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Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

martin.wojtczyk.de

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Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#301

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

jb1991 wrote: post #231
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to an iPhone a few years ago and I really miss the Android calculator app. It showed the entire expression typed so far and its current value! In desperation, I have resorted to SSHing to my desktop and using `python` as a calculator.

Well, if you really want that on your phone you can get other calculator apps that are quite advanced. Might be easier than doing what you are doing.

Believe me, I looked for a while. Nothing quite scratched the itch while also being free, ad-free, and private. I guess I sound quite picky, but SSH + python checks all the boxes.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#302

Post by kurthr »

jb1991 wrote: post #96

On mobile devices, Apple’s Calculator app has always been one of the most frustrating apps I’ve ever used, and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself. If you press buttons quickly, like you would a normal calculator, many of the key presses simply don’t register at all. I’m not sure if they’re prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality, but it’s incredibly surprising from…

Maybe it will be fixed in Apple Calculator for iPad (soon to be released 2024) in iOS 18?!?

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#303

Post by 0x0 »

rgovostes wrote: post #290

A friend doing homework for a university assignment, circa Leopard or Snow Leopard, noticed that Calculator produced negative values when raising a negative number to an even power. The bug turned out to be in CFNumber, in Core Foundation. CFNumber does a lot of fiddly stuff at the bit level for performance, and one of their optimizations for exponentiation was incorrect. Somehow it was never found by tests or due to…

Interesting, I started playing with spotlight and typing in (-20)^21 returns " = 0", which is obviously not correct.

And typing in "(-22)^21" gives "-71100888972574851072", but wolfram alpha insists it should be "-15519448971100888972574851072".

Looks like there are still bugs here.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#304

Post by rgovostes »

I can usually appreciate Apple's design homages. The original iOS Calculator is inspired by the Braun ET, and it makes some sense to provide a familiar design for basic use.

But it inherits baggage from the limitations of the handheld calculators of the 1970s. Why can't I use the - button to write a negative sign? What does "AC" mean? The scientific calculator is an even worse design. There's a ton of invisible state, like the value stored in memory, or whether you're inside parentheses. The user has to hold the whole sequence of operations in their head, without clicking a single wrong button. Want to repeat a calculation with a different operand? Tough.

Graphing calculators like the TI-84 that let you see and edit your input are so much more usable. Even better are notebook-style interfaces like Mathematica. It's a shame Apple won't pay homage to those designs.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#305

Post by FabHK »

fishtacos wrote: post #265
eks391 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used a few apple products -- the iPhone 3 was my first smartphone, and an iPad mini back when tablets were starting out. At the time of the switch to android, I didn't think too much of it, but definitely enjoyed the customisation. A couple years ago I was gonna get a new phone and, half my family being Apple devotees, I was considering switching again so I could stop hearing the 'blue bubble' nagging, plus they…

Along these same lines, the tabletification of Mac OS is annoying. A friend asked me to help with importing photos from the Apple Photo app on his brand new desktop Mac. The sequence of events was: Lightroom Legacy needs photos imported because the new Lightroom (cloud/subscription version I believe) has a different workflow, interface and apparently, features, so he's using both for the time being. So he follows gui…

See, the file system is a fine system for general data, but if you have data of a specific kind, then there’s often a better way than just dumping them in the file system. That’s always been Apple’s approach: let data assigned to a specific app be handled by that app [1].

Apple’s approach has also been to allow export of that data into standard interoperable formats (be it music, photos, emails, contacts, calendars, etc.).

And FWIW, the photos are in “~/Pictures/Photos Library” - that must have been very difficult to find.

[1] it had two pieces of metadata, content type and creator, for files in Mac OSes prior to OS X, when it regressed to the windows/Unix way of handling things with inelegant file extensions.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#306

Post by FabHK »

talldayo wrote: post #244
eks391 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used a few apple products -- the iPhone 3 was my first smartphone, and an iPad mini back when tablets were starting out. At the time of the switch to android, I didn't think too much of it, but definitely enjoyed the customisation. A couple years ago I was gonna get a new phone and, half my family being Apple devotees, I was considering switching again so I could stop hearing the 'blue bubble' nagging, plus they…

The older I get, the more certain I am that Apple products are designed from the ground-up as ad-watching appliances. On iPad, you're restricted to a sandboxed environment where you are not encouraged (or in many cases, allowed) to do anything other than watch ads. You cannot sideload apps that are Open Source. You cannot install emulators or fullspeed VM software. You cannot switch the browser out for one you would…

> Apple products are designed from the ground-up as ad-watching appliances.

That’s funny. I have virtually no ads on my Apple devices. I associate ads with Windows and Android.

And I have several browsers on my iPad, one reason being avoiding ads.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#307

Post by ein0p »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #296
ein0p wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could disable animations on iOS through accessibility options. As a rule a flagship iPhone is at least 30% faster than flagship Android (by which I basically mean Samsung Galaxy) on realistic workloads.

A phone doesn't spend much time doing "workloads". UI animations in particular should never be close to CPU or GPU bound.

And they aren’t. The op probably just didn’t like some hyperparameter, like duration, because it had a different value than on Android.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#308

Post by FabHK »

rgovostes wrote: post #304

I can usually appreciate Apple's design homages. The original iOS Calculator is inspired by the Braun ET, and it makes some sense to provide a familiar design for basic use. But it inherits baggage from the limitations of the handheld calculators of the 1970s. Why can't I use the - button to write a negative sign? What does "AC" mean? The scientific calculator is an even worse design. There's a ton of invisible state…

Coming up in iOS 18.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#309

Post by immibis »

PaulHoule wrote: post #181
diggan wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's greatest weakness is that many of it's fans and I'd assume people in house assume they are the epitome of UI design when actually it's not. Which led to people like me making a fool out of themselves. Always been using Android, and listened to iPhone users singing the praise of the amazing UI and UX of iOS. Well, eventually iPhone 12 Mini released so I figured, "why not give it a try, can't be worse than my…

CarPlay is a thing because carmakers just can't seem to make a decent "radio" with a touchscreen no matter how they try. It would be nice to see a business school case study that reveals why.

You can't feel the controls on a touchscreen. You always have to look at it.

Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

#310

Post by weaksauce »

jodacola wrote: post #217
savanaly wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everything is dog slow, not because poor performance but because of slow animations. Did you try Accessibility > Motion > Off? >Things are impossible to discover unless you watch tutorials on YouTube There's a pretty useful manual built into the device itself called Hints I think? Did you read that?

Disclaimer: I'm generally fine with iOS and use it and macOS as my daily drivers. > There's a pretty useful manual built into the device itself called Hints I think? Did you read that? I posit that if one needs to load up the Tips app to figure out how to perform desired functions, that's a problem with the UX and not the human trying to use the device/app. The ideas espoused in The Design of Everyday Things[0] pops…

> The ideas espoused in The Design of Everyday Things[0] pops into mind right now.

the unfortunate reality of touch screens is that there are no affordances for things that can't be seen. design of everyday things goes over stuff like never put a pull handle on a push door kinda things. i think having to go to an app for some things is somewhat reasonable given the ui size constraints and only having so much touchable area... most of the functionality is there and self evident without an app.

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