Is anyone trying to back this up with a proper scientific study of whether users find it easier or harder to use? Seems just like opinion and debates about aesthetics otherwise?
If I wanted to claim that JavaScriptCore was getting slower and I didn't post any data to back that up people would laugh me out of the conversation.
As long as we miss SI unit for the "hard to use" attribute we will have to fall back to user opinions and debates - and potential randomly constructed half cooked polls.
The opinions and debates are not looking well for Apple though.
You still could set up a study where you have tasks that users must complete and you get countable results. But this would quickly get expensive, so you need a sponsor. This could either be Apple, Google, or some other company in the market interested in making their opponent look bad. And I wouldn't take such a study for granted.
Not only expensive but making a comprehensive one that people actually finish is practically impossible.
And there are many many further aspects that make the measurement non-reproducible - and so unreliable - or biased.
Right. Like I said, the only parties interested in taking all that effort and that have enough money are probably Apple, Google or maybe Samsung. Independent companies won't go down that hole.
> we will have to fall back to user opinions and debates
So what's the point? If it's all just random subjective opinion why are we indulging in it? If you can't even demonstrate any issue in the first place then why bring it up?
But that's a great example of what I mean - are HN users grumbling a statistically significant result? Do they represent average users? Should Apple listen to it or ignore it? I don't know - do you?
We already have usability testing, but there are more dimensions to usability than can be encapsulated by one SI unit. As an example one measure might be the number of seconds required to perform a set sequence of actions such as copying text from a web page to a Notes entry. That's a completely different task to copying a pre-written comment from Notes into a web page, even though they both involve the same apps and are measured in seconds.
Nice isolated example that tells nothing about the "hard to use" factor. We can repeat such for days without yielding reliable empirical results. The issue is too compound.
Opinion of the users, especially repeated ones ought to be enough to justify a concern. There are too many to doubt its validity even without exact but half cooked partial numbers.
As far as I know, the last time anybody used science to help make a good UI was for Windows 95. If you can find "The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering" you can see they were thorough. I would love to be wrong, but I don't think anything like this was posted for any more recent Windows, or Mac OS X or any of the many mobile operating systems.
Apple has fallen into the same trap that Microsoft has -- changing their UI not to advance the state of the art, but just for the sake of changing it so they have something new to sell.
Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes.
It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.
> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X.
So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestures.
Pardon my math but to me that sounds like ignoring 3 core design-principles just to appear trendy and have something new to sell.
I came here just to say the same thing — Apple really needs to track the statistics on success rate for text selection ...
“User Selected the text they wanted first try”
“User Selected the text they wanted within 30 seconds”
“User Selected the text they wanted within 1 minute”
“User Failed to select the text they wanted”
I hit that last case probably more than 30% of the time nowadays — and very often it’s not because the text representation on screen makes it impossible — but because it’s just fucking horrifically bad ui and I can’t select the text I’m interested it despite trying for frustratingly long amount of time. I hit categories 2 and 3 frequently when I really need to get the data selected — and that makes me want to throw my Apple iPhone into the sun ...
Maybe it’s because idiots don’t know/care about selecting text to begin with and their products are more and more targeted to them, as opposed to people why (try to) do real work on their devices as opposed to scrolling social media?
I don’t know many people who would be unable to derive value from the use of text selection on their mobile device - that should be a low percentage of the market, because everyone should be succeeding at using the functionality ...?
In my experience a lot of non-tech people struggle to use it or are not even aware of what the feature is for and consider it an annoyance.
What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features.
Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s
> I’m increasingly frustrated with iOS 13 text selection, copy, and paste semantics.
Seconding this. It literally took me months after I updated to iOS13 until I was able to reliably use copy & paste again.
At some point I had given up completely, but then later on I randomly read an article which explained how this core feature has been changed, how it was supposed to work now.
A seriously wtf moment. Definitely not cool, and definitely not good UX.
Is this the butterfly-keyboard equivalent for touch-interfaces?
How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it?
The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as each attempt has a delay before the feature activates (3D Touch solves this on my iPhone 8 but they removed it from the new models).
Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? It makes no sense, has no “prior art” so nobody is used to it (and why would there be prior art for the dumbest UX ever) and it always gets in the way when trying to scroll (in fact I tried the space bar trick first to avoid this but couldn’t move down with it so had to scroll the text box directly and ended up moving the cursor instead). If I recall correctly even themselves had an embarrassing moment trying to demo it at the Keynote.
> Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly?
I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks. It’s definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.
Tap and hold between words used to bring up a cursor and a magnifying glass above your finger so you could move it and know where you were. Plus moving it away from the currently visible line would start scrolling infinitely allowing you to navigate beyond what you see on the screen.
Both of those behaviours are now gone. Moving the cursor with the finger now scrolls both the text field and the outer page, at a speed high enough to make it unusable.
The “space bar trick” on the other hand doesn’t scroll the text beyond a couple of characters, making it impossible to get to the end of a long URL in the address bar for example.
I still don’t get it either. Apple platforms are full of bizarre gestures and 4-keys shortcuts but it didn’t creep to the most basic features until now.
Supporting this argument: I remember googling how to switch apps since the new iPhone X's feature didn't explain it. I've had to verbally explain it a few times to others who use my phone.
Not fundamentally changing the design is a plus for usability and accessibility.
It would be a disappointment if I had to relearn a UI I've been using over a decade just because I upgraded my software. I don't have time for that. Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there.
Typing this on my SE. Only thing that makes me remotely interested in newer models is the improved camera abilities. Not sure it’s worth it to give up the form factor and affordances.
Also gonna hang out on iOS 12 for as long as possible if what I’ve heard about text selection for 13 is true.
I am planing to keep my SE and buy a small/medium Fujifilm or other camera.
(text selection/navigation in 13 makes me a madman! why the f hey had to fiddle with this, are they f bored to make something f different instead of something better, they are insane! they do this - making differently but not better - repeatedly!)
Text selection as well as copy paste are horribly broken on my up to date iPhone 11 Pro. It’s crazy bad and it bothers me every single day. How has this not been fixed by the .3 update? Crazy.
I’d take the complaints about iOS 13 text editing with a grain of salt. I’m on board with most of the criticisms of iOS 13, including that the new text editing functionality is hard to discover, but now that I am familiar with it I would not want to go back to the old UI.
Just curious, which parts of the new UI do you prefer compared to the old one? To me it seems like a huge loss in functionality (loss of the "long press + magnifying glass" method) with subpar alternatives being offered ("picking up" and moving the cursor without seeing what's under your finger, hold space bar to get a rudimentary touchpad, etc).
Picking up and moving the cursor in iOS 13 shows the cursor about half a centimetre above my finger as soon as I move the finger up or down at all. The precise location it will be moved to is perfectly visible to me. Is this not how the feature works for everyone else?
I never liked the magnifying glass method. I don’t need to zoom in, I just need to put my finger somewhere other than directly on top of the text I’m trying to edit (the “pick up” method does succeed at this, although it’s not immediately intuitive). So from my perspective, I lost one subpar method and gained two slightly less subpar methods.
What's funny is that before Apple released the large iPhones, people were leaving the iPhone to go to the larger Androids. There were very loud complaints about how Apple was behind, and larger phones were the future.
I switched from an iPhone 4 to Android, and went back to the iPhone when they released the larger size - the 6 IIRC.
The over-reliance on gestures and other hidden things like 3D Touch is the exact problem. It's a complete about-face from their classic 90s design policies, which were about ensuring applications were fully discoverable and did not hide any state from the user.
Pressing hard on a UI element, like an app icon[0], tweet, etc will show certain actions. On the newer models without a pressure-sensing screen, you can hold the UI icon for about a second to perform the same thing.
Hmm interesting. I always knew I had to press and hold with different pressure on songs in my library to pull up different menus but I didn't realize that this is what that was. Thanks
I believe 3D Touch is disabled by default on devices with 3D Touch. You may have re-enabled it in Accessibility...or you have Touch Duration set to Fast on one and Slow on the other. Or I could be wrong and Apple changed it so 3D Touch is enabled by default on those devices that support it, but it was certainly disabled by default during the Beta phases.
Regardless, it's still available as an option for phones with the 3D Touch hardware.
I want to add on here—the problem isn’t gestures, it’s gestures for core functionality. Gestures should be like keyboard shortcuts—optional pathways for advanced users. It’s okay to never discover them.
I'd use macOS’s three finger trackpad swipe for switching workspaces as an example of a great gesture. It’s just one of a ton of ways to switch workspaces.
> Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases
A whole lot of design department got insulted just now! Seeing their focus in product design almost the whole Apple! :)
Jokes apart even I - design/visuals/very-cool-new-feature-wow agnostic - can see serious changes. Changes that are f*ing up my workflow and user experience!!
Their phone UI used to have a button you could tap on the bottom. That button powered many things and now it is gone.
Now ‘take screenshot’ and ‘turn off screen’ are nearly ergonomically indistinguishable. Now ‘shut down’ is somewhere random.
Seeking through text has changed, too. It used to provide a bit of a zoomed in view when you slid your finger across the text, so you could see where your cursor was going. This is gone now, to usability’s detriment, and now you’re required to use the undiscoverable ‘hold space bar to turn keyboard into a seek function’ to see where your finger is moving, if you want precise control.
The swipe down features on the newer iPhones where the side of your mammoth phone needs to be selected to view calendar or help apps is also new and random and forgettable.
Thank you so much for the space bar trick. I have been cursing the broken text seeking. How on Earth am I supposed to have known the space bar now seeks? I actually like idea but I went months without knowing that.
The Apple TV app is a great example of half thought out design.
* You start downloading a movie. It doesn't show it downloading anywhere that I could see it. The only place I could find it was by going back
* I had to login about 5 times
* The Apple TV app is so new that you can't give Apple Feedback because the app isn't listed.
* Supposedly I get a free year of apple tv with my new mac. I have no idea where to find that option to sign up.
* When in you own library you can't seem to search your own library.
It just isn't thought through. And don't even get me started on the migration assistant. Buggy, and a poorly tested pile of crap.
What kills me about Apple TV apps is the inconsistency between apps. Ex, the video player works differently between every app. To see how much time I have left do I swipe? Press the main button? I never know, and end up moving the currently playback time.
I’d play the devils advocate re. it being a “trap”. People get bored of things. Changing UI for the sake of changing UI is a sensible business decision if it scratches the customers’ novelty itch. At least a good short-term decision.
Yeah. When a company doesn't make changes they get complaints about using the same 'old' or 'tired' design. The general market likes new regardless if it is better. To quote a recurring snarky remark from HIMYM, "newer is always better" /s
Sure, some of it might be. But so are many other habits that we have. Marketing is a part of our culture know, and is inevitably influencing us, for better or worse. Charles Duhigg talks a bit about this in his "The Power of Habit".
If you're a professional and you have a tool that works and is central to your job, the manufacturer changing it feels more like a betrayal than it does catering to your need for novelty.
Office is a tool that works. People still complain about the Ribbon UI change, despite (possibly jusifiable) assurances that it really is a better UI.
My suggestion would be to just stop adding new features to iOS, macOS, Windows, etc... They are done and only need updates to add support for new hardware, fix bugs, reduce resource consumption, and close security holes.
AppleScript is like the uncanny valley of programming languages. It tries to be English like but it ends up being more verbose and trying to figure out the right syntax is obtuse.
It’s also been around since the early 90s and was the spiritual successor to HyperTalk - which was much better because it had a smaller domain.
A low power mode would mostly be useful for laptops. When you turn it on you it would do things like disable power boost, basically starve background processes of cpu time, etc.
