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Comment by penskymaterial | Hacker News Reader

A time warp to when video conferencing actually worked, as opposed to every new release of FaceTime now being some kind of avant-garde art experiment with the UI being increasingly impossible to use for both technical and non-technical users.

The last straw for me was making the recents/contacts as confusing as it was, and I personally made some accidental calls to former contacts that for some reason were made front and center.

I expect the next version will hide even more controls behind a new, indecipherable icon that looks like a 2D abstract pair of testicles.

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I don't see what's confusing about the app, both on macOS an iOS. You get a preview of your face, the last contacts you called and a green "New call" button.

To me this is simple to the point of being excessively simple, especially with the "missed calls" being in a 16x16 click target dropdown.

It looks like they optimized for "calls from grandma" mode.

You don't see what's confusing, and then you proceed to mention something confusing. If a basic-skills user can't find "missed calls", that's confusing!

The call actually does appear in the Recents list in red, with the time of call, it just doesn't say "missed" explicitly. This matches how the Phone app has looked for the past 20 years.

The "missed calls" list I mentioned would be more of a filter, which is indeed annoying but not fundamental.

Holy cow I hate the facetime app so much

- answering a video call freezes the app. It recovers 10s later but video is not transmitted out

- 4 seconds to load in contact pictures

- typing 5 letters in the contact search field freezes the app for 5 seconds

- scrolling the left sidebar with contact posters is choppy

> and I personally made some accidental calls to former contacts that for some reason were made front and center.

MS Teams is especially bad for this if you have a few people in your addressbook with the same name and corporate email naming gives you for example john.mcleod@place and john.mcleod2@place - oh, you messaged john.mcleod@ six months ago but you message john.mcleod2 multiple times per day? Then this time you must mean john.mcleod with no 2, this time surely!

My "patch" is basically just Scotland, about half the phone book for the north-west is McLeods, and the John McLeods alone are about two dozen pages, so duplicates are common.

Yep Apple software is absolute garbage with a shiny veneer and everyone laps it up - ‘all about the marketing’

Lately, I'd agree. Back in early 2000s, OS X really was something new. It had the NextSTEP underpinnings that turned into a shiny, user friendly Unix that really did "just work" for the most part. Yeah, it had rough edges, but compared to where Windows XP and then Vista was at the time, it really did seem like the best option as far as commercial software was concerned. From OS X 10.1 - 10.4, it actually got better and faster with each release.

But it also had a full Unix shell underneath. That became my gateway into what was possible on other Unix like OSes, and then that led to going full time with Linux. Now all commercial operating systems are just a way to monetize and advertise to people. Thankfully the open source options have caught up and surpassed them.

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