[deleted]
Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
41–50 of 408 posts
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#42One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by…
>More expensive lenses have a coating to compensate for this chromatic aberration.
You can't compensate for chromatic aberration with a coating. You need a compound lens made from multiple elements each with a different dispersion, e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achromatic_lens
More expensive glasses lenses usually have worse chromatic aberration than cheap ones. The cheapest material for glasses lenses (PADC, often called by the brand name CR-39) has one of the best Abbe numbers (measure of dispersion).
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#43My bet would be on some compounding error from long usage also. I'm using Apple Notes and it fails in some random ways after keeping it open for 1-2 weeks: When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random stuff, dragging text won't work, I can check/uncheck todo boxes. Goes away when I restart it.
I ran into this in Notes as well. Restating Notes fixed it, but wasn’t my first instinct, as I view copy/paste as a system task and didn’t think it would be impacted within a single app. Seeing that I’m not the only one, I need to remember to restart notes at the first sign of an issue, rather than trying the action over and over trying to figure out what’s going on.
Hopefully, seeing as you are not the only one, you figure out where to file a bug report and then file it too. And then it gets fixes.
Ha, I am too used to it being more accessible to file a bug report, having spent most of my career with GNU/Linux (contributing and using since 90s).
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve used fullhd imac/osx for many years until around 2018 and never noticed anything like that. Easier to call it “low dpi issues” now that they destroyed it, I guess ;)
2018 was about when they stopped selling the last Mac with a non-Retina display, so that would make sense for when they stopped testing for it.
It's not only about stopping testing: they dropped subpixel rendering altogether.
Though this seems more like a hinting issue.
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#45I’m pretty sure there are Apple employees that read HN. It would have been cool to include a build number of the OS
Or, you know, file a Feedback: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#46Haha, off-by-one pixel error! I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH), but I also have a documents folder that I’ve accumulated over decades. I still use various .txt files in the docs folder as my low tech note taking apps. I use the Spotlight or Alfred keyboard shortcuts (that also use spotlight index?) for quickly opening the files when needed - and annoyingly my most impo…
> I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH), [...]
Almost anything will do for those?
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#47Maybe 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:
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#48My bet is on a random bitflip more than an actual bug in the code, based on its localised nature and rarity. Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel fonts all the time.
A bet on cosmic rays is a rare bet indeed ;)
Rare but does happen.
Not necessarily cosmic rays but things like marginal timing can cause errors like this, especially on GPU buses/VRAM that tend to have less protection.
GPGPU and now AI has made accuracy of results more important, but before that, GPUs were regularly ran at the limits and it was assumed that occasional barely-visible artifacts or otherwise computation errors whose results aren't noticeable were acceptable. (Imagine you're playing a 3D game and a few pixels in a frame occasionally have incorrect values, or some shapes are a pixel off --- unless the errors are massive, you're unlikely to notice.)
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#49macOS on a low dpi screen is mostly full of those kind of issues. I wouldn't recommend using a low dpi screen.
I’ve used fullhd imac/osx for many years until around 2018 and never noticed anything like that. Easier to call it “low dpi issues” now that they destroyed it, I guess ;)
They removed subpixel hinting after Mojave IIRC. Now it's unusable on anything less than a 27inch 4K display, and it's been like that since years...
Re: Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator
#50My bet is on a random bitflip more than an actual bug in the code, based on its localised nature and rarity. Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel fonts all the time.
If only Apple used ECC RAM, then that would be easy to confirm.