Restricted data mode would let you disable processes from accessing a network when on a metered or slow connection and inform other applications to be careful when they are using a network that you flagged as metered.
Workflow was initially a third party app and somewhat limited in its automation capability because of iOS restrictions. When Apple bought it, it integrated it more tightly with iOS and can now do things that third party apps can’t.
Okay. Now let’s see where he is wrong
What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product?
You both get the option to decide what size text and display you want when you start your phone for the first time and the option to change the zoom isn’t under “accessibility” in settings it’s under “Display and Brightness” as are they other settings he mentioned.
Apple does provides a “back” arrow in some locations, but, unlike Google’s Android, where it is universally available, Apple’s undo and back buttons are at the option of the developer. Not everyone, including Apple, implements these features.
The “back button” on Android was so badly implemented that Google got rid of it. But the back link is system controlled when you open an app from another app on iOS. It is not controlled by the app.
Consistency is still listed in the guidelines–but it is not followed. The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why?
Because these are all different devices with different means of interaction. Statistically, very few iPhone users are Mac users and even fewer of those are desktop users with a mouse.
Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed.
This hasn’t been the default behavior for at least two or three years.
But after all no one bothered stating this article is four years old. He’s talking about iOS 9 - we are now up to iOS 13.
That article was published in 2015, and the HN submission ends with "(2015)".
> But the back link is system controlled when you open an app from another app on iOS. It is not controlled by the app.
That's the back link to switch to the previous app, but it does not let you navigate within an app.
Having said that, yes, that criticism mostly applied to the "flat" iOS 7 (released in 2013), and some of the problems Apple has fixed in the intervening years, fortunately.
Unless I am going crazy, the (2015) wasn’t there originally.
The functionality of a universal back button was never consistent with Android.
Besides, the entire tenant of the original iPhone and every smart phone thereafter was to get rid of buttons and let the UI decide what made sense in certain contexts.
Apple made a huge mistake when it launched iOS 7: it failed to improve its UI. I don't know if it was a matter of the best and most capable designers leaving the company or bad decisions by the managers, but the truth is that iOS 7 was never a good UI for iPhones, especially the biggest ones. There are many things that are missing that are obvious, such as being able to organize the icons on your Home screen as you wish like you can do in Android, and I suspect that many of the things that are excellently solved in Android's Material Design, at Apple can't because of patents. I think it all boils down to patents because I don't believe that a company like Apple has such a poorly designed operating system.
Not sure why you are talking about iOS7 since it was released 7 years.
But anyway the reason Apple doesn't allow for customisation of the home screen is because it adds complexity. And given they are trying to sell to people who are computer and technology illiterate you don't want complexity.
I feel ios7 had lasting negative impact not just on ios, but also general usability on the web. Even Apple back peddled on some of its design decision in subsequent updates.
iOS has gotten already too complex that I don't think avoiding complexity is a strong enough reason for not offering home screen customization.
Many of the problems started there: the departure of Forstall, Steve Jobs getting so sick and dying, departure of many important roles at Apple and moving Ive to the head of design in the digital part, in my opinion brang the company to a disadvantadged position. In opposite, Google moved quickly and cleanest with Material Design taking Android phones to a new level Apple couldn't reach. Nowadays iPhones are the minority in every market.
Compare iOS 7 to iOS 13 and despite the time that separates them, are still very similar, but compare iOS 13 to iOS 6 and the difference is night and day. iOS 7 is still pertinent to bring up when talking about iOS software usability because they changed so much in one version; much of the changes in iOS 7 set the direction for future iOS versions, and for better or worse, those iOS versions have inherited iOS 7's design language.
I always wonder what iOS 13 would look like if they didn't dump iOS 6's design so thoroughly.
It's SO nice hearing that I'm not the only one who thought this - it was actually around this release that I just gave up on iPhones and moved to Android phones. The amount of fiddling/setup/googling I've had to do since has been dramatically less.
I've sold my iPhone 5 and bought Pixel phone with Android KitKat back then and it was the best decision I've ever made. Now I'm considering to go back to Apple just because the privacy level.
There are many things that are missing that are obvious, such as being able to organize the icons on your Home screen as you wish like you can do in Android,
This is bad on a mobile operating system. I had the displeasure of trying a device running Android's default UIs a few weeks ago: it felt like a Fisher-Price toy. Apple's model of organization is better in every way.
Constraints make things easier sometimes, and it isn't a bad thing.
A lot of times, it's easier to write something like a narrative when you're working within certain rules. Or to design a powerpoint when you're given a corporate style guide.
Starting from scratch is difficult because it doesn't give any ideas to bounce off of. And with something like a smartphone - which users need constantly, but never seem to have the time to configure - any half-hearted configuration by the average user is going to benefit dramatically by having basic rules in place.
For power users - like all of us on Hacker News - sometimes the blank-slate approach is preferable, but there's nothing wrong for liking Apple because of the lack of choice.
That's a false premise. Sorry, but the rest of the world don't have problems with that, we don't even know if that is a problem. For me, that option is really important because I can organize the icons in the order and in the spatial order I want. Same for my elderly mother, I leave her a few icons in the middle of the screen. Easiest way to organize icons on the screen instead to top bottom groups, icons.
This was absolutely my experience. Say about the looks of iOS 4-5-6 what you want, but gosh, was it easier to use. It used to be so intuitive, and very little of that is left.
I feel that for OSX, everything past Mavericks has been a downgrade. What's the point in having a beautiful hiDPI display if you're going to flatten all UI elements into a solid color?
Everything past Snow Leopard. Lion was a disaster, and there is literally no feature I use that I prefer in any Mac OS created since then. What's more, the OS has become uglier and buggier.
Edit: actually, I like the addition of Finder > Cut, and Finder > Rename. So, hey, there is something!
For me, Panther (10.3) was the last release where every new feature or addition was something I wanted. Spotlight and Dashboard in Tiger (10.4) were dog slow on my G3 back in the day and got disabled immediately.
Just picked up a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard (10.6).
I can confirm all (95%?) the features I've grown to love about macOS and regarded as innovative human design are still
there.
Edit: I do however think iOS has been steadily improving, with some mild-moderate missteps. iOS 8 on my first 5s is a far cry from iOS 13.3 on the 11P. For comparison Snow Leopard was 2009, iOS 8 was 2014.
Snow Leopard (10.6) also lacks batch file rename, automatic file versioning, full screen app support, trackpad gestures, and autosave. IMO that last one is huge—I remember losing many hours of work in Snow Leopard as a high school student, because whenever I got into the "zone" of writing I'd stop remembering to hit ⌘S.
Lion (10.7) has all of these features—Apple added a lot in that release. And while Lion itself was a buggy mess, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9) are basically just Lion with stability fixes.
I do prefer Snow Leopard aesthetically for it's higher contrast UI, but 10.7–10.9 are still well ahead of modern macOS in that respect, and there are even some individual visual elements I prefer in those versions, such as the Dock.
Mavericks is my favorite release overall. Launchpad is stupid, and probably the first place where Apple really began to break OS X's internal consistency, but it can be hidden away easily enough. Yosemite (10.10) is where things got really bad.
(Just for fun: Mavericks > Snow Leopard > Mountain Lion > High Sierra > Sierra > El Capitan > Mojave > Lion > Yosemite > Catalina)
I think the UI looks great on Retina displays. The main point for me is the smoother fonts. It's extremely crisp. I also loved the Windows 2000-style UI which was almost pixel perfect. I guess that's why I love Apple's new design direction.
One of the biggest gripes I have with modern UI (both Apple and Android) is animation times. Try exporting an image from Dropbox app to Photos app on the iPhone. There are so many animations that take up precious time. Do it 10 times and you're tired.
I feel like designers today want "sleekness" more because it sells when people look at it. Ohh...look at that shiny animation, so impressive.
I want instant actions at the expense of not knowing where something poped-up from. This is usually the case made by designers that animations help you understand the "Context" of where something came from. I feel like this needs to be toned down a bit. UI would feel 1000% faster.
An easy solution for developers would be to decrease the animation duration the more often a feature is used. But I have yet to see this approach in the wild.
I remember as a child showing my mother how to do stuff on our family Mac with OS 7.5 and being baffled that she didn't 'get' the UI.
A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously.
Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and is becoming slowly less usable to me.
I don't know if android is immune anymore. The latest update to my tablet dispensed with the labels on the desktop icons and I didn't figure out how to get them back.
LOL, this is exactly the problem. You shouldn’t have to download a third party launcher, desktop, app screen to use the device efficiently.
I think iOS and Android are both shit shows. I pick up an android device and it’s a pain in the ass to figure out. That’s terrible design.
iOS seems to break their own rules and hide more and more in the name of minimalism. It’s asinine. 3D Touch was moronic. More than three gestures is moronic. Context sensitive swipes off the screen are moronic.
All of this became abundantly clear seeing my 77 year old grandma, who used a old android phone for years, have so many WTF moments on iOS 13. It’s not clear what is a button. She accidentally gestures and thinks her phone is busted.
My father literally can not send an iMessage without triggering "gentle effect." It has been highly annoying getting that every time he sends a message for the past three years with no way of disabling it.
If you're still wondering how to get the icon labels back on your tablet, one way is to install a third-party home screen app. (Unlike on iOS, on Android the "desktop" is just another app. If you don't like the one your device comes with, you can download a replacement on the Google Play Store.)
Apps like this are usually called "launchers". Personally, I've used and liked Nova Launcher, an app that tries to be like the default Android launcher but with more settings to customize everything: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teslacoils...
When I read the HIGs -- whether long ago on the Mac or Amiga, or later OSX it made sense, and the rationale for why something was some way made sense. It was actually quite easy to code something to fit, as the rules were clear, simple and (mostly) logical. There felt like an internal consistency that has slowly eroded over the last decade. Mainly thanks to phones.
Both Android and iPhone have internal inconsistencies along with hidden features that annoy or are gratuitously clever, often added in the yearly fit of featuritis and change for yearly change's sake. Windows and MacOS want to move further away from the desktop metaphor to phone+.
End result is I think just about everything - laptop, phone, tablet, stereo in the car :) is getting worse for usability. Peak on each was half a dozen versions back.
Do they even read the HIG themselves anymore? The latest iOS is a shit-show and full of inconsistencies between iPhone, iPad, and whatever you think would be considered “common sense”.
Apple's "services" apps–App Store, Music, Podcasts, TV–are the worst apps on the platform, period. They're so awful that I cannot understand how a sane developer could ship something like that.
To enable/disable shuffle after selecting a song, you must tap a bar near the bottom (which gives no visual indication that it expands); once expanded, you must then tap an unlabelled button with a “list” icon. This will show your upcoming queue, but also holds the control for shuffle and repeat. These are also unlabelled, but at least the icons are fairly unmistakable.
That was fun to look at, but I see you also have an issue with UI/UX on your website: you cannot easily reach the footer when scrolling down because of that infinity scroll.
"
This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.
I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.
I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI.
"
I never owned an iOS device personally and when I offered my help to an older relative who wanted to bookmark a page on their home screen, it took me like 10 minutes to find out that I have to scroll horizontally on that Safari share menu. Due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut off icons to the right, I had no idea that scrolling horizontally was possible.
This gets worse whenever I see new Apple keynotes about their latest iPad gestures for multitasking or text editing. On the computer I have visible menus where I can peek the shortcut for each action but is there anything like that on i(Pad)OS? Just adding more and more gestures without giving the user some intuitive hints/signifiers seems like a degradation of usability. The scrollbar tells me that there is more to show and auto-hiding it was a first step into the wrong direction.
