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Perfectly Cropped

tyler.io

401–410 of 571 posts

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#401

This is all wrong! If there is anything to discuss about Apple products: it´s the brutal and oppressive work system they established in china, their support of surveillance dictatorships around the world, their destructive forced obsolescence and the impudent refusal to contribute to societies by paying taxes like every citizen does. It is an evil, cynical gang of criminals that are actively destroying the future of…

Is this a bit?

It's not clear to me that free software is any more essential to a free society than libraries are. Which is to say, it's a clear public good but that's not a compelling reason to position it as a requirement for a free society. I would very much appreciate if you could expand on why it is childish to believe otherwise.

Look, there's free software that I absolutely love like Vim, but unless things have drastically changed in the past 12 months many open source "alternatives" trail their paid alternatives in features and ease of use. I would choose open source applications if they could demonstrate a superior experience, but I'm unwilling to jump over hurdles for promises of quality that have yet to materialize.

For instance, I agree that Adobe's model is just awful, but Procreate is miles ahead of Gimp so I'd rather give those devs thirty bucks as a one time fee over using free software that is less enjoyable or expedient for my work. That's the crux of it really: for most people computing is a means to an end so it makes sense that users optimize their choices around results rather than ideals about the future of computing.

Also, what you've described doesn't sound like a better economy at all from where I'm sitting. I love not being a sole proprietor or part of a small dev shop. It's great being able to go home on a Friday and know that if anything comes up over the weekend that someone else will handle it. It's equally great knowing that I have the resources of a large company and the combined expertise of a massive pool of employees. I would certainly be less happy as a consultant, independent developer, or entrepreneur.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#402
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…

To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks): Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least: 1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor. 2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the hig…

I hate selecting text on my work iPhone. Android does this far better and you don’t need to learn tricks like pressing down spacebar.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks): Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least: 1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor. 2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the hig…

> 1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor. Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement. They could've told me while I was painstakingly shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo ...... ing!

I'm gonna be publicly ridiculed for this one and I'm good with that.

I've been trying to get the show desktop gesture on my mac right for years. You know, the one that "windows-D" was doing so loyaly for ages.

My habit is to arbitrarily swipe as many fingers as I can find available from center of trackpad outwards. It used to take me ~10 trials to get it right.

And now, enlightened by this random thread, I suddenly figured out I actually need to swipe 3 fingers upwards and one downwards simultaneously. This is the greatest Epiphany HN had given me since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13651148

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#404
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. I fired up my old launch day iPhone a few weeks ago. The phone works great, though some of the apps no longer have services to connect to (Weather, for example). What struck me is how intuitive iOS 3 was to use. Everything seemed more (to use the parlance of our times) "discoverable." Maybe part of it was just remembering how things work, bu…

Even little things -- the slider to unlock on the main screen. Incredibly obvious even after a minute of playing with it (my toddler at the time had no difficulty with the concept, despite not being able to read).

And the single button model was incredible as well -- "stuck somewhere? Press the button. Want to switch apps? Press the button." It was guaranteed that the button was not controlled by whatever app you were in; now all the gestures and sliding stuff means that half the time I'm stuck doing some in-app operation when I really want to do a "phone" operation. And I'm on an iPhone that still has the button! I dread the moment that I'm going to have to give it up.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#405
It has always been an iOS best practice to keep object sizes so that half an item visible if an area is scrollable, so to let the user know there’s more below the fold.

Since the first iPhone I never found them breaking this guideline. Not so badly at least.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#406
post #323
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…

In fairness, iOS these days is wildly unintuitive, and I'm not yet thirty. It's positively littered with hidden gestures and features that you'd never discover during normal usage. Many of them are really slick once you learn about them! But discoverability is worse not only compared to previous Apple software, but even to other systems like Android. And from what I've read, iPadOS is even worse.

They end of the skeuomorphic interface was the end of usability. UI design went from functional for a wide audience to "looks good in a demo". This coincided with the rise of web apps because unlike desktop apps using native widget sets web apps are a "blank slate" as far as UI design goes.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how intuitive and appropriate for that action. edit: it takes me about 2.5 seconds to dismiss a notification with that action. I don't know about y'all but I dismiss notifications way more often than open them. Seems like it should be just as quick to dismiss it as open it.

swipe left 2x, or hold down the X and "clear all notifications". still not as fast as Android, but can't say I've ever been bothered by it.

ahh thank you.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#408
How many iOS NN Beta users are on the ‘old phones’? I think this is a serious problem because then you don’t catch the problem before the iOS is out of Beta.

Same at Microsoft (in Norway) where every developer is eligible for a new PC every year.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#409
A friend of mine got bit by this sort of thing when setting up their Amazon Echo on their iPhone. When they got to the page where they were supposed to choose a wifi connection, it was perfectly cropped and showed no indication of being scrollable, so they thought those were all the networks it could see and there must be something stopping it from seeing theirs. Being a curious person, I walked through the process with them and when we got to this screen I was also confused, but I tried touching and dragging the list and sure enough it scrolled. Surprise!

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#410

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.

It lists your mom first too?

Honestly I rarely ever use any button in the "share sheet" except for Copy or Copy Link. Every time I open it I'm just searching for those Copy buttons. I'll "share" it myself with Paste. Idk how "sharing" ended up like this.

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