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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

#371

Post by jcotton42 »

gmd63 wrote: post #325
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.

My "favorite" macOS mousing sin is that the reverse scrolling options for touchpads and mice are linked, despite there being two distinct checkboxes.

Meaning you cannot have reversed (aka natural) scrolling on a touchpad, and standard scrolling on a mouse at the same time without 3rd-party software.

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

#372

Post by dchest »

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.

Hah,

macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 on M1 = 0

iOS 17.6.1 = -0

WTF.

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

#373

Post by winrid »

mjlee wrote: post #118
darkwater wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH) If it' just "this", Linux is perfectly capable and IMO even superior.

I use linux on the desktop, but I still run a MacBook for my laptop. Nobody else offers the same combination of battery life to performance/weight, build quality, keyboard, trackpad, and screen. Of course it's not perfect for everbody and you might have different priorities but I think the MacBook gets most of them right for most people. Some come close on a few of those points but if you want official linux support…

The x1 carbons running Linux are better than the Mac in every aspect except performance for the battery life, but personally I don't want to use my laptop for that long at once anyway, so w/e.

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

#374

Post by xp84 »

docfort wrote: post #351
xp84 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I take your overall point, but for this specific complaint, there’s a shortcut: long press on the “+” button to take you directly to the photo pocket in Messages.

Thank you! A year on this crappy UI and I never discovered that organically. Such a great discoverable UI.

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

#375

Post by grumpyprole »

secondcoming wrote: post #360
FabHK wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Excel (and some other languages), unary minus has higher precedence than exponentiation, so that -x^2 = (-x)^2 = x^2. That can bite you (for example when calculating the normal probability density function “manually”).

Are there languages where this isn’t the case?

Standard mathematical notation?

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

#376

Post by maskros »

IIsi50MHz wrote: post #347
DavidPiper wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of fonts have monospaced numbers, they just need to be enabled! Look for OpenType (TTF and/or OTF) fonts with feature "tnum", and enable it.

For CSS, use font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums.

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

#377

Post by zelphirkalt »

canucker2016 wrote: post #324
LeoPanthera wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, m…

Can this be true? Does the calculator have any irrational number? What if I enter PI * 2? Infinite precision, wouldn't that mean running until your RAM is full? Or would it simply work, because no irrational number is calculated to infinite (as many as the device could) digits and is therefore finite and can easily be multiplied?

Or another even simpler case: If division is infinite precision, and I enter (2/3) * X, does the calculator internally work with fractions? Otherwise it would have infinite digits to compute.

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

#378

Post by IWeldMelons »

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/

From the same article:

"In contrast, long-wavelength light is growth-inhibiting and short-wavelength light is growth-promoting in rhesus monkey (57) and tree shrew (58)."

Modern monitors have high amount of shortwave spectrum, blue is unusually shortwave.

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

#379

Post by diggan »

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

> What do you want/need this for?

Some things don't get stuck in my memory, like the current year or my own age. My own age is easy to calculate as long as I know the current year, but the current year isn't always easy to remember for some reason, especially the first 6 months of each year. Most of the time I just have to think for 10-15 seconds to remember it though, so isn't the end of the world exactly.

And no, my memory is generally fine, it's just some "sometimes changing" numbers that just don't get persisted correctly, or they're stored correctly but my retrieval microservice is too janky to retrieve stuff fast enough.

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

#380

Post by diggan »

HaZeust wrote: post #317
diggan wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I'm really curious how _this_ is the most egregious issue for you. Because it's so basic. Add a switch that lets me decide how I want the date to be displayed on the lockscreen/notifications centre. > why would you need it featured so prominently? It doesn't need to be more prominently than where the date is right now, I just want the current year next to it as well.

>Because it's so basic Exactly, it's such basic knowledge to know - it'd be a waste of space to show it ... What UI even gives you the option to have year next to date/day and time?

> Exactly, it's such basic knowledge to know

Well, for some people, they know exactly what date it is, and what week number it is, does that mean we shouldn't show that either, because it's such a basic knowledge to know for some?

I'd prefer to accept that different people remember different details, that's why we let our personal computing devices be customizable, because not everyone is the same.

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