I am glad that Android got rid of the dedicated menu button which only worked in very special places without showing any on-screen indication for its availability and I feel like the Option key on Macs is still hiding important things from their users.
The now deprecated(?) 3D Touch on iPhones also seems to suffer from this issue. I was expecting some sort of visual clues to the user (like differently colored buttons) that certain elements offered special actions with a harder press but instead the 3D Touch-enabled elements continued to look the same and mostly the tech-savvy users kept up with where this feature was enabled and where not.
> Due to the auto-hiding scrollbar and no cut off icons to the right, I had no idea that scrolling horizontally was possible.
This appears to be fixed on iOS 13. Actions are now arranged vertically. The app bar above the actions still scrolls horizontally but it now hints at that by cutting off icons.
Yes, and since there are so few varieties of screen size, having it cut off perfectly with no ugly hints (scrollbar, cut-off icon, or even off-centered item) is no accident and shows much higher they prioritize better-looking over more-useful.
When I got my first iPhone, my first touch screen device, I noticed their beautiful little slider switches for all the settings. They didn't work very reliably, though. I would use the touch interface to drag the slider, and it sometimes worked but often failed. Well, touch screens aren't perfect, right?
Until someone eventually saw me doing it and said, "You can't drag it, you have to just tap it." It turns out to be just a checkbox. A real slider switch has to be dragged and won't work if tapped, and an on-screen checkbox is the reverse, and they decided to use an image of the former as their standard implementation of the latter on a touch screen. Someone at the very top very deliberately decided that was what they wanted most.
UISwitches can be dragged by design. Prior to iOS 7, when dragged they followed the position of your finger directly, like physical switches. Post-iOS 7, they only animate after your finger has moved past a threshold, but the toggle graphic expands when held to indicate that it is still draggable.
It seems to be pretty pervasive everywhere. I'm a longtime iOS user, but have been helping my mom with some stuff on her Android phone. Most of the things I have been helping her with involve me working in the phone settings or Google apps. I've found them very confusing to navigate, and there's little clue as to what should be clicked on. It took me a while to realize that what I was looking at wasn't a list of feature names with their description under them, but the place I should click to make changes to the features. It was all just black text on a white background. How did someone think that was a good idea?
As a long time Android user, I really like that on Apple you can go to Settings app and have a list of settings for all installed applications. Settings on Android can be confusing, especially when it comes to things like the "Google" app.
This is true, for some crazy attempts at 'minimalism' companies will hide all settings in the OS settings app settings directory, which involves sorting through a very long list of apps and other menus to find it.
The amount of designers who abuse minimalism because they misunderstand Apple's industrial design and other great design companies, because they only have a surface level grasp of Human Computer Interaction and the wider UX of accomplishing tasks, really bothers me.
It's a menu. The items in a menu don't usually look like buttons on any platform.
And I happen to like the gray text underneath the setting name that tells you the current value of the setting. It makes it clearer what the setting does, and saves you a tap if it's already set how to want it.
I was so confused and panicked once I accidentally overwrote some text from an important note on an iPhone.
For a few minutes I desperately searched for any menus, long presses, weird nearly hidden menus, finger gestures etc. but couldn't discover anything. Apparently there was no way to undo!
After some googling I found out you have to shake the phone a few times. Seriously?
I think there must be a lot of people who simply lost their notes due to a small mistake.
I once shook my phone because I was annoyed by autocorrect repeatedly messing up. The shaking undid more than half the text I had written. I couldn't find a way to redo.
Huh? It usually pops up a message asking if you want to undo, which you need to tap. I'm pretty darn sure this is how the feature has worked since it was introduced.
As I said, I'm pretty darn sure it has always popped up a dialog. Certainly, the dialog has existed for a very long time, I recall seeing it on my first gen iPad, when I was in High School. (I graduated college three years ago.)
Slack has the worst text editor under iOS 13. I can't tell you how many times I've been frustrated by the keyboard disappearing when I want to select and copy or paste text... If the keyboard stayed open like in every other sensible app, I wouldn't have such frustrations editing text, but leaving text edit mode, Apple makes it impossible to edit text with touch at that point...
I think it's a three-finger swipe, isn't it? Though while trying it out, I did discover that a three-finger tap now shows another menu that makes undo/redo a little easier.
Let's not pretend this is a matter of how Apple "couldn't be bothered". Everything like this is an affirmative choice. All such choices (or their alternatives, like what is being asked for here) have both costs and benefits.
How do we really know this was a deliberate choice? There isn't enough information to discard the "Apple couldn't be bothered" hypothesis in this instance.
Android is even worse in this regard. There really is no way to undo changes in text fields! I'm generally a happy android user, but I find it absolutely infuriating that this hasn't been implemented. Text editing on phones is fiddly, and I've lost quite a few comments/messages due to this issue.
I have one of the few Android phones with a physical keyboard and I have the dollar sign key mapped to ctrl. I was pleased to discover ctrl-z works the way it should. This doesn't help the vast majority of users, I know, but it's one more thing I love about having a physical keyboard on my phone.
Oh nice! Mine has left-shift and right-shift, I mapped right-shift to ctrl long ago (so I can use screen when ssh'ing from my phone) but never thought to try - undo (and redo, ctrl+y) both work here too.
BlackBerry KeyOne or Key2. I have the KeyOne and would recommend the Key2. Typing is not any faster than on glass, but it's purposeful and generally error-free, which is a much better experience in my opinion. Also, you don't need to look at the keys.
It must be a KeyTwo - Currency as control key isn't an available option on my KeyOne. Agreed about error-free typing, as well as it's usefulness for SSH.
I use right shift as the Control key on my KeyOne. The Key2 has the quick-switch key in place of right shift, so the extra options were moved to the currency key.
Sorry for missing this, but as other commenters noted, I'm using the Key2.
I can't recommend it for everyone, but since you're reading HN here's the hacker pros/cons:
Pros:
* Every physical alphabet key can be mapped to two app/action
shortcuts (long press/short press)
* Good construction, satisfying to use
* Great battery life
* Great security and permissions management
* Unlocked version is more or less bloatware-free (bundled BlackBerry software is there but is either useful or easy to disable/ignore)
Cons:
* Due to hardening, not all apps are available (I do miss Ruboto)
* Due to hardening, root is not currently possible (I'd like to root my device but I appreciate the security of BB-hardened Android)
* Camera isn't up to iPhone standards (I don't care as much about this and find it kinda nifty that the camera app allows fine control over shutter speed, etc even though I rarely take photos)
* Some of the BlackBerry-specific features are pretty poorly documented (there's a hover gesture that's only available while the phone is charging which shows the charge level as a line extending around the edge of the screen. It's difficult to Google and not very useful, but I got it disabled.)
All in all, I'm happier with it than I've been with a phone in a long time. It's got two SIM slots if you care about that kind of thing. It hits a particular sweet spot for me. Ymmv.
This is the main reason why I use Hacker's Keyboard[0] when writing notes, because it has a full on functional keyboard with all modifier keys. Especially CTRL-Z and Arrows keys.
And when you shake it, in russian language it asks “Don’t apply typing of text” with buttons “Don’t apply” and “Cancel”. Years before its title was “Don’t apply (Input)” with same buttons.
Maybe because in russian Undo == Cancel and they had no courage to make it “Undo”: “Yes” - “No”.
To be fair, many people don't really know how to multitask on Windows or Mac OS (alt-tab, cmd-tab, etc.) either. It's not like the buttons have icons or anything on-screen to emphasize the key combo can be used to multitask.
Not trying to defend Apple, but really just that interfaces in general haven't always been perfect and still have issues, not just one (mobile) platform.
Using the mouse to switch to a given program in the take bar isn't necessarily slow. It's actually faster if you have a decent number if windows open; clicking on exactly the right one straight away is faster than repeatedly pressing Alt-Tab and seeing if the new window brought to the foreground was the right one.
Im sure you know this but in Windows 10 if you hold down Alt after hitting Tab the first time it’ll display which windows you already have open, and hitting just Tab again will cycle though them. You can even hold down Shift as well to cycle through the list of icons but in reverse.
I'm sure you know this, but, I think at least since Windows 7, while having the Alt+Tab "popup" open, you can use the arrow keys while holding Alt down to directly navigate to the window you want to open. Very useful if, like me, you have 20 windows of browser tabs open, and the application you want is in the middle of the list.
One of the things that made multitasking on Windows much better for me was discovering that:
1. win+<number> opens the <number> program on the taskbar from the left. So having a bunch of pinned programs makes opening them very fast and easy.
2. Holding the windows key down then pressing the number multiple times allows switching between multiple instances of the program, similar to holding alt and hitting tab multiple times.
For example, chrome is the tenth icon pinned to the taskbar (counting from the left). So win+0 open chrome or if already open switches to the first window. Holding the windows key and hitting 0 allows me to quickly switch between multiple chrome windows.
So I don't have to mentally keep track of the current alt-tab order to switch between the second putty window and third chrome window. I just hit win+77 for putty and win+000 for chrome.
I wouldn't necessarily call that a blanket statement, though. I'm sure they don't mean power user functions are easy to learn. I think at that point there's just a general expectation that those who will be power users / need that type of functionality will be more than capable of figuring it out.
I was lucky to have a book which introduced Windows 95 and 98 before I got my own computer in 2005. It never occurred to me that a total newb might not guess about alt+tab.
A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.
This, of course, was a long time ago. My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS. At the time this was simply hilarious.
In terms of iOS, the overloading of buttons and gestures makes for a situation where most users don't use any of that stuff. The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not. I know about it and never do it. In fact, when I do it is because I pressed it by accident and end-up unintentionally taking a picture or more.
I have another example that is unrelated to computers. We have these dimming light switches in several areas of our home. If you want to turn on the lights to the pre-established dimming level you single-click the switch. If, on the other hand, you want to go to full intensity, you double-click them. Despite having explained this, everyone uses the little tiny dimming lever on the side of the large push-button plate to go up to full intensity. And visitors, of course, have no clue because the feature isn't discoverable except for a fortuitous accident.
> My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS.
Not for everyone. I could probably get by fine, if slowly, if you took away my trackpad. I can navigate with full keyboard access and shortcuts, and VoiceOver if necessary.
> The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not.
I do :( It give me feedback on whether I took the picture or not.
> couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled.
This doesn’t sound right. I once installed a corrupted version of OS 10 Jaguar on my laptop that resulted in a non-functioning mouse and touchpad. I managed to reinstall the old OS using only the keyboard. Prior to the post-Snow Leopard era when they started stripping down the file system and muddying the navigation, OSX’s interface was really easily navigable.
If there were pinstripes and candy colored buttons it would have been OSX. If the windows were boxy and square it would have been one of the “classic” OSes.
Perhaps you lack context. At the time navigating and running almost anything under Windows without a mouse was not a problem at all. Being that the OS was relatively new and evolving (transition from W3.1 to W95 era I believe) most everyone using these machines were used to learning and using keyboard shortcuts for everything. So, yeah, Windows users at the office had no problem if we removed the mouse. In fact the prank was pointless because it was almost a challenge to show us they could still function. With Mac users --again, at that time-- they just crashed and burned.
As a side note, this was also the pre-Google Internet era, with super early Linux (can't even remember the version). I remember using NCSA Mosaic!
You've missed the point. For Macs, the mouse is the pedals of the car because you absolutely need the mouse yo do basic things. On my Linux setup, I could do just fine without a mouse because I have multiple ways of doing the things I need to do
Yep, this is why so many cars come with a backup set of pedals in case the first set is disabled in a prank. Great to have multiple ways of doing the things that need to be done.
