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Perfectly Cropped

tyler.io

361–370 of 571 posts

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#361

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…

I kind of hate the entire iOS 13 share sheet. Having the option to instantly send anything I happen to be looking at to my mom with an errant tap wasn't a feature I'd been missing.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#362
post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

"It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before." To my mind this is becoming a BIG problem in tech and I'm really saddened to see Apple falling for it. I guess too many people in a position to change things that feel like they need to justify their positions. Either way, it needs to stop. Sometimes good enough is good enough.

The JS ecosystem is plagued by this too.

The other day I opened a Vue project from 2-3 years ago and after installing deps with NPM it reported something like 50 critical vulnerabilities. Fine, I'll update dependencies. After doing that nothing worked anymore. The Webpack config didn't work, the Webpack loaders for Vue didn't work, etc. I had configured this project with an "old" version of Vue CLI and now everyone had moved on from that and changed their APIs.

I had a similar problem with an in-house Electron app from 3-4 years ago. A user reported a problem running the app on high Sierra. So I updated Electron to the latest version and compiled but then I got some new errors because Electron changed something and it broke Gulp. So I updated Gulp and turns out they changed their API too and I had to change the logic... I lost a day with this.

You can open an old jQuery project from 10 years ago change some stuff and everything just works, even after updating jQuery to the latest version.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#363
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…

In some interfaces (i forget where, maybe linux or the browsers) they try to annoy you by making the scroll bar so skinny it’s hard to select it.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#364
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in the WWDC keynote speech. The rest of the world else can "discover" it the next time a bug crawls on their screen.

Herein lies the problem: it doesn't matter how much 'better' or 'smoother' or 'consistent' the change is - or is not, in this case. It's a gross oversight to never inform end users of the change in any way . How many iPhone users attentively watch WWDC or read each update's (often incomplete) release notes? 1%? 3%? 5% tops? Why roll out a feature when 95% of your users will need to discover it through trial and error…

> How many iPhone users attentively watch WWDC or read each update's (often incomplete) release notes? 1%? 3%? 5% tops? Why roll out a feature when 95% of your users will need to discover it through trial and error?

I totally agree, but just want to point out that it may be 5% of developers who follow these. Of the general use base in total? I'd assume it's rather about 1/100 of one percent, or one in ten thousand people.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#365
post #293
post #164

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 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 paren…

Now you are supposed to put the strip of paper above the line you are reading. It reduce re-reading, gives you context of what’s coming up next.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#366

In design this is called “the illusion of completeness.” “The illusion of completeness happens when the visible content on the screen appears to be complete, when in fact more information exists outside of the viewable area.”[0] It’s a designer’s job to create cues that ensure this never happens. [0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/illusion-of-completeness/

It's something I really miss about the height of Windows 8/Windows 8.1/Windows Phone 8 design: the grids were specifically chosen to really to push that incompleteness feel: a few pixels from the next column over or the next row down always peaking through; big parallax landscape backgrounds that give a sense of background space that there's more to pan.

That feeling that not everything fits perfectly on the screen and things were almost always incomplete bugged a few people about those design patterns, but it did create a lot of nice, simple cues that things were scrollable without needing scroll bars or other indicators.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#367
post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

ITT: “The A/B test and creepy stalker analytics told us that everyone was doing other things more often so lets not show these less often tapped features”

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#368
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten to where I really enjoy using it (for the most part: the notifications list stands out as feeling terrible compared to Android), but only after, like, reading guides on the internet . Which is the kind of thing Apple products have traditionally prided themselves on not requiring.

re: notifications Is there a way to dismiss them with a single gesture like on Android? I haven't figured that part out, it's weird since swiping it right opens it, but so does tapping it, and swiping left opens a Manage | View | Clear All (x) menu. It's so hard to use this thing with one hand...

Just tried it and it looks like you can long-press then swipe down to dismiss.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#369
post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

Be sure to check out the tips app. It has stuff like this in it. The long touch spacebar method still works great for cursor movement and it’s my preferred way. Also, that’s weird about the select all. Still works for me, but I can’t be sure the behavior didn’t change.

One reason I like to force touch the keyboard rather than using spacebar is that, when you force touch, you can force touch again with the cursor active, and it will select an entire word. Dragging on keyboard now expands the selection a word at a time. Force touch again (while keeping your thumb on the screen) and it selects a whole paragraph. One more force touch and it switches back to a plain cursor.

It doesn’t seem possible to do this using the long-touch spacebar approach.

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