension that works as an SSH client. But you are right, that Windows doesn't come (or didn't come?) with one out-of-the-box.

In any case, I can see that those addition things like rsync or PDF manipulation might differ between the different operating systems. I was really just talking about browser plus ssh (client).

That’s pretty quick?

I did mention it’s become a lot better. These are just minor annoyances.

Both of those features have been built in to macOS for 2 decades, so in comparison, it’s quite slow.

My bet would be on some compounding error from long usage also.

I'm using Apple Notes and it fails in some random ways after keeping it open for 1-2 weeks: When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random stuff, dragging text won't work, I can check/uncheck todo boxes. Goes away when I restart it.

I ran into this in Notes as well. Restating Notes fixed it, but wasn’t my first instinct, as I view copy/paste as a system task and didn’t think it would be impacted within a single app.

Seeing that I’m not the only one, I need to remember to restart notes at the first sign of an issue, rather than trying the action over and over trying to figure out what’s going on.

Hopefully, seeing as you are not the only one, you figure out where to file a bug report and then file it too. And then it gets fixes.

Ha, I am too used to it being more accessible to file a bug report, having spent most of my career with GNU/Linux (contributing and using since 90s).

https://www.apple.com/feedback/notes/

Or more generically…

https://www.apple.com/feedback

…if you have bugs to report that aren’t for Notes.

Maybe the offsets themselves represent a binary number within that byte that corresponding to the bits within that byte. Maybe if you give it the right sequence, a message will emerge.

Notes has been super buggy for a while. The failure modes are so weird I don't even understand how it's possible for a text editor. E.g. text and selections rendered floating between or on top of lines of text. I wonder how they manage to bork it so hard.

Did this possibly start when they added “live” collaboration (quotation marks placed very intentionally) to shared notes?

[0] says that was in macOS Ventura 13.1 and iOS 16.2.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to rewrite the text editing engine in Notes, or at least parts of it, to accommodate for this change. And if there’s anything more terrifying than modern Apple rewriting parts of macOS, it’s them doing it for any cloud-based functionality. shudders

0: https://techhub.social/@shantini/109508624631773033

I started using a shared note last week and my sister in law edited a grocery list at the same time I did

It duplicated the entire list on top of itself; I was laughing at how bad of a bug it was

> When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random stuff

A special place in hell exists for such code. No surprise the coder responsible is not keen to visit it.

My initial thoughts were that these issues were showing how things look on a non-retina display, or a display with non-default scaling. That does seem to be the case, but not entirely.

I took some screenshots and I do not see the misaligned numbers at retina or non-retina resolutions, but I do see the odd bevelled edges on the 8/10/16 "tabs": https://imgur.com/a/PqqkWai

Apple have pretty much given up on making things look correct on non-retina displays, so many things are positioned at what turn out to be half pixel steps. Depending on whether we're talking fonts or shapes things can jump by a pixel or become blurry. I wrote about this here: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/01/25/running-modern-ma...

> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t

There is: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/

That said, it isn’t very user-friendly, and I find that they don’t seem to pay much attention to it. When they do respond, it tends to be some form of “#wontfix. Please close this.”

That looks like a fairly ugly little bug. I suspect they know about it now, thanks to the HN Bug Reporter. It tends to highlight these types of things.

Conversely all 4 of the bugs I reported with that were fixed in the next minor release!

It may well have to do with the types of bugs I report. Many are Xcode bugs, and Xcode is one of the most productive bug farms on Earth.

I also submit feature requests and usability issues.

My experience is pure anecdata.

I usually end up closing the reports, after a number of months of them being ignored.

RNG coding? I.e. what bugs replaced them...

I reported a bug that occurs in a specific configuration of the Music app (trying to use Home Sharing + using bluetooth headphones), never heard anything back. I wonder if it's been fixed in the latest version of the OS, I still haven't upgraded...

Every now and then I think about starting a public bug report tracker for Apple bugs since they keep theirs to themselves. The number of maddening but minuscule bugs I run into makes me wish I was using Linux again, where I can fix them myself, or at the very least report them upstream and hope someone else eventually does so.

