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Perfectly Cropped

tyler.io

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Re: Perfectly Cropped

#291

Post by rdiddly »

It's charming how he goes out of his way not to step on any designer toes. "I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer. So I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs."

No, yeah you do, you just said it in the previous paragraph: "And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below."

I don't feel bad being critical of their UI choices, precisely because Apple was the company that made a big deal about UI and how far ahead of the poor hopeless gray conforming IBM Microsoft masses they were. And I mean, yeah I would've bought it, back then. Their stuff at its best was always a holy union of simple, functional and beautiful. But function came first, then simple, and beautiful arose from that, kind of in the Zen sense. Kind of like how a well-crafted hammer can be beautiful even though it's just a hammer. But at some point they went whole-hog into putting "beautiful" first, probably because that's where the money is. If you're not careful with that, you wind up being beautiful and stupid like the popular kids in high school. A beautiful hammer with no handle is just a crappy piece of shit. Even though it might be a great hammer(head), it's crippled by its lack of a proper UI.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#292

Post by wlesieutre »

guitarbill wrote: post #195
nine_k wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, Apple kills multiple birds with one stone. On pictures, iPhone looks sleek, easy to brag about. In spec sheets, iPhone is impressively thin. In real life, iPhone is expectedly fragile, so people put protective covers on it. It also solves the problem of uneven shape. In real life, people want a wider choice of colors, textures, and a larger battery. Custom covers solve this at no expense to Apple, which can cont…

> In real life, people want a wider choice of colors, textures, and a larger battery. Custom covers solve this [...] Absolutely. I'd go one further and say many owners don't want Apple to "solve" it. The cover can be more than utility, for some it's an expression of themselves. Plain covers. Sports team covers. Franchise covers. Utility covers with e.g. battery packs also say something about you. Covers are a feature…

Agreed on phone cases, it's nice to have all the options, and if people are all using them anyway then the camera bump isn't as big a deal.

For iPads though, the only reason mine has a hard case on the back (instead of just a folding screen cover) is the stupid camera bump. I've literally never dropped it once, it doesn't need a case except for the fact that it's not flat. And I don't think people treat tablets as quite as much of a personal expression as their phones, there's really no good reason for most people to need an iPad case.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#293

Post by cr0sh »

bhauer wrote: post #164
teetermld wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen. I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen. I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just see the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of…

I don't know if this is still done in grade schools or not, but long ago when I was in grade school, teachers would pass out strips of paper for reading - and as a bookmark. The idea that the student would hold it under the sentence in the paragraph they were reading so that they didn't get lost or lose their place.

I had been reading since before I started school; it was something I picked up early and that my parents encouraged in me greatly. So by the time I was in school and we were doing these reading exercises (which were mostly utterly boring to me at the time, because my favorite thing to read at home were my various science encyclopedia sets), I had no need for such a placeholder. Reading was natural to me, and I knew where I was in a paragraph, etc.

Of course, this upset the teachers, until they finally figured out that yes, I could read, and not only that, I could read well above my grade level (that said, my comprehension wasn't as great, unless it was geared toward topics of science).

I always figured that people who highlight text as they read on a screen do so for similar reasons; not that it's a stupid thing or anything - sometimes with long lines, small fonts, bad color/contrast choices, etc in text on a screen, you do need some kind of a marker to help you along...

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#294

Post by JoeAltmaier »

war1025 wrote: post #252
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...call home, get spouse to send email or call co-worker. Have some imagination.

You will note that I did solve the problem. I met my wife where I was planning to meet her anyway, and from there used her phone to make the needed connections. All told I lost maybe an hour of my day. Not really a big deal.

Sorry, didn't mean to be critical. Just trying to be funny. Many folks nowadays (my sister included) won't ever resort to voice calls; she won't even answer them.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#295

Post by billfruit »

FPGAhacker wrote: post #285
taneq wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gone the opposite direction (or just skipped ahead into second childhood?) - if I can't see the option I want I spend a minute or so monkey-slapping the screen in random directions with random numbers of fingers, because apparently this is what qualifies these days as "discoverable". (A simple example I discovered before I devolved to this level - when looking at messages on an iphone, swipe and hold left to see…

I knew because it was in the tips app, that shows how to do new stuff with new releases. I got a notification from the tips app after I upgraded, offering to show me what’s new. Somehow this doesn’t seem to work for everyone. Not sure if people just ignore the tips app notifications or if they don’t get them for some reason. It’s a normal app you can run any time. I just looked and the cursor movement as well as peek…

Yes, but it doesn't answer why these things had to change and why it is better now.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#296

Post by EpicEng »

FPGAhacker wrote: post #285
taneq wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gone the opposite direction (or just skipped ahead into second childhood?) - if I can't see the option I want I spend a minute or so monkey-slapping the screen in random directions with random numbers of fingers, because apparently this is what qualifies these days as "discoverable". (A simple example I discovered before I devolved to this level - when looking at messages on an iphone, swipe and hold left to see…

I knew because it was in the tips app, that shows how to do new stuff with new releases. I got a notification from the tips app after I upgraded, offering to show me what’s new. Somehow this doesn’t seem to work for everyone. Not sure if people just ignore the tips app notifications or if they don’t get them for some reason. It’s a normal app you can run any time. I just looked and the cursor movement as well as peek…

I ignore them because I'm typically trying to do something like right now and those get in my way. How about something more discoverable to begin with? When you hide all of the damn controls behind silly gestures this is what happens.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#297

Post by pera »

bhauer wrote: post #153
chias wrote: post #135

I need to use a MacBook Pro for work. Discovering that there is an option to make scrollbars always visible when there is scrolling to be done was, by a significant margin, the best QOL improvement I have discovered. This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrollin…

> people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno. Yes, it seems like the younger generation is conditioned to a different form of UI "discoverability" than those of us who learned computing in the desktop era. I look for visual indicators, even on touch user interfaces, so I am always missing functionality that is hidden behi…

I am 30 and I find this hidden scrollbar fad (aka try-to-swipe-every-screen) really frustrating, am I already so old that UX designers should build special accessibility settings for me?

Sure, when I see younger people trying some new GUI they basically touch and swipe everything to discover hidden options and functionalities, because someone decided that a flat rectangle looked "cooler" than a button, or that a greyed out textbox looked more "modern" than a standard white one... but isn't this just bad design? what happened with make things as simple as possible, but not simpler and don't make me think?

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#298

Post by chenster »

I'm not one of those aging parents, but it definitely bothered me when I could not find the other actions besides copy and share on my phone, then realized one must scroll to reveal additional options. WTF, the first is "flat UI", then this. Our UX is totally dictated by those no-talent ass clown designers. Seriosuly why do they keep changing the UI when it is perfectly fine?

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#299

Post by starpilot »

Is OS X / iOS trying to be more like Windows? In mobile Safari, the icon in the address bar used to go straight to Reader view, now it goes to a menu with four items. It's a running theme; formerly concise, direct functions are replaced with overloaded menus like the Microsoft world.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#300

Post by Jtsummers »

bosie wrote: post #280
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shake to undo applies to all text boxes on iOS. But I don't blame you if you didn't know that, I only knew about it from the iPhone OS 3(?) keynote that introduced it!

Can you turn this off? I am asking because using an iPhone unlocked while cycling is activating this great feature regularly.

Go to Settings, scroll to the very top (beyond what shows as the top when you first open it). There's a search field (this is in a lot of other "list" styled interfaces like contacts as well). Type "undo" into the field. It'll bring up the location in settings to disable "shake to undo".

It's under the Accessibility settings if you want to just browse around for it.

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