A keyboard is not strictly required either. You can use an on screen keyboard with a mouse, text to speech, etc. And on anything that doesn't require text input, it's easy to avoid the keyboard.
The key is flexiblity. On Linux, I could avoid my mouse or my keyboard or my entire graphical desktop if I wanted to and still be productive. Macs don't have that flexibility.
I single out a mouse because it is a very low information density device. It doesn't really do much, so it is the low hanging fruit. Whether a mouse is required by an OS is like a litmus test of "can the user configure the OS the way they want, or does the OS dictate how the user will use it"
A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:
It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!
Our variation swapped the m and n keys to the same effect.
My go-to pranks on Magic Mouse users are to turn the mouse around or cover the laser. Righting the mouse is usually only the second or third thing they try.
What's sad in this little sub-thread is to watch people down-voting and taking this too seriously. These are healthy jokes, just good fun. Nobody is saying Macs are bad or inferior in any way. Heck, I own a bunch of them, PC's as well. Lighten-up people!
...and then there was this time when I spent a full hour with an x-acto knife above the dropped ceiling carefully, silently, carving a hole right behind one of my co-workers to drop a firecracker right behind him. Yeah, that's how we rolled.
I have a feeling that today's workplace has become far more rigid and intolerant of, well, being human. People would get fired for probably every single thing we did back then...like wiring-up a fire extinguisher to discharge into someone's crotch (male coworker, 'cause someone is likely to assume the worst) when they sat at their desk. Or how about jumping out of the bushes with two water hoses to hose down someone when they got to work? There's more...we had lots of fun and worked 14 to 16 hour days. That was twenty years ago, we are still good friends.
Oh, I have to mention one more. I bought a new car and proudly showed it off to everyone in the team at the time. One of the other engineers rented a crashed version of exactly the same car from a junk yard. He had the tow truck swap my car for the utterly destroyed car in the parking lot. He also swapped the license plates. My car was towed and parked around the corner. Imagine my reaction when I came out of the office to get lunch and my car looked like Optimus Prime stomped on it! It was absolutely hilarious beyond description.
All of this definitely required everyone to have a sense of humor. It developed over years of working together. The participants could take it as well as they dished it out. It sure makes for a lot of great stories to remember.
Here's a quick one: One of my coworkers watched my frustration level rise throughout the day as I was debugging one of my hardware designs. The thing was failing intermittently and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Being a hardware + embedded software project made it that much more difficult.
At the end of the day he calls me over to his workbench. He doesn't say a thing. He opens a drawer, grabs hold of a large knob on a variac, turns it down and all the alarms on my workbench --at the other end of the room-- go off. He turns it back up to 120 V, looks at me and smiles. The SOB got me good. Brilliant!
Actually, you could always access and navigate menus by the keyboard on Macs (Ctrl + F2 nowadays). It's just that this was/is a relatively unknown feature.
How do you do this on System 7.5? Would actually be super useful on a PowerBook I have where the trackpad goes wild on cold days before the machine warms up.
Actually, I don't remember how this really worked in System 7. :-(
I think, at least in Word you could Cmd + Tab (or pressing "." on the numeric keypad) to transfer focus to the menu bar. (Then simply navigate by cursor keys and use Enter or Space to select an item.)
However, Mouse Keys may be generally of help. I think, in System 7, they are part of the "Easy Access" system extension (be sure to have this in your system folder). Mouse Keys are activated by Cmd + Opt + Clear and allow you to navigate by the numeric keypad. (Up, down, left, right, diagonally, 5 is equivalent to a click, 0 to holding the mouse button pressed, the decimal point [dot] to releasing it.) On a PowerBook, you probably have to use the function key as well. (Using Mouse Keys, you may activate a menu by the 0 key. Normally, once the menu bar has focus, you can navigate by cursor keys and select a menu item by the space bar.)
> A couple of decades ago I worked at a company that had about 200 Mac's and a similar number of PC's. One of our favorite practical jokes was to disable the mouse on Mac's. The victim quite literally could not do a thing with the computer until the mouse was re-enabled. In sharp contrast to this most Windows users could function reasonably well without the mouse.
I don't mind this that much. It just shows that Apple elevated the mouse to an essential input system that must always be available, as opposed to being an optional accessory, and designed the system around that requirement.
You can make the same argument about not being able to do anything with a mouseless computer if the keyboard was disabled too.
In fact, even if the keyboard was unavailable, you could still use a computer with just a mouse + onscreen keyboard ...or a touchscreen. :)
So a physical keyboard is actually more expendable than a mouse.
Way back, a long time ago, software came with large, detailed, paper manuals. The quality varied, but a well written manual was a godsend. I guess the constantly updating that goes on with current software does not allow for such a thing these days, but it sure was nice when you could get a version of some software and use the same thing for 5 years without learning new tricks all the time.
«ng the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank. Of course, in later years, the check was replace by a credit card, and check clearance was replaced by the 15-day return period, but Steve’s and Apple’s focus remained the same.»
I think apple stopped designing for our generation a while ago. When I see my young nieces using their iPad, I’m amazed at how easily and fluidly they navigate the device using all the extra gestures that seem unintuitive to me.
You know what I hate? I hate the fact that every time I open an app (most of which I use relatively rarely), I get a bunch of popups trying to introduce me to a variety of features I never needed in the first place. That goes beyond iOS, but also websites including Slack.
E.g. Why does iOS, instead of silently allowing me to use it's new version, feeds me this gamified introduction to "what's new in 13.x.y.z?".
What I want is a piece of software that doesn't change. Or when it changes, it doesn't notify me of it - it just keeps working until I find enough time to actually go on my own journey of discovery.
I am not-so-subtly exhausted by every single half-capable developer spoon-feeding me their "new features". I've downloaded your app because of the features it _had_ - I mostly don't care about what you add later on.
I could not agree more. This is also what really bothers me about Windows 10. Notably in that case, Microsoft makes an enterprise version of Windows 10 called LTSC/LTSB, where you get security updates but never feature updates. Unless you're a huge enterprise, they'll refuse to sell to you.
1. You can buy LTSC with as few as 5 licenses. And they don't all have to be for Windows. If you need 5 MS licenses of anything you can get it. Don't spread misinformation
The link you gave makes it sound like it's a huge hassle to get LTSC as an individual, which is what I'd read in the past. You need to go through a reseller and provide details about your business.
> You really don't want LTSC on your desktop.
Because why?
I have used LTSC, and it is in fact exactly what I want on all my Windows computers. It's just normal Windows 10 except without the Windows Store†, and with a Debian-esque update model.
† And there are ways to add the Windows Store back in, if you really want it.
A contrary indie developer perspective: some features are just really hard to discover even when you know what are you looking for. I don't have time for making those introductions, and end up getting feedback requests for some features my app already has.
Problem: Half of the time I'm not even familiar enough with the core features of the app, never mind learning the new niche features they just added in the latest version. And since many apps believe in updating a lot and often I see this "What's New" stuff way too frequently.
I imagine frequent users of the app would appreciate knowing what's new more than users that aren't so familiar with the app. I like to know what's new in iOS/macOS, since they update once a year and I'm familiar with it, and they make it brief.
> Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition.
You assume it can be tackled. Here's a concrete example:
The tool automatically snaps new windows to where user wants them to be. Rarely the user wants to undo that. The core functionality (autosnap) does not require any visible interface whatsoever. If I want user to see the undo button, I have to place it somewhere over his app's window, which bloats the interface (the undo is uncommon), or outright impossible, since some windows have custom titlebars.
So there's a hotkey, configurable in settings. How can you make it more discoverable?
Well, the problem is that you have already been bombarding that user with a bunch of other useless features, so what they are going to do is to quickly skip through your tutorial and then end up swearing “why the hell did they decide to switch that functionality I am used to?”.
Also, I am yet to find a single piece of software that does snapping better than tiling window managers, so I am not so sure about your use-case.
Off the top of my head, do a highlight pulse on the two snapped edges, and over the app window raise an ephemeral notification "New window snapped, click here or press [hotkey] to undo".
This is just the first thing I have thought of. There are probably better options that require a little more thought.
What if it happens to many windows at once?
What if they end up covering each other?
Are you sure user wants to see that popup he'd hardly ever use every time he starts an app?
I think we’re in the era of notification burnout. Your pop up may not be the problem but it’s taking the blame - since these pop ups are optional to a lot of people.
I am going to be a little rough, but no-one cares about your difficulties!
Especially when your inability of producing intuitive - or easy to discover - features blocking users instead of helping! A tool should help users not being the poor man's self advertisement medium!
Otherwise there's no point using those.
Do it properly or find a living where you are competent!
Again, sorry for being rude, but hopefully it helps you getting the 'user perspective'...
Still a user, and that is the point here!!
Many developers forget making tools for the user, forget who they are working for, putting there problems first, onto the user.
That is the real rudeness here!
That I am very tired about and which makes me reluctant to use apps. Too many lazy incompetence ruining app usage. I may be alone with rudeness but definitely not alone with the strong disappointment and reluctance.
Just look around here!
Everything that has correct and up-to-date documentation is easily discovered. There’s no need at all for notifications or pop ups. Just create end user documentation.
It wouldn't bother me if it was one or two apps that I use frequently. It does bother me when it's every single one, and as you say, most of which are used rarely. Then it gets annoying on all of them.
It's less annoying with Apple since they only update apps/OS once a year.
But it seems like every software jumps onto the bandwagon and now you see a changelog opening up an app every other day.
I feel the same. Recently, I updated Spark just for the dark theme option. I don't mind the short introduction of new features. However, I hate when the app dramatically changes, as Spark did. Now, the UI of this version is significantly different to the previous one. I experienced the same issue on Pocket. They removed the "Open with Firefox" option when sharing an URL. I don't like these kind of updates.
Your opinion here is completely valid and probably pretty widespread, but I feel almost entirely the opposite. Every time I get one of those "what's new" pop-ups in an app I already enjoy, it feels like Christmas morning for me and I almost always immediately go try out the new feature(s). I don't think I would find most of them (or wouldn't find them as quickly) for most apps without a nudge saying what to look for.
OP literally started with, “your opinion here is completely valid” and shared a valid opinion and you responded with, basically, “you’re doing it wrong”.
Personally, I don't want apps that I'm not using to send a disruptive notification that there's something new in the app. I'd prefer that the app let me know the next time I launch it, as being described by OP.
A notification sounds like less interruption than a full screen modal "Click here!" that will fire the feature to demonstrate it. Absolutely hate those dialogs.
My feelings on the subject are entirely dependent on luck. If I'm trying to do something, naturally most of the time, I'm cursing the notifications and trying to skip past them. If there's less pressure, I might read through them out of curiosity.
What I'd really like would be an OS service that could show me a random selection of features from any of the applications I have installed. And, presumably on an opt-in basis, you could share which features you use, thus a bit of analytics could even recommend features I'm likely to find useful.
It's much like how the design of Facebook constantly changes without adding any sort of benefits. I think that they have large design teams who have nothing to do because the product is already perfectly adequate, so they invent work for themselves.
I think it keeps more than the designers in a job. Half of these changes come with some exaggerated prose from a marketing or design consultant, explaining how their new logo or colour scheme or layout really speaks to the fundamental nature of the universe and our place within it, and how suitable that is for a chat client or an analytics platform. Throw a custom font in there too for good measure.
Agree. Catalina was what ended it for me. I understand that mobile OSes need to change somewhat generation to generation as we’re still scratching around to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I don’t want or need that for my workstation though. I built a tower, installed kubuntu 18 LTS and don’t intend to upgrade until they stop supporting it. It made sense for my workflow and I’m happy with how it’s worked out.
