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Perfectly Cropped

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Re: Perfectly Cropped

#501

Post by tossAfterUsing »

dpcan wrote: post #156

"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time." I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community. 20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it. The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that: 1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my…

one of the more challenging experiences in my adult life was my dad screaming about how upset he was that windows had forced some upgrade, and as a result (?) he'd lost genealogy work he'd been doing for years (eventually he found it).

he was furious, and crying, and shouting... "i don't want any f* upgrades! just leave my f* computer alone!! i never asked for any of this, i just want to do my work"

i dont' spend a lot of time at the house any more ... and i didn't know what to tell him, so i hugged him. later i brought up linux (again) and i think we'll get to that place soon, so that he has a chance to learn before age sets in too much further.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#502

Post by nothrabannosir »

avip wrote: post #403
nothrabannosir wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor. Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement. They could've told me while I was painstakingly shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo ...... ing!

I'm gonna be publicly ridiculed for this one and I'm good with that. I've been trying to get the show desktop gesture on my mac right for years. You know, the one that "windows-D" was doing so loyaly for ages. My habit is to arbitrarily swipe as many fingers as I can find available from center of trackpad outwards. It used to take me ~10 trials to get it right. And now, enlightened by this random thread, I suddenly f…

F11 does it

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#503

Post by d-sc »

cco wrote: post #489
BigJono wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you on everything else (I'll be the first to admit that I love trashing Apple at every opportunity I get these days), but I find it weird that people criticize the dongle thing so heavily. Surely standardizing everything to USB-C would be an example of the exact thing you're talking about? (keeping it simple and functional). Somebody has to make the switch first, and if Apple didn't, wouldn't we all be using…

Where is the USB C on my iphone? Why do I need a dongle to connect my brand new I phone to my brand new MacBook? Why do the headphones that came with my iPhone not work in my MacBook? Why does my magic mouse not charge via USB C? My keyboard? It has been years now, why hasn't this happened within the company? Shouldn't Tim Cook be banging a pot and pan outside every team's door asking why they haven't gotten with the…

I have a brand new iPhone and the cable that is included with the phone connects directly to my 2019 MacBook Pro.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#504

Post by bsder »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #202
djsumdog wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows 95/98 scroll bars were vastly superior to those in Win10. No matter the size of the window or the scrollable content, you can tell what is the scroll bar and what isn't. On Win 10 it's sometimes ambiguous. Removing the scroll bar when you're not scrolling is the worst design decision.

Hmm, idk, perhaps a midway between removal and hiding would be to collapse it to ~1px so you gain real estate but still see the position in the document?

Um, we have an alpha channel now on every single computing device display.

You can make a scrollbar that "ghosts" over/under the content.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#506

Post by redwall_hp »

romwell wrote: post #483
mattnewton wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tips app is one attempt at feature discovery like this. The problem is that modern UI's can do so much that some has to be hidden so the common use cases can be easier, but users never go into the tips app or online help books to find out what was hidden. Pushing notifications spams users who don't want to look there, so we instead have our current situation /shrug ️ Source: used to work on the iOS tips app and h…

>The problem is that modern UI's can do so much that some has to be hidden so the common use cases can be easier Bollocks. The "modern UI" can't do anything that much more that Windows 95 wasn't doing already. Too bad the touchscreen became standard long after anyone cared about good UX, and so the UI paradigms are still struggling with this new kind of hardware. There is no reason ever to hide the scrollbar, which i…

I was just thinking about this the other day. OS X, in its earlier days, as a marvel of usability. Every last thing was seemingly crafted with utmost attention to ergonomics (e.g. the omnipresent menu bar is on the edge of the screen so it's easier to hit with the cursor), consistency, and intuitive discoverability. Again, the menu bar is a good example of this: it's always there, actions are laid out in a way that you can browse them to look for functions, and each item has the associated keyboard shortcut shown. The old HIG document was pretty well thought out.

iOS, on the other hand, is a byzantine mess of nondiscoverable gestures, meaningless hieroglyphic buttons that you have to blindly press to see what they're supposed to do, and general UI antipatterns. This isn't the only post on HN today about modern UIs, prompted by phonisms, regressing functionality. There's one about scrollbars too, which is another area that Apple has lead the charge on messing up.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#507

Post by redwall_hp »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #318
andrewla wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks): Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least: 1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor. 2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the hig…

> 1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor. Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement. They could've told me while I was painstakingly shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo ...... ing!

All the non-discoverability of vim, without the power!

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#508

Post by Silhouette »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #464
pier25 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The JS ecosystem is plagued by this too. The other day I opened a Vue project from 2-3 years ago and after installing deps with NPM it reported something like 50 critical vulnerabilities. Fine, I'll update dependencies. After doing that nothing worked anymore. The Webpack config didn't work, the Webpack loaders for Vue didn't work, etc. I had configured this project with an "old" version of Vue CLI and now everyone h…

I don't disagree with your sentiment re: Js, it's a problem for sure. But a jQuery project from 10 years ago is completely different from a pseudo-native app (aka electron). I guarantee the jQuery project doesn't provide an iota of the functionality that the electron app does (and if this isn't the case, why use electron in the first place?!)

People were already building substantial web apps long before the current generation of popular libraries and frameworks were around. Some of those applications are in use to this day, jQuery and all, and still in active development. They can include a huge amount of functionality after that much work has gone into them.

Would a team choose the same tools if they were starting those apps with a blank canvas today? Probably not. Is anyone going to throw away a decade of working code to rewrite the apps that already exist? Also probably not.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#509

Post by threeseed »

Aperocky wrote: post #438
nothis wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave poor “beautiful” out of it! It’s innocent! Apple’s shit is beautiful because it is simple and functional, not the other way round. I think the issue is now that their products become weirdly tacky looking from being functionally weird. The notch, the Touch Bar, the overladen gesture menus... it’s all kinda aimless and floaty. Let’s not even go into how they turned a MacBook workspace into dongle central.

I cannot for the love of my life understand why apple put a touchbar there. If someone regularly uses them, please share your experience. My next personal laptop will definitely not be a MacBook at this rate.

I love the touchbar.

You just need to customise it using something like BetterTouchTool which allow you to execute sequences of actions or invoke menu items.

Re: Perfectly Cropped

#510

Post by threeseed »

Aperocky wrote: post #478
dmix wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if Apple has some data that people secretly like the touchbar (I've never come across someone who uses it for anything). Beyond just being fancy-looking when you're in the Apple store comparing laptops... which I think is the whole point and makes you question the priorities of Apple's recent leader. I wouldn't even care about the Touchbar if they left the rest of the keyboard alone, but apparently the es…

As a heavy vim user, I can’t live without escape key. One Of the fast way to alienate an entire userbase. I know people sometimes map cap lock but my brain is not conditioned to bimodal action and I don’t want to be tied to a certain specific keyboard layout, not to mention the pain to overwrite muscle memory.

So the escape key is there on the Touchbar.

It is always the same size. It never moves. It is always there.

And because the keyboard is already pretty thin the difference in feedback isn't that significant.

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