easeout

> 3. Why does iOS not even have radio buttons?

iOS has tables. A table is a single column of complex cells that usually fills the screen. Cells can be divided into sections or not divided. The Settings app is almost entirely tables; so is a Twitter app, so was the iPod. Table cells can have a checkmark accessory—just a glyph, not surrounded by any shape—that is either exclusive to one among many rows or not exclusive. Originally, a single or multiple selection field would push another screen with a table whose cells would provide the behavior you want. Tapping anywhere in a cell selects it, displays the checkmark, and if desired removes it from other cells. The user pops the screen when done.

This is all the same as what you find in the macOS Menu Bar—items may be grouped between dividers, some items may disclose another column of options, some may have a persistent selection state, the selection states of nearby items may be mutual or individual. macOS menus also never had checkboxes or radio buttons but can have either kind of selection indicated by a checkmark. Table screens are menus.

iOS also decorates arbitrary objects like photos with a checkmark in similar situations—put the Photos app into selection mode for example. There is no checkbox control to aim for. You hit the entire object and it performs the appropriate selection behavior, which results in a checkmark being displayed or hidden.

I believe the reason iOS has an object decoration instead of either checkboxes or radio buttons is that fingers are blunt and users enjoy big tap targets. Trying to poke at a small circle or box to the left of some accompanying text kinda sucks. The whole of the text could be an active touch area but a user wouldn't know that from looking at it.

Have a look at switches for comparison—they're big, they can be tapped or dragged, they play haptics. But the text beside them does not activate them because it doesn't look like a thing you can handle, not like the switch itself, not like the checkmark-gaining photo or a mail message table cell.

I think the reason this question is still asked is that the HIG doesn't address expectations about a missing control. To my knowledge Apple has never in this era explained their design reasoning, maybe because intuitive UI has historically been their competitive advantage. So we identify patterns largely from repeated anecdotal use and make educated guesses about the reasoning. In the end it means that long-time users of iPhone are at times more aware of UI norms than career designers who aren't particularly iPhone specialists. And sometimes, despite knowing better, we design and build custom radio buttons because a stakeholder couldn't be convinced.

That's a mistake I've made before, except we did have nightly backups.

I was not the one who set up the backups, nor did I perform the restore. I just told my senior I made a big mistake, and he said thanks for saying so right away and we're going to handle it. Our client company told their people to take the rest of the day off. It must have been costly. I learned a lesson, but I also internalized some guilt about it.

Reflecting on this, I was in an environment where it was the norm to edit production live, imagining we could be careful enough. I'm suggesting that the error the author publicly took the fall for was not all their fault. Everyone up the chain was responsible for creating that risky situation. How could they not have backups?

There's a moment early in Resident Evil 7 VR where you're up to your neck in water in a tight space. You completely fool yourself, you feel the mass of water on your chest, and you start breathing like you're in a pool.

In iOS 18, there is now a SwiftUICore framework that's separate from SwiftUI, which I imagine consumes it. I don't see the new one on the documentation site. If that becomes public in a year or so, maybe you'd be able to replace one of the two frameworks to implement your own view system atop the attribute graph and data flow bits.

Great idea!

Please let the text wrap. My phone is narrow and I want to read it. How it looks may not match your intent:

https://ibb.co/R0PCj16

They're thin.

Some men just want to watch the dictionary burn

I don't think that—I think it's not an attack specifically against my account.

I'm glad this is news, because it means I was probably affected by a mistake and not a specific attack. Nonetheless you can't go spooking your users like this.

I think you mistake my point: Iceland's culture _is_ perpetually endangered, more than most. These steps appear necessary for them, they appear to work, and even 100x larger countries whose cultures would survive anyway do some amount of the same.

Globalization risks blurring cultural distinctions away. Among cultures we're aware of on the world stage, Iceland punches above their weight class—they have only one member for every thousand Americans. I have to think their success is due to specific measures to retain their identity. Even Canada which has a tenth the population of the US has laws mandating that 1/3 of what's broadcast on the radio must be Canadian.

Also the island is kind of trying to kill whoever lives on it.

This used to happen back when phones could only keep a few apps backgrounded at a time, but I haven't seen iOS kill the most recently used background app since the first couple years backgrounding was supported at all.

But then, apps in that environment were made for no swap. If you take away swap on a desktop system it could be another story.

I used this often for diagrams before repository sites' Markdown renderers started to support Mermaid. Nice tool; easy and fast. Can be a bit fiddly to make changes, depending on how much you care about neatness.

That and there are two major chips, the R1 and M2, acting as distinct heat sources. I don't know if they would spin the fans up and down independently, but the two chips' heat output could differ over time.

I confirm that experience. The first iPad in particular only got a couple years of updates. https://iosref.com/ipados

I don't really regret those purchases, but that's me. I was an early adopter, not a regular customer by any stretch.

Would you be open to illustrating in general terms what your situation is like?