> I understand that mobile OSes need to change somewhat generation to generation as we’re still scratching around to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
...do we though? The iPhone came out more than a decade ago now, and I feel like we got it pretty darn figured out around 2015 or so.
Newer versions of iOS have brought some improvements, but also a lot of miss-steps, and performance decreases on older devices (the only place you'd notice).
The current versions of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 having obvious and frequently encountered rendering bugs in safari. If they let this out to users your expectation that they’ll allow the user experience to interfere with their awesomeness is surely going to be unfulfilled.
Not to mention those stupid flashlight and camera buttons on the iPhone lock screen whose only explanation is some manager somewhere wanted to make their mark.
On my xr it's much quicker to get to either of them through control center than holding the button for two seconds. And the way that they are placed, about 15% of the time when I pick up my phone gripping it front-back rather than side-side I activate one of those two things unintentionally.
Plus the trailing edge triggered nature of them is annoying.
It's also anti-user that they can't be disabled/removed per the user's preference.
This is one of the reasons I disabled app auto updates. There are only a few apps that need to be updated regularly, like uber and some banking apps. The rest can wait until I decide to update them. Also saves space on my device by not always having the latest version.
Yeah after app thinning was enabled, most apps became much smaller because you weren’t forced to download assets meant for other device sizes. But these days I think most app updates are bigger than previous versions. Would be interested to hear about exceptions to this hypothesis, and reasons why!
I agree. When I open an app, it's because I want to do something. That something is not "reading release notes". This kind of bullshit is why people don't read warnings but reflexively close pop-ups to get the damn machine to shut up and obey their orders.
On one hand, yes, tour pop-ups are often an admission that discoverability has been neglected, and every time a product discussion goes the orientation-popup direction it should trigger some reflection on that.
On the other hand... well, for example, I have a puzzle game concept I’ve worked up a prototype for and everyone I show it to needs some things explained that I haven’t been able to figure out how to just make a discoverable part of the UI.
Outright replacing visible affordances with gestures is wrong 9 times out of 10, reorganizing UX in a way that needs a walkthrough is annoying... but sometimes I don’t see another way to get certain things across?
> What I want is a piece of software that doesn't change. Or when it changes, it doesn't notify me of it - it just keeps working until I find enough time to actually go on my own journey of discovery.
Use one of the stable desktop environments on Linux.
One of the biggest time wasting annoyances Apple has created is the touch bar virtual escape key. I'm triggering it constantly. How did they not know this was a problem before they brought it to market?
Thankfully, they're going back to a real escape key in the latest MacBook Pro.
And what happened to the backlit Apple on the lid? Another sacrifice to the god of thinness?
Like getting rid of the Kensington security slot. My first MacBook had that and I used it with a cable lock in coffee shops. Also sacrificed to eliminate size and weight, I suppose.
As a developer, the Touch Bar as a whole is trash. I want to type without looking at the keyboard, and now I suddenly always have to look at the keyboard.
Accidentally pressing the escape key is just one of many issues I have with that "feature".
Now that's press and hold on the keyboard to move the cursor without your finger being in the way so you can never figure out where the cursor is going to land in "teh".
I was really excited to see multitasking coming with iPadOS 13. Unfortunately, it turns out to be absolutely horrible to use and insists on turning itself on with annoying regularity...
This is fucking horrible. Worth an episode in Silicon Valley horrible. What I hate most about the new Apple devices is that I always do something that produces a gesture or a hidden function. Grab iPhone quickly by the sides - get a screenshot. Swipe with four fingers looking North shaking - get something else. Who the hell needs all this crap?
My first Apple product was a iPad Pro I got last year. I consider myself quite tech savvy, but the gestures was a huge pain-point when learning the device, to the point that it soured the whole experience for me:
When trying to find the WiFi toggle button (which is accomplished by "pinching" the screen) I basically just tried every possible gesture until I found the right one (I know that some gesture opened it from watching others). By far the worst and most memorable UX problem of the year.
I have no idea what any of these gestures are and I’m using iOS 13, and I just tried a couple of them and doesn’t seem to do anything. How do you copy with a three finger pinch?!
I've wanted to like Apple's way of doing things for years - Unix-like and support for MS Office, "ecosystem" integration - but every time I've used their products I've returned them or passed them off to my family members hoping they'd get more use out of them.
Nowadays, I get more questions than ever asking for help on how to do X Y or Z thing that seems really trivial on Android/Linux/Windows systems (like copying files without iTunes/iCloud, a frustration I remember dealing with even almost 10 years ago). It's now to the point where I just recommend 3rd party apps and alternatives for basic utilities for Apple's macOS and iOS to my family.
I've passed off excessive tech support calls for a few people by suggesting they get a Mac. Not because it's easier to use, I really doubt that is true anyways. But for the simple reason I don't know how to use them being an Android, Linux and Windows guy. The calls went away fast. I first started doing that when the bosses wife called me at 12:30 at night and had the audacity to expect me to do a home visit to help her.
I never got how people could even get past Mac window management or rather lack of window management. They've never had a Maximize function and they always pushed that stupid Zoom functionality instead, which every window implements differently. Then they moved onto making Full Screen the default which I find utterly frustrating as I wait for some junior programmer, who chose a Macbook, swiping furiously to find that lost window. Many other times, they'll put the pointer too close to the top of a full screen window and window chrome will expand downwards to get in their way.
And that's just one tiny facet of a single set of features that they got terribly wrong. There's so many other things wrong with Macs, macOS, iPhones and iOS... I could go on for hours and hours detailing these things.
Despite all of that, like you, I will happily recommend a Mac to beginners because they do have system stability down to a science. I also use an iPhone and I recommend them to everyone since they're just safer and more secure than Android as far as I have seen. I'm hoping one day I can stop giving Apple money though because I don't want to support their shit attitude towards power users. I used to only buy used iPhones, but now I stay about 2 or 3 models behind their current offering (and I buy them at a deep discount - my new iPhone 8 was only $350 with no contract from Boost Mobile which works just great for my needs).
I'm really hoping my iPhone 8 will be my last iPhone because the task switching shortcut for the newer home button-less iPhones is very finicky from what I can tell experimenting in stores. Maybe they'll bring the home button back one day or I'll finally switch back to some other mobile OS.
They made lot "invisible" improvements in 10.15 (apfs is finished, kern speedup, metal, ml, fonts on 4k etc..) but not sure about this iOS look on my MacBookPro, Now my os look like web page from '98. Way too flat. Icons are broken on toolbar, hated how it looks.
Suggestion:
1. One Pro OSX version for Pro users (cut all services that eat ram and can be security hole) and add more options for advanced users.
2. Cut price around $800 or if you can cut more without damage in "real" performance and quality. Because not all apps use all power anyway.
3. And most important, fix broken flat UI, find balance. We have lot talented designers without job.
4. Don't break old apps with new update, find way for LTS.
MacOS is still my favourite BSD distro and mac from 2013/15 is perfect HW.
So, if you do not know how to improve it, then keep what works and what users like or ask.
Fearing (correctly) that the laptop I had refurbished for my mother was soon to die, I bought her an iPad. She is not in any way computer literate and dislikes change. Surely, I thought, they would have some "cheat sheets" available to boil down the basics. I bought a few on Amazon and found them to be either insufficient or crowded with esoterica.
So I set about making a set of laminated cheat sheets of my own, with a consistent design, using screenshots of all of the applications I had installed, and so on. One points out all of the buttons on the iPad, another one shows the different screens, and a third was a diagram of common gestures.
Finding the gesture list itself was ... well, quite a bit harder than I thought it ought to be. Everything seems opaque. I am reminded of one of those escape room puzzles where one must painstakingly iterate through an array of taps, drags, swipes against each and every corner, edge and pixel. It seems that one must flail about against all of the idols, oh, I'm sorry, icons, hoping that one of the motions I have just performed will propitiate the gods. Watch for signs.
It seems, from my vantage, that learning the Apple Way was done with the very first Apple products and that now there is an expectation that everyone has been following along all this time. Certainly, that was my experience with my first smartphone, the iPhone SE. I was constantly having to look up how to do the smallest things and hoping that the information I found was not outdated. I also had to pester other Apple users for tips. My high school computer science teacher would be appalled at the lack of forthrightness.
While I think I did an alright job with the cheat sheets, she never did use that iPad much.
Apple is just a cult. if Steve Jobs was great at anything, he knew how to create a cult and then the money will follow. It's not about engineering, design, users or any bullshit you see in the ads, press, your annoying friends shilling, etc.. . It's pointless to argue with cult believers. Cults are only removed with new cults.
Has anyone tried the free "Getting Started" sessions that Apple offers, when you buy a device? (Edit: I think they're online. In-store would be easier to learn the UI.)
When Jobs came back to Apple, and continuing after his passing, there seems to have been a conscious decision away from "the computer for the rest of us" (aka 'entry level' 'easy' computer, and thus hard to sell to the aspirational) branding to various forms of luxury branding. The point of the UI in the iOS and OS X era is not so much to be easy to use, but to provide a consistent luxurious experience. A kind of marketing sheen -- like the styling of the interior of a BMW or Mercedes -- more than a UX approach.
I think that an opaque interface actually helps sell a luxury product and making it more difficult is intentional and strategic up to a point. A lot of features on, say, a BMW don't actually improve the experience, like say soft-closing doors or automatic wipers. But what they do is they constantly remind you that you have a luxury product while you are getting used to it, and after you have gotten used to it, you are constantly reminded if you drive anything else, because your reflexes and expectations are tuned for the "special" way of doing things.
It's a way to inhibit people from switching to a competitor, but of course it's possible to go too far. People joke about BMW drivers not using their turn signals, and as it happens, the traditional turn signals on their car work quite differently than on other cars, so quite likely many drivers simply never figured them out. Recently they have changed them to work the same way as on Japanese cars.
"Good" design is insufficient for aspirational/luxury products in general, because you can get it on mid-range products and incrementally higher pricing can't pay for substantially better design. So anything for the high end has to be ostentatiously or subtly different.
I just made the move from Android 10 to iOS 13. I was shocked how complicated the process was. Not saying that one is more intuitive than the other.
But man...
No back button. The password manager didn’t integrate well. The keyboard didn’t adapt to the language I was typing in. Parameters were hidden in the settings app but sometimes also in the app itself. Force touch is impossible to predict without trying it (actionable notifications). The cloud is incompatible (I lost my WhatsApp history). The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel). What the hell... the notification panel looks like the lock screen... Some control are stuck on an inaccessible and not obvious corner (abort the reorganization mode of main app starting panel).
I felt a bit stupid and understood the frustration of my 70 year old mother trying to learn how to use an iPhone. How am I supposed to explain it to her if it doesn’t make sense to me?
Nothing in the tech is really intuitive unless you truly know the product.
I felt hopeless and a bit depressed for y couple of days.
Thank god the hardware is gorgeous and the product feels great! :)
Swipe from the left edge of the screen, or tap the chevron in the top left.
> The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel).
The lock screen hides historical notifications. You can scroll down to see them.
iOS was never designed to be a general computing platform. It was designed to be minimalist mobile consumption only and light interaction.
You can tell this in the original iOS which lacked multi-tasking completely. Only later was it shoe-horned in (along with undo, copy/paste, the concept of a cursor, etc)
The result of what we have now has been an iterative journey, the product of a bunch of user requests who insist on trying to create the same experience on a mobile phone with limited and far different interaction modalities.
At a certain point, you need to know when to stop and just open up your laptop rather than cursing something that was never originally designed for the task you’re trying to accomplish.
