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Perfectly Cropped

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Re: Perfectly Cropped

#441

Post by dmix »

Aperocky wrote: post #438
nothis wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave poor “beautiful” out of it! It’s innocent! Apple’s shit is beautiful because it is simple and functional, not the other way round. I think the issue is now that their products become weirdly tacky looking from being functionally weird. The notch, the Touch Bar, the overladen gesture menus... it’s all kinda aimless and floaty. Let’s not even go into how they turned a MacBook workspace into dongle central.

I cannot for the love of my life understand why apple put a touchbar there. If someone regularly uses them, please share your experience. My next personal laptop will definitely not be a MacBook at this rate.

I'm curious if Apple has some data that people secretly like the touchbar (I've never come across someone who uses it for anything). Beyond just being fancy-looking when you're in the Apple store comparing laptops... which I think is the whole point and makes you question the priorities of Apple's recent leader.

I wouldn't even care about the Touchbar if they left the rest of the keyboard alone, but apparently the escape key was seen as an unimportant key.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#442

Post by heartbreak »

reaperducer wrote: post #287
taneq wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-pinch".)

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.

It's also in the Tips app, which prompts via notifications to learn about new features in iOS after an upgrade. You can ignore it, or you can let it walk you through the changes to your device.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#443

Post by TurkishPoptart »

com2kid wrote: post #416
newscracker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poor design described in the article is really bad. But > Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web. This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings…

> Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. Swipe up from home screen, the launcher + search bar appears. It is somewhat annoying that none of the primary buttons now brings up the launcher, but that change happened long ago. :/ IIRC pressing the home button while on the home screen would make the launcher appear. Since it is Android there is probably a utility to add that back. Of course us…

>(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)

Was that the one with all the floating "tiles" on the screen? IIRC it was influenced by the Zune UX. I remember when my father purchased a Windows phone as his first smartphone. It had already been announced they'd stop supporting them, but the Verizon guy didn't tell him that. I actually rather liked the UX and OS; the thing about Android's "desktop" that I dislike is its "pagination" - i.e. you can fit 12 icons on one page, and have to flip through them. So I have my calendar on one page, 8 icons or so there, my work email on one, my personal email on the next. I can navigate it quite quickly, but compared to the Windows tiles it seems antiquated for some reason.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#444

Post by ken »

taneq wrote: post #284
andrewla wrote: post #273

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…

Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-pinch".)

Was it ever announced? How are new users supposed to figure anything out?

My C=64 came with a thick reference manual, with circuit schematics in the back. Every computer I've bought since then has had a smaller manual. I think my smartphone came with a small pamphlet with a couple screenshots.

It seems you're supposed to learn how to use electronics these days by having people say "oh, don't you know?"

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#445

Post by ir77 »

dpcan wrote: 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…

i still can't figure out how to do screen splits on iPad, since it was introduced in OS 11? i watched videos on it, etc, and still couldn't get it to work. the only way i got it to work is to split screens for an app that's on my dock, which itself is very limited.

i ended up giving the ipad to my 5 year old as his toy and the other day it died completely.

i guess i will never know.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#446

Post by cicero »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #159
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…

Peak OSX / MacOS was Snow Leopard. From next version they hid scrollbars, swapped default scroll direction and started a steady move to make it seem everything should be hidden like iOS.

The success of phones and tablets appears to have made the desktop world afraid they were obsolete, so the trend since Snow Leopard and Windows 7 has been to make the desktop more like a phone or tablet. Windows 8 clearly went too far and provoked a revolt, so Microsoft improved things with Windows 10, but I think the Windows 7 UI is still better than Windows 10 in many ways.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#447

Post by mattwad »

_bxg1 wrote: post #323
dpcan wrote: 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.

This is how it always was. They always have secret keyboard shortcuts that don't have a menu option. Still, to this day, it's hard to even find your hard drive folder by default in Finder. Apple's UX is incredible if all you need to do is look at photos.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#448

Post by rktdno »

dmix wrote: post #441
Aperocky wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot for the love of my life understand why apple put a touchbar there. If someone regularly uses them, please share your experience. My next personal laptop will definitely not be a MacBook at this rate.

I'm curious if Apple has some data that people secretly like the touchbar (I've never come across someone who uses it for anything). Beyond just being fancy-looking when you're in the Apple store comparing laptops... which I think is the whole point and makes you question the priorities of Apple's recent leader. I wouldn't even care about the Touchbar if they left the rest of the keyboard alone, but apparently the es…

I miss the escape key.

I also like that volume and brightness are both sliders—I find the gesture of tapping the volume on the Touch Bar and dragging my finger up or down in the direction I want better than pressing a button a bunch of times until I’m at my desired volume. There are other things I like about it (and others I don’t).

I think it’s ok to like aspects of the Touch Bar and dislike others—it is possible to iterate to something better by being specific in one’s critique about what is good and what isn’t rather than just tossing the whole thing out (which is personally what I’d like to see...and maybe I’m in the vocal minority here).

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#449

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #287
taneq wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-pinch".)

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.

[deleted]

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#450

Post by mattnewton »

taneq wrote: post #284
andrewla wrote: post #273

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…

Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-pinch".)

The tips app is one attempt at feature discovery like this.

The problem is that modern UI's can do so much that some has to be hidden so the common use cases can be easier, but users never go into the tips app or online help books to find out what was hidden. Pushing notifications spams users who don't want to look there, so we instead have our current situation /shrug ️

Source: used to work on the iOS tips app and help.apple.com/$productname help books at apple.

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