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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

#321

Post by rgovostes »

FabHK wrote: post #308
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.

Unless I missed something, they’ve added a handwriting mode, which is cool but not necessarily an improvement over something like Mathematica. I don’t want to have to carry an Apple Pencil with me and write long hand every time I want to solve an equation.

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

#322

Post by jwells89 »

diggan wrote: post #279
jwells89 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that keeps me on iOS is that Android just doesn’t feel right, and none of the tweaks that can be applied (launchers, etc) can fix that. Animations, interactions, etc just feel… off somehow, like I’m using an early alpha build of software that has placeholders strewn about. It’s not a “it’s not iOS” thing, either. There are certain desktop Linux setups for example that don’t bother me nearly as much. It’s ju…

> Animations, interactions, etc just feel… off somehow, like I’m using an early alpha build of software that has placeholders strewn about. It's funny that I'm the complete opposite. I was fine with Android, switched to iPhone (as mentioned upthread) and everything feels off, like no one cared about the UI and UX, and bugs galore everywhere. If someone handed me my iPhone 12 Mini today I'd say they're running a beta…

QA for iOS has slipped in recent years, but I feel that’s a different matter. The issues I have with Android aren’t bugs, it’s more like odd choices for things like animation timing curves and nitty gritty things like that.

Bugs aside, it feels like touches more “directly” control iOS whereas with Android it’s like interactions are all passing through an additional layer, leading to an impression of disconnectedness. It’s not entirely unlike the phenomenon that used to be observable on some Linux desktops a decade+ ago when computers were weaker and you could “feel” the layering of X11, GTK, your compositor, DE, etc all kind of slip-sliding and not acting fully in concert, where Windows and OS X usually didn’t give this impression.

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

#323

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

st3fan wrote: post #287
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #82

> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t There is: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/ That said, it isn’t very user-friendly, and I find that they don’t seem to pay much attention to it. When they do respond, it tends to be some form of “#wontfix. Please close this.” That looks like a fairly ugly little bug. I suspect they know about it now, thanks to the HN Bug Reporter. It tends to…

"We cannot process this report. Please attach 50GB of logs that may or may not include PII". I've had enough cases where a simple screenshot or log snippet should have been enough to accept the bug report but instead they were closed because I cannot in good conscience attach all the data they want from a Mac that I use for my day to day work. :shrug:

The last report I submitted, was an App Store Connect bug.

If you are submitting a build for Mac (in my case, as a Mac Catalyst companion to an iOS app), you can’t reset the build number to 0, after you change the main version.

For example, if you go from 1.0.0 (106) to 1.0.1, you would expect it to be 1.0.1 (0), but it won’t let you submit a Mac build with that build. It must be 1.0.1 (107), even though the iOS build is fine, with 1.0.1 (0).

This forces me to keep updating the build number on both builds (because I sync them). I used to use the build number as an indicator of release status, but this pooches that. Not the end of the world, but annoying.

I first got a “cannot reproduce” response, where they wanted me to submit a sample app (In the original report, I actually sent them a link to my full app source code, as it is an open-source app -most of my work is open-source, and I have a number of repos that contain full source for shipping apps).

I responded, saying I would not, because it would require creating a whole fake app, with fake releases and whatnot, and it wasn’t worth it, as I had already sent them a link to a shipping app, that exhibits the problem, and also, they were quite capable of doing that, a hell of a lot more easily than I could.

I then got a second response, saying something like “Oh, I see. It is a string issue, not a numerical issue. Works as designed. #wontfix. Here’s how to close a bug.”

I gave up, and closed it.

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

#324

Post by canucker2016 »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #312
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…

The Windows 3.1 calculator has a fun bug where 2.01 - 2.00 returns the result of 0.00, not 0.01. That always amused me.

Acording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Calculator#Windows_9x_..., the Win98 version of calc.exe got an arbitrary-precision math library for basic math functionality to fix this sort of problem.

also mentioned by Raymond Chen, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39... :

"Today, Calc’s internal computations are done with infinite precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and 32 digits of precision for advanced operations (square root, transcendental operators)."

And they fixed the square-root-of-a-perfect-square bug a few years ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/89s53g/microsoft...

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

#325

Post by gmd63 »

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…

Anyone who has tried to play computer games semi seriously on a Mac has experienced some level of bewilderment due to Apple's decades-long refusal to include an option to disable mouse acceleration in their settings.

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

#326

Post by immibis »

mrob wrote: post #47
djbusby wrote: post #35

Maybe now is a good time to remind everyone: your vision will deteriorate. Keep this in mind when designing. When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable. According to my eye doctor the screen time is causing eyesight issues earlier. We're not designed to stare at a bright light 40cm away all day. May want to look at some eye exercise…

Very few screens are bright enough to compete with the normal brightness of outdoor sunlight. There's no evidence that close focus or looking at bright screens causes eyesight problems. Bright light actually seems to protect against myopia. Here's a good overview: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/

Once I took apart an LCD monitor (with LED backlight) since one of the backlight elements was broken (I got it broken for very little money). I thought I'd see whether the LCD element can be used in front of a window to make a sci-fi type screen. Turns out the backlight is much, much brighter than daylight, and the LCD lets almost no light through. The LCD was too dark to make a cool sci-fi screen, and the backlight sitting separately was blindingly bright.

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

#327

Post by xp84 »

diggan wrote: post #169
PaulHoule wrote: post #163

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. The thoughtlessness/pixel ratio might be worse than Microsoft in some cases, which can be hard to believe.

> 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…

The egregious amount of time wasted playing the animations is really the worst. For a great demo of how bad it is, even on my 15 Pro Max — try this: go into a Messages conversation and hit the + next to the text entry field. An ugly, blur-filled animation has to play for about 1000ms EVERY TIME you open this menu up, which is now the way you have to add a photo to the conversation. Heck, I don’t even want the menu, I just want a photo button which instantly shows my most recent photos.

Back in jailbreak days there was a global animation timer hack you could do — changing the animations to take zero seconds — so they would all just be skipped. It made the phone so fast.

(“Reduce Motion” is useless for this because yeah, the fades are just as slow.)

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

#328

Post by ASalazarMX »

kurthr wrote: post #302
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?!?

Of course not. Apple would not release a calculator for iPad that doesn't honor the bigger form factor and Apple's uncompromising design and user friendliness, nothing that doesn't make users go "Wow!" in slack-jawed amazement!

It needs to work on it for at least five more years, meanwhile you can buy one of the many inferior iPad calculator apps that are not hindered by Apple's vision of greatness.

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

#329

Post by Dylan16807 »

ein0p wrote: post #307
Dylan16807 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I agree, that is what they meant by slow animations. So why did you bring up compute power? They specifically said "not because poor performance".

Also I don't think "just" is the word to use here. Slow is slow, and when it's on purpose it's harder to avoid.

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

#330

Post by ein0p »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #329
ein0p wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, I agree, that is what they meant by slow animations. So why did you bring up compute power? They specifically said "not because poor performance". Also I don't think "just" is the word to use here. Slow is slow, and when it's on purpose it's harder to avoid.

Slow is in the eye of the beholder. Of all the legitimate complaints one could make about Apple, “slow” is somewhere towards the bottom of the list.
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