By not having a public record of bugs Apple conveniently hides the sheer number of them and how many people they affect.

There's https://openradar.appspot.com where you can at least share the bugs you file yourself.

Also https://github.com/feedback-assistant/reports specifically for Feedback Assistant reports.

Also very nice. Thanks for that!

Oh, this is great! Not surprising someone already thought of it.

Oh, this is great!

I was also a bit surprised to read that, since Feedback Assistant.app should be the first thing that pops up if you do a spotlight search for "feedback". The app helps a bit with collecting a sysdiagnose report and makes it easy to add screenshots.

Only if you’re on beta builds afaik

On macOS 14.6.1:

1. Cmd-Space 2. I type "Fee", "Feed", or "Feedback" 3. Feedback Assistant appears in the list of suggestions.

It's not "not user friendly", it's criminally user hostile as a deliberate act. I know - incompetence over malice. But this is wilful malice of Apple to cover for their incompetence, so yeah maybe both. Not to mention the grand Apple opacity.

Thanks! I didn't know about this site to share feedback. I'll give it a try.

Also another reader mentioned to enter Feedback Assistant in Spotlight. It's the first time I see that app.

Honestly you might as well scream it into the nearest pillow. I'm sure someone somewhere reads some of them, but in most cases the very best you can hope for is a comment asking you to confirm whether it's still an issue in the latest release/beta.

Wasn’t it admitted or leaked through court documents that it was originally added only to placate upset users who expect to be able to submit feedback but that they weren’t going to particularly monitor or care for what gets submitted through it. I recall it was Jobs himself who didn’t want it and gave in after constant demands for a feedback contact method

Thank you for the context!

As a policy, I tell the world about (non-exploit) bugs from billion dollar corporations, but I report bugs directly to small businesses.

This creates an incentive for the big players to improve their process and proactively catch bugs.

I've seen bugs reported to Apple's bug reporter get fixed in subsequent OS versions, but almost never in updates to the current or previous ones. This is a fundamental flaw with their process that provides a historical track record of them deprioritizing certain bugs. Which is why we should probably pivot away from internal bug reporting services and move towards third party bug trackers.

The AAPL market cap is $3.48175 trillion as I write this.

I do like single-dev apps. There are two apps I use regularly, and I have Discord open to the developers of both. They are always happy to receive bug reports (because so few report) and often open the code while I'm talking to them to figure out the problem.

"We cannot process this report. Please attach 50GB of logs that may or may not include PII".

I've had enough cases where a simple screenshot or log snippet should have been enough to accept the bug report but instead they were closed because I cannot in good conscience attach all the data they want from a Mac that I use for my day to day work.

:shrug:

The last report I submitted, was an App Store Connect bug.

If you are submitting a build for Mac (in my case, as a Mac Catalyst companion to an iOS app), you can’t reset the build number to 0, after you change the main version.

For example, if you go from 1.0.0 (106) to 1.0.1, you would expect it to be 1.0.1 (0), but it won’t let you submit a Mac build with that build. It must be 1.0.1 (107), even though the iOS build is fine, with 1.0.1 (0).

This forces me to keep updating the build number on both builds (because I sync them). I used to use the build number as an indicator of release status, but this pooches that. Not the end of the world, but annoying.

I first got a “cannot reproduce” response, where they wanted me to submit a sample app (In the original report, I actually sent them a link to my full app source code, as it is an open-source app -most of my work is open-source, and I have a number of repos that contain full source for shipping apps).

I responded, saying I would not, because it would require creating a whole fake app, with fake releases and whatnot, and it wasn’t worth it, as I had already sent them a link to a shipping app, that exhibits the problem, and also, they were quite capable of doing that, a hell of a lot more easily than I could.

I then got a second response, saying something like “Oh, I see. It is a string issue, not a numerical issue. Works as designed. #wontfix. Here’s how to close a bug.”

I gave up, and closed it.