Disagree with this wholeheartedly. iOS is the only platform I used which seems to make regular usability upgrades. Not new features but actual workflow improvements. I used iOS to get 70% of my work done and it all works together very nicely. You might call me a technical user though. I watch all the keynotes and learn to use the new/different features.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadIf I wanted to claim that JavaScriptCore was getting slower and I didn't post any data to back that up people would laugh me out of the conversation.
The opinions and debates are not looking well for Apple though.
So what's the point? If it's all just random subjective opinion why are we indulging in it? If you can't even demonstrate any issue in the first place then why bring it up?
(the lack of reliable and exact measurement does not equal to the lack of existence...I thought it is evident)
Opinion of the users, especially repeated ones ought to be enough to justify a concern. There are too many to doubt its validity even without exact but half cooked partial numbers.
Apple hasn't fundamentally changed the UI on iOS or OSX since the initial releases apart from say the iOS look & feel refresh and gestures to support iPhone X. And in the last few releases there have been almost no UI changes.
It's actually one of the disappointments of the Apple platforms.
So for the iPhone alone Apple has changed the 1. look and feel to be more “modern” (which means showing less accordances), 2. fashionably removed the very affordable home-button for no functional reason and 3. replaced it with non-discoverable, complex gestures.
Pardon my math but to me that sounds like ignoring 3 core design-principles just to appear trendy and have something new to sell.
I had the first iPhone and I remember it was really good at selecting text. A far cry from the painful experience today.
Rearranging icons is also pretty awful, it takes me multiple tries to move something into a folder and then rearrange said folder.
“User Selected the text they wanted first try”
“User Selected the text they wanted within 30 seconds”
“User Selected the text they wanted within 1 minute”
“User Failed to select the text they wanted”
I hit that last case probably more than 30% of the time nowadays — and very often it’s not because the text representation on screen makes it impossible — but because it’s just fucking horrifically bad ui and I can’t select the text I’m interested it despite trying for frustratingly long amount of time. I hit categories 2 and 3 frequently when I really need to get the data selected — and that makes me want to throw my Apple iPhone into the sun ...
What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features.
Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s
Seconding this. It literally took me months after I updated to iOS13 until I was able to reliably use copy & paste again.
At some point I had given up completely, but then later on I randomly read an article which explained how this core feature has been changed, how it was supposed to work now.
A seriously wtf moment. Definitely not cool, and definitely not good UX.
Is this the butterfly-keyboard equivalent for touch-interfaces?
How do they expect me to be able to position the cursor precisely when my finger is right over it and they removed the “magnifying glass” that used to appear above it?
The keyboard “hold & swipe the space bar” trick doesn’t really work. It’s really hard to go down vertically (since the space bar is all the way at the bottom), it’s slow especially if you need multiple attempt as each attempt has a delay before the feature activates (3D Touch solves this on my iPhone 8 but they removed it from the new models).
Finally, what the fuck is that idea of moving the cursor by grabbing it directly? It makes no sense, has no “prior art” so nobody is used to it (and why would there be prior art for the dumbest UX ever) and it always gets in the way when trying to scroll (in fact I tried the space bar trick first to avoid this but couldn’t move down with it so had to scroll the text box directly and ended up moving the cursor instead). If I recall correctly even themselves had an embarrassing moment trying to demo it at the Keynote.
I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks. It’s definitely not great, but better than tap-and-hold where you want the cursor to go, and then giving up in frustration because the whole word gets selected.
Both of those behaviours are now gone. Moving the cursor with the finger now scrolls both the text field and the outer page, at a speed high enough to make it unusable.
The “space bar trick” on the other hand doesn’t scroll the text beyond a couple of characters, making it impossible to get to the end of a long URL in the address bar for example.
Except making room for the one thing iPhone has always been about: the touch screen.
It would be a disappointment if I had to relearn a UI I've been using over a decade just because I upgraded my software. I don't have time for that. Go get your crazy wizbang UI interfaces on Linux. There are plenty there.
And here I am, using Window Maker, utterly unchanged for decades, older than the distro I use.
The dozens of us on Linux are excited and entertained that we're now the leading desktop experience.
Also gonna hang out on iOS 12 for as long as possible if what I’ve heard about text selection for 13 is true.
(text selection/navigation in 13 makes me a madman! why the f hey had to fiddle with this, are they f bored to make something f different instead of something better, they are insane! they do this - making differently but not better - repeatedly!)
I switched from an iPhone 4 to Android, and went back to the iPhone when they released the larger size - the 6 IIRC.
It’s bigger, fatter and heavier with a cheaper feeling finish. The 7 feels positively elegant if you hold one after the other.
And apart from the slight camera improvements the performance feels identical.
I’ve had an iPhone for around 5 years now and I still have no idea what 3D Touch is.
I hear it’s not supported on all models, so my phone may be lacking it, but if it does, I wouldn’t even be able to tell.
0: https://imgur.com/a/wOTDT3s
On all devices that run iOS 13.
Regardless, it's still available as an option for phones with the 3D Touch hardware.
I'd use macOS’s three finger trackpad swipe for switching workspaces as an example of a great gesture. It’s just one of a ton of ways to switch workspaces.
A whole lot of design department got insulted just now! Seeing their focus in product design almost the whole Apple! :)
Jokes apart even I - design/visuals/very-cool-new-feature-wow agnostic - can see serious changes. Changes that are f*ing up my workflow and user experience!!
Their phone UI used to have a button you could tap on the bottom. That button powered many things and now it is gone.
Now ‘take screenshot’ and ‘turn off screen’ are nearly ergonomically indistinguishable. Now ‘shut down’ is somewhere random.
Seeking through text has changed, too. It used to provide a bit of a zoomed in view when you slid your finger across the text, so you could see where your cursor was going. This is gone now, to usability’s detriment, and now you’re required to use the undiscoverable ‘hold space bar to turn keyboard into a seek function’ to see where your finger is moving, if you want precise control.
The swipe down features on the newer iPhones where the side of your mammoth phone needs to be selected to view calendar or help apps is also new and random and forgettable.
iOS UX has changed a lot and a lot for the worse.
* You start downloading a movie. It doesn't show it downloading anywhere that I could see it. The only place I could find it was by going back * I had to login about 5 times * The Apple TV app is so new that you can't give Apple Feedback because the app isn't listed. * Supposedly I get a free year of apple tv with my new mac. I have no idea where to find that option to sign up. * When in you own library you can't seem to search your own library.
It just isn't thought through. And don't even get me started on the migration assistant. Buggy, and a poorly tested pile of crap.
There is so many problems with it it’s like they invented AppleTv+ solely to raise money to pay a team to basically entirely rewrite AppleTV.
It’s hard to believe Apple even sells the AppleTV.
ugh the TV app on the Mac is riddled with bugs and BS.
Just trying to see all the things I get with an Apple TV+ subscription is a labyrinth of clicks here and there.
Or the episodes of a show. Multiple different pages for show, episode, downloads and unintuitive ways of navigating between them.
Only a single player window allowed.
Clicking on "Resume Episode" if it's already open in a player window, fucking closes the player!!
Office is a tool that works. People still complain about the Ribbon UI change, despite (possibly jusifiable) assurances that it really is a better UI.
- a low power mode
- a restricted data mode
- a modern scripting interface , basically port Workflows to the Mac
What’s wrong with AppleScript? Genuine question as I don’t use macOS.
It’s also been around since the early 90s and was the spiritual successor to HyperTalk - which was much better because it had a smaller domain.
Apple dismantled the original automation team (https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1359425) years ago.
Workflow is much more modern and is already partially ported to the Mac.
Workflows doesn't need OS support beyond the current regular API, does it? On iOS at least, it was entirely a userspace program.
Restricted data mode would let you disable processes from accessing a network when on a metered or slow connection and inform other applications to be careful when they are using a network that you flagged as metered.
Workflow was initially a third party app and somewhat limited in its automation capability because of iOS restrictions. When Apple bought it, it integrated it more tightly with iOS and can now do things that third party apps can’t.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
You both get the option to decide what size text and display you want when you start your phone for the first time and the option to change the zoom isn’t under “accessibility” in settings it’s under “Display and Brightness” as are they other settings he mentioned.
Apple does provides a “back” arrow in some locations, but, unlike Google’s Android, where it is universally available, Apple’s undo and back buttons are at the option of the developer. Not everyone, including Apple, implements these features.
The “back button” on Android was so badly implemented that Google got rid of it. But the back link is system controlled when you open an app from another app on iOS. It is not controlled by the app.
Consistency is still listed in the guidelines–but it is not followed. The Magic Mouse works differently than the track pad, which is different than gestures on the iPhone or tablet. Why?
Because these are all different devices with different means of interaction. Statistically, very few iPhone users are Mac users and even fewer of those are desktop users with a mouse.
Consider the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple keyboard shows the letters in upper case, no matter what is actually being typed.
This hasn’t been the default behavior for at least two or three years.
But after all no one bothered stating this article is four years old. He’s talking about iOS 9 - we are now up to iOS 13.
> But the back link is system controlled when you open an app from another app on iOS. It is not controlled by the app.
That's the back link to switch to the previous app, but it does not let you navigate within an app.
Having said that, yes, that criticism mostly applied to the "flat" iOS 7 (released in 2013), and some of the problems Apple has fixed in the intervening years, fortunately.
The functionality of a universal back button was never consistent with Android.
Besides, the entire tenant of the original iPhone and every smart phone thereafter was to get rid of buttons and let the UI decide what made sense in certain contexts.
Quite possibly, it's often added later.
But anyway the reason Apple doesn't allow for customisation of the home screen is because it adds complexity. And given they are trying to sell to people who are computer and technology illiterate you don't want complexity.
iOS has gotten already too complex that I don't think avoiding complexity is a strong enough reason for not offering home screen customization.
I always wonder what iOS 13 would look like if they didn't dump iOS 6's design so thoroughly.
This is bad on a mobile operating system. I had the displeasure of trying a device running Android's default UIs a few weeks ago: it felt like a Fisher-Price toy. Apple's model of organization is better in every way.
Sometimes it seems like Apple's lack of choice is the primary reason people prefer Apple.
A lot of times, it's easier to write something like a narrative when you're working within certain rules. Or to design a powerpoint when you're given a corporate style guide.
Starting from scratch is difficult because it doesn't give any ideas to bounce off of. And with something like a smartphone - which users need constantly, but never seem to have the time to configure - any half-hearted configuration by the average user is going to benefit dramatically by having basic rules in place.
For power users - like all of us on Hacker News - sometimes the blank-slate approach is preferable, but there's nothing wrong for liking Apple because of the lack of choice.
Edit: actually, I like the addition of Finder > Cut, and Finder > Rename. So, hey, there is something!
I’d say Spotlight was a pretty big deal on the whole.
I can confirm all (95%?) the features I've grown to love about macOS and regarded as innovative human design are still there.
Edit: I do however think iOS has been steadily improving, with some mild-moderate missteps. iOS 8 on my first 5s is a far cry from iOS 13.3 on the 11P. For comparison Snow Leopard was 2009, iOS 8 was 2014.
Lion (10.7) has all of these features—Apple added a lot in that release. And while Lion itself was a buggy mess, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9) are basically just Lion with stability fixes.
I do prefer Snow Leopard aesthetically for it's higher contrast UI, but 10.7–10.9 are still well ahead of modern macOS in that respect, and there are even some individual visual elements I prefer in those versions, such as the Dock.
Mavericks is my favorite release overall. Launchpad is stupid, and probably the first place where Apple really began to break OS X's internal consistency, but it can be hidden away easily enough. Yosemite (10.10) is where things got really bad.
