Live data from Hacker News

Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

reddit.com

361–370 of 501 posts

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#361
post #53

People are talking about "lag" and performance, as if this was a "the system can't handle it!" issue. This is a misleading description. The actual issue is that some developer at Apple screwed up their animation configuration when implementing the calculator redesign, and nobody tested adding more than two numbers together quickly. Multiple failures, none involving system performance. What's happening is: the operato…

Your solutions are a little off the mark. Treating the animation as the problem is merely treating the symptoms. What needs to happen here is pressing the button needs to immediately register the press elsewhere in the code. The UI animations and the button tap should be decoupled entirely. Then the user can tap away as fast as their heart desires and only the animations are going to continue on. That’s an easy probl…

Exactly. This is a very general pattern of error in software design - the use of a non-causal pathway to model causality. It is an especially exasperating problem, as it is both more complicated and more prone to failure than doing it right.

This goes well beyond UI design, and there are even physical analogs - for example, the crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 in Paris could have been prevented if the device to prevent the cabin being pressurized if the cargo door was not properly closed had been operated by the door locking pins sliding home all the way, rather than by a side-linkage off the linkage that was supposed to drive in the pins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981#Ca...

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#362

Almost all of the animations on iOS are about 2x-3x as long as they should be. First off, they look terrible, the slooooooow change from one thing to another. Secondly, they severely impede usability because you have to wait wait wait for 1000ms here, 1000ms there, and another 1000ms there after every action. It's enough to make me want to give up privacy and switch to Android. Soooo pissed at slow animations. 500ms,…

Start at 300ms and gradually reduce it in 10ms increments until UX test subjects stop saying they like the animation. If people notice it, it's too slow.

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#364
post #53

People are talking about "lag" and performance, as if this was a "the system can't handle it!" issue. This is a misleading description. The actual issue is that some developer at Apple screwed up their animation configuration when implementing the calculator redesign, and nobody tested adding more than two numbers together quickly. Multiple failures, none involving system performance. What's happening is: the operato…

Your solutions are a little off the mark. Treating the animation as the problem is merely treating the symptoms. What needs to happen here is pressing the button needs to immediately register the press elsewhere in the code. The UI animations and the button tap should be decoupled entirely. Then the user can tap away as fast as their heart desires and only the animations are going to continue on. That’s an easy probl…

It is not as easy as that. UI and logic should run in parallel , yes, but they should also be able to synchronise.

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#365
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never noticed anyone anywhere wearing an apple watch. Not that I spend any time looking at people's wrists, but you'd think if it was a massive success everyone would notice.

Interesting. Where do you live? Here in London they are really commonplace - you see them on people on the tube all the time and I notice them being used fairly regularly by all ages and sexes for contactless payments, running, etc. In fact they seem so widely adopted that it’s not uncommon to see even people with them who you would not necessarily expect to be wearing them.

They're pretty rare in my UK city; I expect being able to use them for the Tube provides a useful rationalisation for the purchase - the are a lot more richer people in the greater London area too.

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#366
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your solutions are a little off the mark. Treating the animation as the problem is merely treating the symptoms. What needs to happen here is pressing the button needs to immediately register the press elsewhere in the code. The UI animations and the button tap should be decoupled entirely. Then the user can tap away as fast as their heart desires and only the animations are going to continue on. That’s an easy probl…

My professor likes to tell this story about keyboard buffers that I never quite understood. Basically, in this old time terminal setup he would start typing the password before the prompt showed up or something and when it did, it would just sail through. Sort of like how I can apt upgrade while apt update is still running but fancier and a couple of decades before...

That's what happens when you read from a keyboard buffer. Since the buffer is not being read (and not cleared) until a prompt is in the screen, you can type whether you want and it'll get dumped and processed whenever needed. Not that long ago really, that's how it worked in DOS and most other terminals.

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#367
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More annoying than performance is the ever increasing nagging for apple paid services, apple pay, apple icloud, etc. The platform is literally becoming a junk adware platform. It feels like an infected PC that pop ups ads randomly.

This is precisely why I will not buy an iPhone again. Every single time I open my photos to show someone something I have to wait through two popups that are extremely slow to close. Also now I'm getting nagged to upgrade to ios 11 whenever I just want to use the phone. Abysmal.

What's the alternative? Android, especially Samsung infested bloatware, is substantially worse. The touchwiz upgrade prompts are WAY more annoying than ios ones. Plus the constant Samsung login junk. And then there is the heavy google integration that requires a google account for almost everything.

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#368
post #308

I probably own more Apple devices than most people here (even considering this is HN we're talking about) because I do a lot of iOS programming and I have to use them as test devices. I also own the latest devices. But this problem is not some stupid complaint coming from uninformed people. This calculator thing was a perfect symbolism for all this bullshit that's been going on since iOS 11 release because the bug is…

>5. Yesterday I was trying to take a picture and opened the camera. And YES, I mean the native camera app that ships with iOS. I saw the camera UI launch, but there was no "camera". It was just a black screen. I've become accustomed to this type of lag in app loading so i waited for my camera to "boot up". It never did. The camera app was open and there were all the UI components, but it wasn't capturing anything. I…

"on maybe the most popular mobile OS on earth"

You can't be the most popular if your competitor's market share is ~85%.

https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#369
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>5. Yesterday I was trying to take a picture and opened the camera. And YES, I mean the native camera app that ships with iOS. I saw the camera UI launch, but there was no "camera". It was just a black screen. I've become accustomed to this type of lag in app loading so i waited for my camera to "boot up". It never did. The camera app was open and there were all the UI components, but it wasn't capturing anything. I…

"on maybe the most popular mobile OS on earth" You can't be the most popular if your competitor's market share is ~85%. https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os

You can if you mean "most popular" in terms of customer satisfaction - http://www.theacsi.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=art...

Re: Try quickly typing 1+ 2 + 3 into the iOS 11 Calculator

#370
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main reasons I don't use iOS or macOS anymore is because of the animations. Even very, very short animations make the whole experience excruciating for me. It feels slow and unresponsive.

So what do you use instead? FYI you can reduce animation in the accessibility menu of both iOS and OSX

When I had a choice, I used Fedora + XFCE for a long time, then Xubuntu. I've been on Windows 10 since it came out, and it's been incredibly liberating not to constantly have to think about my OS and Google my way through its quirks and bugs.

It also takes about 20 seconds to disable all animations in Windows, which makes it feel as snappy as XFCE (even on my 5-year-old machine).

For what I do now (Office, email, programming using IDE hooked into Docker containers), it really doesn't hinder me to be on a non-*nix OS.

Post reply on HN