I got surprisingly helpful technical support through Feedback Assistant for a problem I reported having with a >10 year old Thunderbolt display. I always thought these "send feedback" forms at big companies always just went to /dev/null, but after sending three bug reports with logs (and after six months) I got a fairly technical response which was obviously written by an engineer, including a root cause diagnosis and a workaround that actually worked. Have to say I was very impressed.

It appears to be fixed already in Sequoia.

https://imgur.com/a/5klvt24

Windows 11 lets you conveniently "pin" the calculator in standard mode, keeping it accessible on top of your active window – great for multitasking with calculations.

However, switch to a different calculator mode (like scientific), and Windows inexplicably removes the pinning feature.

This baffling decision feels so actively user hostile it is deserving of an award for poor design choices.

If I recall correctly, that is a kerning issue with the font. At the edges of the font is not a solid line, but rather more like every other pixel so that the characters can be closer together. This causes the up/down movement of one character to the next, as they fit together like poorly made puzzle pieces. And just how bad it looks depends on the size of the pixel on the monitor, and how much "bleed" it has with it's neighbors. (I don't recall the tech terms for this.)

Isn't kerning about left-right and not up-down, though?

Yes

I think ascents and descents fall under keming. You don’t want a j to bump into a b on the next line. So you have short letters from time to time. But that might be an archaic usage, or I’m wrong.

You mean another, more compact version of `j` with a shorter descender? Well that’s called an alternate glyph.

Kerning is strictly about the relative spacing between two adjacent glyphs. The only case that would ever be vertical is if you’re writing vertical lines (such as in Chinese or Japanese).

Interesting... I'm in Japan and I was about to reply that Chinese and Japanese are almost always fixed-width, but luckily I grabbed a product next to me (laundry detergent) covered in Japanese. I was expecting to see perfect line-up of characters on adjacent lines proving they are fixed-width. They aren't even close, and this is true for both vertical and horizontal text on everything I look at. I opened a few apps like word and confirmed by default everything is fixed-width. So TIL Japanese is fixed width for plebs but any professional copy has way more kerning that I realised.

Depends on the language. Though I’m now struggling to think of a top-to-bottom script that isn’t grid aligned. Mongolian I guess? Example: https://president.mn/mng/

kerning does not shift characters up and down, only left and right.

macOS on a low dpi screen is mostly full of those kind of issues. I wouldn't recommend using a low dpi screen.

The problem appeared in the screenshots that the article shows, I don't think it has anything to do with the screen.

It's a screenshot of macOS running in low-dpi mode.

I’ve used fullhd imac/osx for many years until around 2018 and never noticed anything like that. Easier to call it “low dpi issues” now that they destroyed it, I guess ;)

2018 was about when they stopped selling the last Mac with a non-Retina display, so that would make sense for when they stopped testing for it.

It's not only about stopping testing: they dropped subpixel rendering altogether.

Though this seems more like a hinting issue.

You don't stop testing when you stop selling X. You stop testing when you stop supporting X.

6 years is a long time ;)

They removed subpixel hinting after Mojave IIRC. Now it's unusable on anything less than a 27inch 4K display, and it's been like that since years...

It’s crazy that I had to buy BetterDisplay (great tool btw) just to get fonts from incomprehensible to merely ugly on a 25x16 monitor via a fake 2x scaled one. Windows renders razor sharp even without gfx drivers.

There’s a great article with explanations on the net. But the gist is that macOS renders like a giant image with no care for pixels and small details. It works fine when using native resolution (low dpi) or have enough pixels for their “retina” approved resolution. Anything else and it looks blurry.

Linux and Windows use actual pixels for their rendering, and even with anti-aliasing, it looks sharp. If you’re stuck with macOS, aim for 4k at least.

Ideally, you want a screen that natively runs at a resolution that’s a perfect 2x multiplier of a mainstream 1x resolution that has the right amount of screen real estate for the screen size.

So for example, a 20”-24” screen should be 4K so it can run at 1920x1080 @ 2x. Similarly for 27”, you want 5K which is 2560x1440 @ 2x.

