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Perfectly Cropped

tyler.io

461–470 of 571 posts

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#461
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna be the jerk who says you really shouldn't be using your phone while cycling.

navigation/gps? workout app? whats the difference between a workout app on my iphone compared to a dedicated device (e.g. garmin edge) in terms of safety?

You shouldn't be actively using, interacting with, and providing manual input to your device (be it a phone, garmin edge, or anything else) while cycling. An occasional glance at a navigation app (on a screen that is held by something other than your hand - a clip, stand, etc.) is probably fine - but taking your hand off a handlebar long enough to hold a device, and taking your concentration off your path long enough to interact with it, is asking for trouble.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#462

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/

This happens all the time with news articles. There's an enormous ad and call-to-read-something-else in the middle of the article and you can't see below it to know the article didn't end. It's happening more and more.

Arguably, news articles have been written from the start (even in physical newspapers) so that the most important information is listed first, knowing that many readers won't bother to flip the pages to get to where the article is continued. Giant page-ending ads online just continue this tradition, they'd rather you click three more headlines than keep reading the mostly-redundant article body.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#463
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 considering coasting back to a Thinkpad for a while and check if they manage to un-fuck the MBP next year.

I'm fine if they just re-print the old sacred & holy Unibody with recent hardware, X62 style.

Perfection cannot be improved.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#464
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 h…

I don't disagree with your sentiment re: Js, it's a problem for sure. But a jQuery project from 10 years ago is completely different from a pseudo-native app (aka electron). I guarantee the jQuery project doesn't provide an iota of the functionality that the electron app does (and if this isn't the case, why use electron in the first place?!)

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#465
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While we're on the topic, those screen-masking "tutorials" you randomly get when apps push out an updated UI are annoying. I always skip past them. When I open an app, it's for a reason, and I want to start using it.

Yeah, an overview of how things are laid out is great to have but let me go there after I've already looked around a bit, and don't make it an obstacle.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#466
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…

People have the patience of learning the new tricks ONCE when they get a new phone. After that nothing major like this should change. I am sure this change would have created more than a few hundred WTF moments while someone was driving/cooking/whatever and texting (yes, I know it is bad, but everyone does it) and I wouldn't be surprised there are a few accidents.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#467
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.

Yep, I had an iMac stolen recently.

Guess what I bought with the insurance money:

A PC laptop.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#468
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…

One of the hazards of working in this space is that as you develop sympathy for others, trying to “think like a normal user” you eventually succeed. Your own thinking starts to shift and pretty soon you suffer from the same class of problems. I overheard several people talking about this when I first started thinking about UX and sure enough within a couple years I was making some of the same sorts of “mistakes”.

Having fallen into that thinking, at some point a few years back I realized that I was selling myself short by thinking that I should behave "like a normal user". And now I combat it with a secondary mindset of training some actions into muscle memory, as if I were learning martial arts techniques.

With a lot of hardware-only workflows, muscle memory training happens by default, which also means that they "get away with" really poor UX ideas at times. With software you can have some mixture of defaults/presets and technique. It's not worthwhile to try to customize all of it(good defaults are precious, early-binding forms are valuable) and technique usually suffices for covering the remainder. But technique is less discoverable than a settings menu, as well, and swipe-and-tap techniques are extremely so since they operate on many dimensions. Compare the new iOS gestures to chorded keystrokes - once you know that chording exists, you can learn any new one given some time.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, but who has time? Tips will spend 5 mins walking you through how to change the preferred colour scheme for the Weather app, when what I want to do right now is answer the phone. Then, 2 months later, I want to change the colour scheme in the Weather app. Can I remember how? Or even remember where I saw to do that? Or even find the right tip? Obviously not...

This seems like a huge excuse for not wanting to learn. Things will continue to change, and either you can learn or be left behind.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#470
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…

The three finger unpinch on a phone is miserable
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