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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

#341

Post by jagged-chisel »

petters wrote: post #331
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…

> most egregious issue: How can I see the current year What do you want/need this for? Not something I've heard before

A full-year calendar. I’m not GP, but I’m pretty visual when it comes to planning things for the coming year. I don’t need coloring to show what’s available and what’s not, just a full year view of the calendar.

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

#342

Post by jagged-chisel »

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…

It’s not just animation causing the problem.

There are so many cases where I touched a button and it’s so slow that I tap again, but when it finally responds, it does the thing twice or changes the UI under me and I tap a different button.

Or it changes color/flashes to acknowledge the touch, but does nothing until I’m super patient and try it again and it works.

Or it does nothing to acknowledge my touch and doesn’t execute the action, so I question my sanity.

The point is that it’s so inconsistent that I don’t have an evidence-based guess at the root cause. My gut says it’s the overuse of dispatch queues.

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

#343

Post by IIsi50MHz »

dagmx wrote: post #209
MagerValp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also a bit surprised to read that, since Feedback Assistant.app should be the first thing that pops up if you do a spotlight search for "feedback". The app helps a bit with collecting a sysdiagnose report and makes it easy to add screenshots.

Only if you’re on beta builds afaik

On macOS 14.6.1:

1. Cmd-Space 2. I type "Fee", "Feed", or "Feedback" 3. Feedback Assistant appears in the list of suggestions.

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

#344

Post by Dylan16807 »

ein0p wrote: post #330
Dylan16807 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The threshold of what is too slow is in the eye of the beholder, but there have been good studies done on that topic and small delays do cause problems.

But the general idea of things being slowed down by animations is objective. It could be done in a frame or two, it takes X frames. And you can add up those delays when you're navigating and reach significant numbers.

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

#347

Post by IIsi50MHz »

DavidPiper wrote: post #223
furyofantares wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I saw the wobbly numbers instantly, but I didn't see any of that, and can't even see the 31/63 issue now.

The 31/63 issue for me is that they appear to be aligned differently to the 0s directly above them. The left-edge of the 6 seems to be further left than the left edge of the 3. The 3 in 31 at least looks vertically aligned with the 0 above it. However, I suspect they both have the same ("Incorrect" seems too harsh a word... "Visually imprecise"?) layout constraints and they look different in practice because "63" is…

> and they look different in practice because "63" is a wider number than "31".

Gah, I was just noticing this again today, in Finder! No sane font has Roman numerals that are not monospaced.

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

#348

Post by crazygringo »

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.

Wow that's bizarre.

At first I thought it was just an overflow error but no it's nothing like that. The math is indeed very clearly broken, as I play around with it on Sonoma on my M1.

I'm genuinely shocked. I though this kind of floating-point math was rock-solid, tested thoroughly over the decades.

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

#349

Post by jader201 »

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…

> and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself

I’m not surprised. Apple’s first party apps have always seemed like afterthoughts that were lower priority than other things. (E.g. relative to what I consider great quality hardware.)

Maps was terrible for several years following the release, and is still not great.

Screen Time, especially the parental controls side of it, is almost unusable.

Find My Friends used to have all sorts of disconnects where it wouldn’t work, though admittedly it seems to have finally gotten better over the past couple years.

These are just some examples I can think of. But this bug in the OP doesn’t surprise me.

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

#350

Post by tankenmate »

tankenmate wrote: post #115
baq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Linux laptop do you recommend?

If you're looking for an occasional laptop, I bought a Lenovo V14 ADA for the few times I travel; got it brand new for less than $275. 1080p screen, 8GB RAM, 4 threads, good Mesa support. Perfect for travel / now and again usage. It can even play some games on low graphics. EDIT: I should note, this is the AMD variant of the V14

I just checked Lenovo's more recent offerings in the US; the IdeaPad 1 15" AMD Abyss Blue.

Not sure if the build quality is as good as the EU SMB market laptops (which are generally really good value with good build quality, for me a perfect compromise between price and build quality, steel internal framework with solid plastic case, not sexy but definitely robust).

This IdeaPad1 looks like it has the same specs as the EU model (V14 G4 AMN). Just check if the build is solid enough. The IdeaPad1 can be bought at Best Buy.

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