This is a really good post describing how it all works:

https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/

That’s the article. I got hit with this issue after purchasing a 27” QHD monitor. Native resolution made everything too small, and everything else was blurry. I gave up after trying pretty much everything and bought a 24” 4K monitor for the mac.

The issue persisted when I disconnected the external screen, but I probably should have taken additional screenshots from the built-in laptop screen.

On the topic of calculator font bugs, Google's calculator randomly switches between two fonts:

https://pasteboard.co/lmbr4iE6BJej.png

https://pasteboard.co/sU3GA5psIaT0.png

The first one is worse because the 0 looks more like an O. What platform?

Edge on Mac, but IIRC it happens on Windows as well. Just checked in firefox/mac and seems OK.

Hard to know if you're referring to Chromebook/Android/Web, but looks like the web one. If that's the calculator from the google.com web-page, that is surely a stylesheet/font that failed to load (sometimes?). Try to look at the browser developer console next time it happens for some request errors.

How would you even tell in the first place? The contrast on those digits is so low and their font weight is so light as to render them essentially invisible.

And as far as bad design goes, why are the bit position indicators on the right (0, 32) center-justified underneath their digits, whereas the ones on the left (31, 63) are left-justified?

Beyond this bug, nowadays accessibility features are one of the most used in my setup, and I think as software engineers age they will become more sophisticated.

I remember using fonts of 8pt in an IDE to "squeeze " the potential of the monitor.

Starting to see this with view counts on YouTube in Firefox after some recent UI updates.

Oh that's what that is. I saw this on YouTube in Firefox the other day and thought YouTube was just A/B testing a quirky new way to display view counts.

I don't remember in which browser I saw this, Chrome or Firefox, but when a block of text suddenly becomes a bit more animated (eg. moves around in a div) you could see it change from Windows' native font rendering method to DirectWrite-style fuzzy edges.

This post is going to lead to a new calculator and a calculator app on the iPad.

Braun may have some ideas:

https://ganjieyin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/d...

They already have that in iOS/iPadOS 18 fwiw

Right, I think they announced it at WWDC ;) Before I even posted. Living the future.

> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t

This is infuriating and the same for all the big companies (at least Google, Microsoft, Apple); you have a serious issue and simply no way to talk to a representative. The best you can do is post something on Hacker News and hope it somehow gets picked up.

I worked at a company that paid Microsoft a lot to have a 1-day SLA for support. When I contacted them, I got a reply back weeks later saying "hey sorry I missed your email". About two weeks later (which was the time it took to email back and forth), it was clear that I had to insert another ticket and mark the subject as something else (that was not directly related, but apparently the team responsible for that subject was also working on the functionality I found a bug in. There was no way for me to know this since it was something internal to Microsoft). So, I had to go through the whole procedure again.

Once I did that, the reply was "oh yeah, we dropped that functionality but the documentation doesn't mention it. we recommend you use <technology X> for this". Where, of course, technology X did not support the feature I was trying to use.

Thanks! It looks like posting on Hacker News works well :) In the meantime a few people pointed out the "Feedback Assistant" for Apple. There's a website and an app that spotlight finds.

I can usually appreciate Apple's design homages. The original iOS Calculator is inspired by the Braun ET, and it makes some sense to provide a familiar design for basic use.

But it inherits baggage from the limitations of the handheld calculators of the 1970s. Why can't I use the - button to write a negative sign? What does "AC" mean? The scientific calculator is an even worse design. There's a ton of invisible state, like the value stored in memory, or whether you're inside parentheses. The user has to hold the whole sequence of operations in their head, without clicking a single wrong button. Want to repeat a calculation with a different operand? Tough.

Graphing calculators like the TI-84 that let you see and edit your input are so much more usable. Even better are notebook-style interfaces like Mathematica. It's a shame Apple won't pay homage to those designs.

Coming up in iOS 18.

Unless I missed something, they’ve added a handwriting mode, which is cool but not necessarily an improvement over something like Mathematica. I don’t want to have to carry an Apple Pencil with me and write long hand every time I want to solve an equation.