Last year, I puzzled over how to watch my local sports team of choice and got mired in questions about streaming services and local blackouts and licensing. Then I bought a ten dollar antenna for my TV.

OK, but I notice you're still using apostrophes in all their accepted right places, and I assume that's because you intend to accommodate me and other readers who haven't discarded the rules and would still trip. Earnestly, thank you, and please keep it up, because unless new rules emerge (whether official or just usage), we'll continue to be tripped up when the existing scheme isn't followed.

I customize more than enough things in my life for the sake of "better". It's not worth the tradeoff to deviate and be the pioneer every time. Some things you gotta run stock because compatibility is a major benefit.

What's the word for the vision equivalent of misophonia?

The problem is not that it's confusing but that, because the rules exist and set our expectations, we mentally trip over violations of them. We stop absorbing what was intended to be communicated and have to back up and try again. I don't disagree that changing the rules would solve this, but we haven't done that. So in individual instances of written communication which each of us does have the power to affect, it's on the writer to ensure the reader has no unnecessary trouble. I could wear boots inside your house, but I'd rather you clean up the Lego.

I think we'd all be gladly sitting atop high abstractions like that if not for the fact that brands pay the bills, and brands want custom experiences. Website and app design often begins with "what does a button look like," and design tools focus not on prebuilt widgets but on paths and fills, because the last thing a brand wants is to speak with different tones in different media. Their software has to feel like their stores and advertisements in order to create a brand-consistent customer experience. Design systems are a hot topic today because what brands got with this design method is a different voice in each of their sites and apps, because they're all independently custom.

I think most of what we've built is made of too many parts. I think it's partly because we no longer make the same thing a thousand times, refining it as we go. We don't reduce software to its essence like we did with common tools like a hammer or a dish sponge. We take software parts off the shelf and use them wholesale for 10% or 1% of their total capability. Trimming the unused remainder and integrating it all to suit the problem better would require we stop and learn what those dependencies are made of and how they work. In our rush to ship, we rely on abstraction for speed, but abstraction has a cost too, and it has been compounding for decades.

I value this method; my strategy is to turn my display brightness down to nothing while drafting. If I think I mistyped something, I just type a line break and go again.

So's a video game, and we call that "real-time 3D". Time is mentioned, but it isn't counted again as a dimension, perhaps because any given momentary view is a time slice, not a time range like it is an XYZ range.

Yes, especially if you're Valve and you operate the preeminent game store.

Hmm. According to Civ 2, the products of The Wheel have been obsolete since we discovered the secret of Polytheism.

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Chariot_(Civ2)

If you had to pick one game to ever play, Descent is a great one.

Like any other kind of employee, you the stakeholder are responsible to get them trained in the role you delegate to them, or to evaluate that they meet your needs before hire. Designers I know do art for fun, but at work they design to solve business problems. They have a lot to say about this topic. In any case it isn't due to some character flaw on their part.

> What about Apple?

> I can't comment on the current state of MacOS since the time I've spent actually using a Mac during the last 8 years or so probably totals to a few hours. Apple used to be good at this, and I hear they still do a decent job at keeping things sane, even post-Jobs.

The macOS menu bar is still compulsory. First party apps generally still fill it out properly with commands for everything a user can do and put the common ones in their usual places. For third party apps it depends on whether the developer put time into platform norms. Many Electron apps don't: Slack makes many commands available only through UI popup menus; VS Code puts them in the command palette so you can only find them by search. Of course these apps have key shortcuts but you can't learn them from a menu bar item that doesn't exist.

The focused window gets a heavy shadow. I think that's also compulsory.

But first party apps and recently the system frameworks are guilty of cramming toolbars into title bars and leaving a drag area that doesn't span the width of the window. That's permanent. At least the window title is still written and you know you can drag that. A window's file proxy icon is often missing until you hover on the title. The bar at the top of the window may or may not be visually divided from the content area.

First party apps also remove color and/or silhouette distinctiveness from those toolbars' buttons. App icon silhouettes are also gone.

Scroll bars are of course hidden by default but can be always shown.

The result is probably more usable than what's described in this article on other platforms, but off peak for macOS.

Aside: iOS started the hidden-unless-scrolling scroll indicators trend, I think. Platform guidance was that you're supposed to flash them on first appearance of any scroll view whose content doesn't all fit. (To try it out, go to the Home Screen and then back to Safari.) This is the signal to the user that there is more to see. Users don't consciously think about it but they pick up the right expectation. You just call a method[1] after the view transition animation finishes. This has become arcane knowledge in the iOS field: No one remembers this is important to do in the absence of persistent scroll bars, and where it's not automatic due to using system frameworks in a high level way, many apps just don't get this right.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscrollview...

The Introduction says:

> In a nutshell, what you are reading is intended to be a shop class for computer science. Young computer science students are taught to "drive" the computer; but where do you go to learn what is under the hood?

I take that to mean this guide is a supplement. A student would already know what a bit is.