(Just for fun: Mavericks > Snow Leopard > Mountain Lion > High Sierra > Sierra > El Capitan > Mojave > Lion > Yosemite > Catalina)
First thing she couldn't figure out is where the "cut" functionality is.
I feel like designers today want "sleekness" more because it sells when people look at it. Ohh...look at that shiny animation, so impressive.
I want instant actions at the expense of not knowing where something poped-up from. This is usually the case made by designers that animations help you understand the "Context" of where something came from. I feel like this needs to be toned down a bit. UI would feel 1000% faster.
A decade ago I wrote some Cocoa stuff and read the HIG religiously.
Now I'm in my 30s. I can't work out how to do stuff on my iPhone (Android makes perfect sense). mac OS, of which I have used every major version of since 6, is starting to break with the mental model I understand and is becoming slowly less usable to me.
Suddenly I feel old.
It's a sad state of affairs across the board.
Try using a third party launcher, maybe? Nova is a great alternative.
I think iOS and Android are both shit shows. I pick up an android device and it’s a pain in the ass to figure out. That’s terrible design.
iOS seems to break their own rules and hide more and more in the name of minimalism. It’s asinine. 3D Touch was moronic. More than three gestures is moronic. Context sensitive swipes off the screen are moronic.
All of this became abundantly clear seeing my 77 year old grandma, who used a old android phone for years, have so many WTF moments on iOS 13. It’s not clear what is a button. She accidentally gestures and thinks her phone is busted.
Apps like this are usually called "launchers". Personally, I've used and liked Nova Launcher, an app that tries to be like the default Android launcher but with more settings to customize everything: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teslacoils...
Both Android and iPhone have internal inconsistencies along with hidden features that annoy or are gratuitously clever, often added in the yearly fit of featuritis and change for yearly change's sake. Windows and MacOS want to move further away from the desktop metaphor to phone+.
End result is I think just about everything - laptop, phone, tablet, stereo in the car :) is getting worse for usability. Peak on each was half a dozen versions back.
I am old, but I kind of hoped for more. :)
If there was a competition on how many guidelines you can break in a single app, this would take all the prizes home.
The addition of Apple Arcade only increased the amount of WTFs.
[1] There are Apple HIG, and then there is MacOS App Store https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P
[2] Here's a quick and easy way to see which apps are currently being downloaded in app store https://grumpy.website/post/0SU9WNFXB
[3] Apple Arcade was made to explore https://grumpy.website/post/0SpwtkNB_
To enable/disable shuffle after selecting a song, you must tap a bar near the bottom (which gives no visual indication that it expands); once expanded, you must then tap an unlabelled button with a “list” icon. This will show your upcoming queue, but also holds the control for shuffle and repeat. These are also unlabelled, but at least the icons are fairly unmistakable.
Source? I know the apps are horrible but I haven’t seen much to make it seem like he’s specifically more full of ego.
My recent gripe is the Recent list: https://grumpy.website/post/0Spuij-7C
Edit: I feel kind of stupid of thinking everyone is stupid on the internet except me.
" This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.
I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.
I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI. "
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559387
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552932
This gets worse whenever I see new Apple keynotes about their latest iPad gestures for multitasking or text editing. On the computer I have visible menus where I can peek the shortcut for each action but is there anything like that on i(Pad)OS? Just adding more and more gestures without giving the user some intuitive hints/signifiers seems like a degradation of usability. The scrollbar tells me that there is more to show and auto-hiding it was a first step into the wrong direction.
I am glad that Android got rid of the dedicated menu button which only worked in very special places without showing any on-screen indication for its availability and I feel like the Option key on Macs is still hiding important things from their users.
The now deprecated(?) 3D Touch on iPhones also seems to suffer from this issue. I was expecting some sort of visual clues to the user (like differently colored buttons) that certain elements offered special actions with a harder press but instead the 3D Touch-enabled elements continued to look the same and mostly the tech-savvy users kept up with where this feature was enabled and where not.
This appears to be fixed on iOS 13. Actions are now arranged vertically. The app bar above the actions still scrolls horizontally but it now hints at that by cutting off icons.
https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/
But at least we've rotated the problem by 90 degrees :P
When I got my first iPhone, my first touch screen device, I noticed their beautiful little slider switches for all the settings. They didn't work very reliably, though. I would use the touch interface to drag the slider, and it sometimes worked but often failed. Well, touch screens aren't perfect, right?
Until someone eventually saw me doing it and said, "You can't drag it, you have to just tap it." It turns out to be just a checkbox. A real slider switch has to be dragged and won't work if tapped, and an on-screen checkbox is the reverse, and they decided to use an image of the former as their standard implementation of the latter on a touch screen. Someone at the very top very deliberately decided that was what they wanted most.
The amount of designers who abuse minimalism because they misunderstand Apple's industrial design and other great design companies, because they only have a surface level grasp of Human Computer Interaction and the wider UX of accomplishing tasks, really bothers me.
And I happen to like the gray text underneath the setting name that tells you the current value of the setting. It makes it clearer what the setting does, and saves you a tap if it's already set how to want it.
For a few minutes I desperately searched for any menus, long presses, weird nearly hidden menus, finger gestures etc. but couldn't discover anything. Apparently there was no way to undo!
After some googling I found out you have to shake the phone a few times. Seriously?
I think there must be a lot of people who simply lost their notes due to a small mistake.
What phone? Do you recommend it?
I'm really sad that it feels like we're dwindling down on physical keyboard phones.
I can't recommend it for everyone, but since you're reading HN here's the hacker pros/cons:
Pros:
* Every physical alphabet key can be mapped to two app/action shortcuts (long press/short press)
* Good construction, satisfying to use
* Great battery life
* Great security and permissions management
* Unlocked version is more or less bloatware-free (bundled BlackBerry software is there but is either useful or easy to disable/ignore)
Cons:
* Due to hardening, not all apps are available (I do miss Ruboto)
* Due to hardening, root is not currently possible (I'd like to root my device but I appreciate the security of BB-hardened Android)
* Camera isn't up to iPhone standards (I don't care as much about this and find it kinda nifty that the camera app allows fine control over shutter speed, etc even though I rarely take photos)
* Some of the BlackBerry-specific features are pretty poorly documented (there's a hover gesture that's only available while the phone is charging which shows the charge level as a line extending around the edge of the screen. It's difficult to Google and not very useful, but I got it disabled.)
All in all, I'm happier with it than I've been with a phone in a long time. It's got two SIM slots if you care about that kind of thing. It hits a particular sweet spot for me. Ymmv.
I have a Cosmo Communicator. No comment yet on recommendation (or not). F(x)tec is another one.
flow typing wasn't possible last time I used it, however.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pocketwork...
Maybe because in russian Undo == Cancel and they had no courage to make it “Undo”: “Yes” - “No”.
Not trying to defend Apple, but really just that interfaces in general haven't always been perfect and still have issues, not just one (mobile) platform.
1. win+<number> opens the <number> program on the taskbar from the left. So having a bunch of pinned programs makes opening them very fast and easy.
2. Holding the windows key down then pressing the number multiple times allows switching between multiple instances of the program, similar to holding alt and hitting tab multiple times.
For example, chrome is the tenth icon pinned to the taskbar (counting from the left). So win+0 open chrome or if already open switches to the first window. Holding the windows key and hitting 0 allows me to quickly switch between multiple chrome windows.
So I don't have to mentally keep track of the current alt-tab order to switch between the second putty window and third chrome window. I just hit win+77 for putty and win+000 for chrome.
This, of course, was a long time ago. My guess is that today this would be the case for any computer user, Windows or MacOS. At the time this was simply hilarious.
In terms of iOS, the overloading of buttons and gestures makes for a situation where most users don't use any of that stuff. The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not. I know about it and never do it. In fact, when I do it is because I pressed it by accident and end-up unintentionally taking a picture or more.
I have another example that is unrelated to computers. We have these dimming light switches in several areas of our home. If you want to turn on the lights to the pre-established dimming level you single-click the switch. If, on the other hand, you want to go to full intensity, you double-click them. Despite having explained this, everyone uses the little tiny dimming lever on the side of the large push-button plate to go up to full intensity. And visitors, of course, have no clue because the feature isn't discoverable except for a fortuitous accident.
Progress isn't without side effects I guess.
Not for everyone. I could probably get by fine, if slowly, if you took away my trackpad. I can navigate with full keyboard access and shortcuts, and VoiceOver if necessary.
> The simplest example I have of this is using the volume switch to take a picture, nobody does not.
I do :( It give me feedback on whether I took the picture or not.
This doesn’t sound right. I once installed a corrupted version of OS 10 Jaguar on my laptop that resulted in a non-functioning mouse and touchpad. I managed to reinstall the old OS using only the keyboard. Prior to the post-Snow Leopard era when they started stripping down the file system and muddying the navigation, OSX’s interface was really easily navigable.
As a side note, this was also the pre-Google Internet era, with super early Linux (can't even remember the version). I remember using NCSA Mosaic!
On your Linux setup, could you do just fine without a mouse AND without a keyboard?
Why is it OK for the keyboard to be an essential required device but a mouse should be optional?
The key is flexiblity. On Linux, I could avoid my mouse or my keyboard or my entire graphical desktop if I wanted to and still be productive. Macs don't have that flexibility.
I single out a mouse because it is a very low information density device. It doesn't really do much, so it is the low hanging fruit. Whether a mouse is required by an OS is like a litmus test of "can the user configure the OS the way they want, or does the OS dictate how the user will use it"
Requiring a mouse and assuming it to always be present is not a bad thing; it's progress.
macOS has good accessibility features, so you can set it up to use it without a mouse if you really need to.
Glad my work isn't impacted by such pranks!
A user was having a really bizarre problem: They could log in when they were sitting down in a seat in front of the keyboard, but when they were standing in front of the keyboard, their password didn't work! The problem happened every time, so they called for support, who finally figured it out after watching them demonstrate the problem many times:
It turned out that some joker had rearranged the numbers keys on the keyboard, so they were ordered "0123456789" instead of "1234567890". And the user's password had a digit in it. When the user was sitting down comfortably in front of the keyboard, they looked at the screen while they touch-typed their password, and were able to log in. But when they were standing in front of the computer, they looked at the keyboard and pressed the numbers they saw, which were wrong!
My go-to pranks on Magic Mouse users are to turn the mouse around or cover the laser. Righting the mouse is usually only the second or third thing they try.
What's sad in this little sub-thread is to watch people down-voting and taking this too seriously. These are healthy jokes, just good fun. Nobody is saying Macs are bad or inferior in any way. Heck, I own a bunch of them, PC's as well. Lighten-up people!
...and then there was this time when I spent a full hour with an x-acto knife above the dropped ceiling carefully, silently, carving a hole right behind one of my co-workers to drop a firecracker right behind him. Yeah, that's how we rolled.
I have a feeling that today's workplace has become far more rigid and intolerant of, well, being human. People would get fired for probably every single thing we did back then...like wiring-up a fire extinguisher to discharge into someone's crotch (male coworker, 'cause someone is likely to assume the worst) when they sat at their desk. Or how about jumping out of the bushes with two water hoses to hose down someone when they got to work? There's more...we had lots of fun and worked 14 to 16 hour days. That was twenty years ago, we are still good friends.
Oh, I have to mention one more. I bought a new car and proudly showed it off to everyone in the team at the time. One of the other engineers rented a crashed version of exactly the same car from a junk yard. He had the tow truck swap my car for the utterly destroyed car in the parking lot. He also swapped the license plates. My car was towed and parked around the corner. Imagine my reaction when I came out of the office to get lunch and my car looked like Optimus Prime stomped on it! It was absolutely hilarious beyond description.