I did miss something, you can type in Math Notes in iOS 18. It’s a little glitchy in the betas though.

If I may pitch my own app, TechniCalc has this same mode, along with a bunch of other stuff the built in app doesn’t support. It works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS

https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc

Once I had downloaded a HN thread for later reading, on my iPhone with Safari's built-in Download Linked File feature. When I opened it and was reading it (HN renders fine with just the HTML), I noticed a single line looking a bit off. Took my glasses off to take a closer look. I don't remember the specifics, but I think the spacing with the line above was slightly less than usual. Took screenshots and it was clearly visible zoomed in. Happened twice that day and never before, never after. I believe I witnessed a cosmic ray induced bit flip.

>Maybe the UI coordinate system is using floats and a rounding error aggregated over many days

It's using floats on 32bit (...which means only the watchOS currently, I guess?) and doubles elsewhere.

Are there any modern UI frameworks that _don't_ use floats/doubles?

I was gonna guess CSS, but even that has supported sub-pixel precisions on HiDPI displays for a while now.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5709698/html-sub-pixel-b...

Apple software quality has gone into the trash the past 10 years. I'm not talking about initial quality but rather about "mature" quality, i.e., the current public versions almost a full year after a major release.

I was just talking about this yesterday: somehow TextEdit on Mac has been wrecked. TextEdit, which is essentially a wrapper around NSTextView, was more or less "perfect" 15-20 years ago. Now I experience a bug where the window is blank when I open a document until I click inside a window, and scrolling performance in a long document is atrocious. For example, if I try to scroll backward, from the end of the document, it stutters and can lose my place. This doesn't depend on the document; it happens all the time.

I guess that Apple rewrote everything a few years ago with TextKit 2, and it shows, but not in a good way.

The impression I get from Apple is that Craig Federighi has given engineers license to keep churning out new features and not worry much about bugs, or design, or the user interface. And if something becomes a massive problem, they just pause on features for a couple of weeks, which is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Casio FX115ES Plus, its only $15. Looks great, feels great, just works.

Relevant remark in the comment section of the blog post:

"after I took screenshots and restarted the calculator, the misplacements were gone. I am looking out for it to happen again."

I like Apple's hardware and underlying OS enough to shell out for MacBook Pros but, man, their homebuilt applications are a PITA. The RPN calculator on my high powered new MBP doesn't have a scientific or engineering notation option.

Same on my old MBP as well.

I guess it is a feature.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank

Sequoia's calculator has RPN with scientific notation now.

Thanks! Look forward to getting it when it is released.

Reminds me of Microsoft calculator having a one pixel off between buttons: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...

That's awfull!! I couldn't use it anymore after I've seen it once

Use the old one, it’s better anyway: https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-window...

Ouch! I had no idea.

Possibly they ask the text engine to render halfway two pixel lines. It will round up or down quite randomly when fp errors accumulate.

You can try submitting a bug report with Feedback Assistant.app or apple.com/feedback, but there’s no guarantee they will see it.

Someone will definitely see it, but maybe not take action on it. Now that it's on HN, it will definitely get more traction.

There's a similar bug in the Windows calculator. One of the buttons is about 1 pixel wider than the rest.

Aren't the raised digits an indication of endianness or something? It looks like a transmission bit pattern. Or isn't high low high low double high double low the original Apple disk format? It's something like that.

Just guessing -- it doesn't look accidental to me.

I would say it's a feature: it's supposed to be like a mechanical odometer.

Even if Apple were adopting skeuomorphism it would take a lot more change in design elements to support the concept that there's a mechanical system driving it, and for a binary display I'd assume a row of lights would be more appropriate to how this would read on appropriate machines

Proudly presented to you by the company that took 14 years to port the calculator to the iPad, because “if we do it, it has to be the greatest calculator app“

One that Apple seems to ignore. You click on something. And the micro second before it changes the hi, causing you to click something else.

Wut? It changes before the click? That sounds ... magical. And what is "the hi"? Typo of "ui"?

