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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

#331

Post by petters »

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…

> most egregious issue: How can I see the current year

What do you want/need this for? Not something I've heard before

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

#332

Post by mulmen »

runjake wrote: post #230
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?

I think you’re talking about iOS. If so, it’s Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion -> On

This doesn’t solve the problem. It just turns the animation into equally slow fades.

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

#333

Post by Aloisius »

0x0 wrote: post #303
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.

Spotlight on Sequoia looks correct, though it limits precision more than wolfram alpha.

(-20)^21 = -2.097152x10^27 and (-22)^21 = -1.5519448971*10^28

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

#334

Post by andrewinardeer »

Windows 11 lets you conveniently "pin" the calculator in standard mode, keeping it accessible on top of your active window – great for multitasking with calculations.

However, switch to a different calculator mode (like scientific), and Windows inexplicably removes the pinning feature.

This baffling decision feels so actively user hostile it is deserving of an award for poor design choices.

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

#335

Post by mh- »

diggan wrote: post #271
mh- wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a manual for iOS. Here's[0] the section about the onscreen keyboard (ctrl-f for trackpad to find the spacebar thing). Expand the Table of Contents + at the top to see all the sections. (Like others, not defending the state of things, just trying to help.) 0: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-onscree... edit: if you want it in an offline format, you can find it in the Apple Books app by sear…

Yeah, with the helpful title of "Turn the onscreen keyboard into a trackpad", not even mentioning "move/moving" or "cursor", and also using "trackpad" wrong? A trackpad is for controlling a pointer, like a mouse, not to control the "insertion point of text". Great that it is mentioned somewhere, in some manner, I guess.

Yeah that was quite hard to find, even though I already knew about the user guide. I searched for both cursor and spacebar and came up empty. Finally checked each section.

Not great.

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

#336

Post by Aloisius »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #299

I like Apple's hardware and underlying OS enough to shell out for MacBook Pros but, man, their homebuilt applications are a PITA. The RPN calculator on my high powered new MBP doesn't have a scientific or engineering notation option. Same on my old MBP as well. I guess it is a feature. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank

Sequoia's calculator has RPN with scientific notation now.

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

#337

Post by jmb99 »

layer8 wrote: post #134
johnwalkr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently windows has become much better for things a linux or macOS user takes for granted, like using ssh (a quick google search tells you how to install it using powershell), but is missing a lot of features. Two recent examples for me are taking 5 minutes to figure out how to install and use rsync, and taking 10 minutes finding a program to add/delete pages from a pdf file that's not a trial or demo of some kind.

That’s pretty quick?

Both of those features have been built in to macOS for 2 decades, so in comparison, it’s quite slow.

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

#338

Post by talldayo »

FabHK wrote: post #306
talldayo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I have virtually no ads on my Apple devices.

Virtually. It's great when you log into iCloud and only have to deal with the App Store's "Suggested Content" and the Google suggested results in Spotlight Search and the misery of the default YouTube client running 30s midroll ads. Then you can make the little storage nag go away with a convenient $2.99/month payment addressable to Apple Inc. Oh, you wanted sideloading? That's to the tune of $99/year... can't pass off the SDK for free, can you? We'll assume you ignore Apple Music, although it will certainly nag you to try it.

For cloud storage and basic sideloading capabilities, Apple will charge you $11.24/month for basic features of the phone you bought and still treat you like garbage. The premium brand-halo surrounding their products is the well-documented Reality Distortion Effect - you are being fooled into defending nonsense because you think this grifting benefits you. To be clear, I think Android and Windows both suffer from similar problems, but their users aren't fooled because it's explicit. Apple uniquely abuses their position as OEM, and the problem literally extends to them advertising to their users and convincing them it's harmless when Apple does it. If you don't understand it by now, just read the affidavit once the FTC wraps up their case.

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

You have one browser, with multiple interfaces. When Apple serves you boot, your browsers have no choice but to lick.

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

#339

Post by fishtacos »

FabHK wrote: post #305
fishtacos wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Windows has a Pictures folder. Before they started screwing with the OneDrive directories, it used to be in ONE location. Now it's in OneDrive\directory location, which works, even if it annoys me. The upside being automatic backup and restore. That Pictures folder is accessible systemwide and is accessible through EVERY application that can browse directories.

The Photos library on the Mac was not accessible via Lightroom Legacy. He (& I) could not locate it through the "Browse" functionality within the application. I think I could open the photos through finder, but could not import them through Lightroom Legacy. I could, however, Open With: from the Photos app, which then imports into the application just fine. This irked him enough to not want to do it, and I explained that it was the only way to do so, or otherwise export and import the desired photos in bulk.

I see what you're saying, but Apple's approach was clearly not intuitive for me, nor the Mac user. It's what it is, but Apple needs to facilitate working with their virtual folders/libraries natively through applications, not force users to resort to using workarounds... to export into interoperable formats for applications that run natively on their OS. Either Adobe is screwy or Apple is screwy here, but I'm leaning on Apple so far.

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

#340

Post by wojtczyk »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #176
deergomoo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly you might as well scream it into the nearest pillow. I'm sure someone somewhere reads some of them, but in most cases the very best you can hope for is a comment asking you to confirm whether it's still an issue in the latest release/beta.

Wasn’t it admitted or leaked through court documents that it was originally added only to placate upset users who expect to be able to submit feedback but that they weren’t going to particularly monitor or care for what gets submitted through it. I recall it was Jobs himself who didn’t want it and gave in after constant demands for a feedback contact method

Thank you for the context!
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