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Perfectly Cropped

tyler.io

471–480 of 571 posts

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#471
post #371

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…

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'm with you on everything else (I'll be the first to admit that I love trashing Apple at every opportunity I get these days), but I find it weird that people criticize the dongle thing so heavily. Surely standardizing everything to USB-C would be an example of the exact thing you're talking about? (keeping it simple and functional). Somebody has to make the switch first, and if Apple didn't, wouldn't we all be using dongles anyway, just the other way round?

I'm happy to cop a bit of temporary pain in the pursuit of standardization. It's the one thing that actually isn't shitting me about my work Macbook.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#472
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…

> 1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.

Specifically, either long-touch the space bar or force-touch any letter. Just don't force-touch the left side of the screen, which will invoke the app switcher.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#473
post #441

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'm curious too. Anecdotally, I've never seen anyone use it for anything (I work in an office where Macbooks are standard issue). I think when I first got it I dicked around with it for 5 minutes, changing the colour of my terminal using the hue slider, and it was cool, but I haven't used it since. It just feels like a sales gimmick that serves no real purpose except to look fancy in an ad.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#474
post #153
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've been thinking about adding this to the app I'm working on, as a sort of UI hint. Just something real subtle at each edge that is scrollable, to signal the user that they can scroll in that direction (maybe a transparent animated chevron or something).

It definitely does feel like something the browser should handle though. Having to work on stuff like that instead of actual functionality is painful, especially for startups that are trying to iterate fast.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#475
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…

Thanks! Still not always (in Chrome, still need to scroll or hover over the scrollbar to appear).

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#476
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.

On Android:

"Options/other"-icon before: 3 dots ( https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/android-user-interfac... )

"Options/other"-icon now: 3 horizontal lines ( https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/android-user-interfac... )

I liked the 3 dots because it was natural for me to associate it with "etc...". I don't know what the 3 horizontal lines are meant to represent, but I know that it's really difficult to explain to my parents and that they keep forgetting its meaning because they cannot associate the symbol with anything :(

Similar thing with the "back button"-icon ( https://icon-library.net/images/android-back-icon/android-ba... ): it's an equilateral triangle, maybe pointing to the left, or maybe to the top/bottom right corners, or maybe just a "triangle" (associate "triangle" with "back"?) depending on how you think. I'd prefer a less stylish but classical arrow ("Etc... .

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#477
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant. Every single image that I saw is of an Apple product. The so-called masters of UI.

We (the authors) are Mac and iPhone users, so yeah, our exposure to things is skewed towards MacOS and iOS :) And yeah, it pains us to no end :)

Hey grumpy - awesome site, but I thought "Cancel Subscription? - YES / CANCEL" was the title of the post and spent sometime wondering why it had nothing to do with subscriptions:

https://pic.t0.vc/ZYIU.png

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#478
post #441

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…

As a heavy vim user, I can’t live without escape key. One Of the fast way to alienate an entire userbase. I know people sometimes map cap lock but my brain is not conditioned to bimodal action and I don’t want to be tied to a certain specific keyboard layout, not to mention the pain to overwrite muscle memory.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#479
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…

Thanks for posting this, I never thought to check if scrollbars could always be on. This is a big improvement.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#480
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

I have a 90% success rate with my totally different approach-

put four fingers in the center of the trackpad- not touching each other, but very close. then naturally spread them apart.

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