Google has this problem in its search suggestions. They update with some delay, and humans also have a significant delay in how quickly they can react to a changing stimulus. So I tap on the wrong search suggestion. One problem is that they aren't satisfying monotonicity: the suggestion can change unexpectedly even if further inputs keep exactly matching the old suggestion.

I’m pretty sure there are Apple employees that read HN. It would have been cool to include a build number of the OS

Or, you know, file a Feedback: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/

Don’t do that.

Here's something that really irks me. On macOS I'll use Spotlight (Cmd+Space) to do some quick math. For example, press Cmd+Space, type "1.2+3.4", and it sort of displays 4.6. Now to copy the results you either have to click the copy option in the dropdown, using your mouse (no thanks), or press enter to get the results in Calculator.

Assuming you last left the calculator in "Programmer" mode the calculator displays the value "4".

Ideally, pressing enter in Spotlight would simply replace the text in the input bar with the result. The equivalent Alt+Space tool in KDE (Plasma Search) performs math this way and it's amazing. I haven't used Quicksilver or Alfred in a decade but I'm sure they do the right thing, too.

Otherwise both Spotlight and Plasma Search are both pretty great. Type something like "14oz to lb" and they both display the result (though Plasma Search displays the exact "0.875 pounds" while Spotlight displays the rounded "0.88 pounds").

Overall I'm mostly disappointed with first-party Apple software. Being one of the richest companies in the world I have higher expectations.

Sounds like Alfred could solve this problem quite easily? I wouldn't give spotlight too much hope from Apple's end. Have seen some very nice Alfred workflows

I run an older version of macOS, but it's historically been the case that Command-C copies the result of a calculation entered in Spotlight. They key is that the Copy command must be performed when the calculation is not selected for the result to be copied to the Clipboard. Put another way, type the math to be performed in Spotlight, then press Command-C and the result has been copied.

This is to fit in with the windows calculator, which also has off-by-one pixel errors: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...

And this on a Mac. :D

That would have never happened under Jobs's watch.

They clearly need better telemetry in the calculator app.

My bet is on a random bitflip more than an actual bug in the code, based on its localised nature and rarity.

Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel fonts all the time.

A bet on cosmic rays is a rare bet indeed ;)

Rare but does happen.

Not necessarily cosmic rays but things like marginal timing can cause errors like this, especially on GPU buses/VRAM that tend to have less protection.

GPGPU and now AI has made accuracy of results more important, but before that, GPUs were regularly ran at the limits and it was assumed that occasional barely-visible artifacts or otherwise computation errors whose results aren't noticeable were acceptable. (Imagine you're playing a 3D game and a few pixels in a frame occasionally have incorrect values, or some shapes are a pixel off --- unless the errors are massive, you're unlikely to notice.)

If only Apple used ECC RAM, then that would be easy to confirm.

This would never have gone past Jobs.

In that picture I'm personally more bothered by the antialiasing than by the misalignment.

I'm disturbed by the ambiguous UI.

Is 'Hide Binary" enabled or disabled? If it's enabled, why is it a different colour to the slider that has presumably selected Base-16?

Are the binary digits editable?

Are "ASCII" and "Unicode" mutually exclusive as you'd expect, in which case why are they both the same colour?

I’ve been using an app called PCalc on Apple’s App Store.

The Apple calculator is a frustrating mess to use.

PCalc does scientific, engineering, and A to B calculations for most things.

I wouldn’t go back to Apple’s calculator app even if Apple gave me a credit for the PCalc app.

Nope.

YouTube viewership numbers ha et a similar issue.

Juste my vision

It's font hinting and kerning. But whyyy the heck only in the last few chars?

Well you’ve just answered your own question: because it’s not just font metrics.

There seems to be more to that custom view than a standard line of text; something about that view is not optimized for low-dpi displays.

Maybe the bug is the need for everything to line up perfectly.

Yᵒu'ʳe ʳiᵍhᵗ, iᵗ's ⁿoᵗ sᵒ bᵃd ᵒnᶜe ʸoᵘ'rᵉ uˢeᵈ tᵒ iᵗ.

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