I wrote a "Flakey Keyboard Simulator" in 6502 assembly on the Apple ][ to drive my brother crazy.
Here's a quick one: One of my coworkers watched my frustration level rise throughout the day as I was debugging one of my hardware designs. The thing was failing intermittently and I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Being a hardware + embedded software project made it that much more difficult.
At the end of the day he calls me over to his workbench. He doesn't say a thing. He opens a drawer, grabs hold of a large knob on a variac, turns it down and all the alarms on my workbench --at the other end of the room-- go off. He turns it back up to 120 V, looks at me and smiles. The SOB got me good. Brilliant!
I think, at least in Word you could Cmd + Tab (or pressing "." on the numeric keypad) to transfer focus to the menu bar. (Then simply navigate by cursor keys and use Enter or Space to select an item.)
However, Mouse Keys may be generally of help. I think, in System 7, they are part of the "Easy Access" system extension (be sure to have this in your system folder). Mouse Keys are activated by Cmd + Opt + Clear and allow you to navigate by the numeric keypad. (Up, down, left, right, diagonally, 5 is equivalent to a click, 0 to holding the mouse button pressed, the decimal point [dot] to releasing it.) On a PowerBook, you probably have to use the function key as well. (Using Mouse Keys, you may activate a menu by the 0 key. Normally, once the menu bar has focus, you can navigate by cursor keys and select a menu item by the space bar.)
I had to use the key map once to type without a working keyboard. That was bad.
I don't mind this that much. It just shows that Apple elevated the mouse to an essential input system that must always be available, as opposed to being an optional accessory, and designed the system around that requirement.
You can make the same argument about not being able to do anything with a mouseless computer if the keyboard was disabled too.
In fact, even if the keyboard was unavailable, you could still use a computer with just a mouse + onscreen keyboard ...or a touchscreen. :)
So a physical keyboard is actually more expendable than a mouse.
«ng the first Jobsian era at Apple, I used to joke that Steve Jobs cared deeply about Apple customers from the moment they first considered purchasing an Apple computer right up until the time their check cleared the bank. Of course, in later years, the check was replace by a credit card, and check clearance was replaced by the 15-day return period, but Steve’s and Apple’s focus remained the same.»
https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/
The rule works great and is easy to follow. But first you have to know it :)
Sadly, the company that taught me this in a previous century, now no longer follows it.
(Actually, I just wanted to create a custom ringtone out of an song fragment. It was the most epic fail I've ever had on a macOS and an iOS device).
E.g. Why does iOS, instead of silently allowing me to use it's new version, feeds me this gamified introduction to "what's new in 13.x.y.z?".
What I want is a piece of software that doesn't change. Or when it changes, it doesn't notify me of it - it just keeps working until I find enough time to actually go on my own journey of discovery.
I am not-so-subtly exhausted by every single half-capable developer spoon-feeding me their "new features". I've downloaded your app because of the features it _had_ - I mostly don't care about what you add later on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/bbof9s/windows_10...
2. You really don't want LTSC on your desktop.
> You really don't want LTSC on your desktop.
Because why?
I have used LTSC, and it is in fact exactly what I want on all my Windows computers. It's just normal Windows 10 except without the Windows Store†, and with a Debian-esque update model.
† And there are ways to add the Windows Store back in, if you really want it.
I imagine frequent users of the app would appreciate knowing what's new more than users that aren't so familiar with the app. I like to know what's new in iOS/macOS, since they update once a year and I'm familiar with it, and they make it brief.
Maybe tackle this problem first, then fall back to exposition.
One suggestion might be to start by removing hieroglyphic icons, or at least augmenting them with text labels.
You assume it can be tackled. Here's a concrete example:
The tool automatically snaps new windows to where user wants them to be. Rarely the user wants to undo that. The core functionality (autosnap) does not require any visible interface whatsoever. If I want user to see the undo button, I have to place it somewhere over his app's window, which bloats the interface (the undo is uncommon), or outright impossible, since some windows have custom titlebars.
So there's a hotkey, configurable in settings. How can you make it more discoverable?
Also, I am yet to find a single piece of software that does snapping better than tiling window managers, so I am not so sure about your use-case.
This is just the first thing I have thought of. There are probably better options that require a little more thought.
That is the real rudeness here!
That I am very tired about and which makes me reluctant to use apps. Too many lazy incompetence ruining app usage. I may be alone with rudeness but definitely not alone with the strong disappointment and reluctance. Just look around here!
We’re all disappointed about something or other, but we still maintain a basic level of courtesy in our posts on this site.
It's representative of users that actually know what the hell is going on and have a clue.
It's less annoying with Apple since they only update apps/OS once a year.
But it seems like every software jumps onto the bandwagon and now you see a changelog opening up an app every other day.
Surely Firefox exports an action to open the URL in the app?
And that’s excluding the apps. CityMapper, Google Maps, Amazon, WhatsApp.
Every day there’s something new released in one of those apps.
I can barely keep up with my email stream - you are either not using enough apps or you have too much free time on your hands.
What I'd really like would be an OS service that could show me a random selection of features from any of the applications I have installed. And, presumably on an opt-in basis, you could share which features you use, thus a bit of analytics could even recommend features I'm likely to find useful.
...do we though? The iPhone came out more than a decade ago now, and I feel like we got it pretty darn figured out around 2015 or so.
Newer versions of iOS have brought some improvements, but also a lot of miss-steps, and performance decreases on older devices (the only place you'd notice).
Not to mention those stupid flashlight and camera buttons on the iPhone lock screen whose only explanation is some manager somewhere wanted to make their mark.
I use those all the time, via muscle memory. Getting to the camera and flashlight ASAP is critical.
Plus the trailing edge triggered nature of them is annoying.
It's also anti-user that they can't be disabled/removed per the user's preference.
How so?
On the other hand... well, for example, I have a puzzle game concept I’ve worked up a prototype for and everyone I show it to needs some things explained that I haven’t been able to figure out how to just make a discoverable part of the UI.
Outright replacing visible affordances with gestures is wrong 9 times out of 10, reorganizing UX in a way that needs a walkthrough is annoying... but sometimes I don’t see another way to get certain things across?
At the other end of the spectrum several times I thought Google maps had removed a feature, only to find they had hidden it somewhere else.
Use one of the stable desktop environments on Linux.
Thankfully, they're going back to a real escape key in the latest MacBook Pro.
And what happened to the backlit Apple on the lid? Another sacrifice to the god of thinness?
Like getting rid of the Kensington security slot. My first MacBook had that and I used it with a cable lock in coffee shops. Also sacrificed to eliminate size and weight, I suppose.
Accidentally pressing the escape key is just one of many issues I have with that "feature".
That’s not a gesture, that’s you pressing the side buttons.
> Who the hell needs all this crap? Who the hell needs keyboard shortcuts?
When trying to find the WiFi toggle button (which is accomplished by "pinching" the screen) I basically just tried every possible gesture until I found the right one (I know that some gesture opened it from watching others). By far the worst and most memorable UX problem of the year.
Besides, none of those gestures are actually necessary; you could have gone settings app > Wifi > turn wifi on/off.
You shouldn't have to Google for basic functionality such as WiFi toggle button.
What if the problem was how to turn it on?
Nowadays, I get more questions than ever asking for help on how to do X Y or Z thing that seems really trivial on Android/Linux/Windows systems (like copying files without iTunes/iCloud, a frustration I remember dealing with even almost 10 years ago). It's now to the point where I just recommend 3rd party apps and alternatives for basic utilities for Apple's macOS and iOS to my family.
And that's just one tiny facet of a single set of features that they got terribly wrong. There's so many other things wrong with Macs, macOS, iPhones and iOS... I could go on for hours and hours detailing these things.
Despite all of that, like you, I will happily recommend a Mac to beginners because they do have system stability down to a science. I also use an iPhone and I recommend them to everyone since they're just safer and more secure than Android as far as I have seen. I'm hoping one day I can stop giving Apple money though because I don't want to support their shit attitude towards power users. I used to only buy used iPhones, but now I stay about 2 or 3 models behind their current offering (and I buy them at a deep discount - my new iPhone 8 was only $350 with no contract from Boost Mobile which works just great for my needs).
I'm really hoping my iPhone 8 will be my last iPhone because the task switching shortcut for the newer home button-less iPhones is very finicky from what I can tell experimenting in stores. Maybe they'll bring the home button back one day or I'll finally switch back to some other mobile OS.
Suggestion:
1. One Pro OSX version for Pro users (cut all services that eat ram and can be security hole) and add more options for advanced users.
2. Cut price around $800 or if you can cut more without damage in "real" performance and quality. Because not all apps use all power anyway.
3. And most important, fix broken flat UI, find balance. We have lot talented designers without job.
4. Don't break old apps with new update, find way for LTS.
MacOS is still my favourite BSD distro and mac from 2013/15 is perfect HW. So, if you do not know how to improve it, then keep what works and what users like or ask.
So I set about making a set of laminated cheat sheets of my own, with a consistent design, using screenshots of all of the applications I had installed, and so on. One points out all of the buttons on the iPad, another one shows the different screens, and a third was a diagram of common gestures.
Finding the gesture list itself was ... well, quite a bit harder than I thought it ought to be. Everything seems opaque. I am reminded of one of those escape room puzzles where one must painstakingly iterate through an array of taps, drags, swipes against each and every corner, edge and pixel. It seems that one must flail about against all of the idols, oh, I'm sorry, icons, hoping that one of the motions I have just performed will propitiate the gods. Watch for signs.
It seems, from my vantage, that learning the Apple Way was done with the very first Apple products and that now there is an expectation that everyone has been following along all this time. Certainly, that was my experience with my first smartphone, the iPhone SE. I was constantly having to look up how to do the smallest things and hoping that the information I found was not outdated. I also had to pester other Apple users for tips. My high school computer science teacher would be appalled at the lack of forthrightness.
While I think I did an alright job with the cheat sheets, she never did use that iPad much.
The problem is, the gesture metaphor is deeply rooted in manipulation of window pane of desktop based OS, which normally has menu bar and controls.
What does iOS lack? Both. Most gesture-based controls are torturous workaround the absence.
I have new ipad and it pains me to look at this cheat sheet.
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/16-gestures-that-will-make-you-l...
Although you probably need an annual refresher.
Edit2: https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/11/06/apple-offers-30-m...
- https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados
- https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios
It's a way to inhibit people from switching to a competitor, but of course it's possible to go too far. People joke about BMW drivers not using their turn signals, and as it happens, the traditional turn signals on their car work quite differently than on other cars, so quite likely many drivers simply never figured them out. Recently they have changed them to work the same way as on Japanese cars.
"Good" design is insufficient for aspirational/luxury products in general, because you can get it on mid-range products and incrementally higher pricing can't pay for substantially better design. So anything for the high end has to be ostentatiously or subtly different.
But man...
No back button. The password manager didn’t integrate well. The keyboard didn’t adapt to the language I was typing in. Parameters were hidden in the settings app but sometimes also in the app itself. Force touch is impossible to predict without trying it (actionable notifications). The cloud is incompatible (I lost my WhatsApp history). The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel). What the hell... the notification panel looks like the lock screen... Some control are stuck on an inaccessible and not obvious corner (abort the reorganization mode of main app starting panel).
I felt a bit stupid and understood the frustration of my 70 year old mother trying to learn how to use an iPhone. How am I supposed to explain it to her if it doesn’t make sense to me?
Nothing in the tech is really intuitive unless you truly know the product.
I felt hopeless and a bit depressed for y couple of days.
Thank god the hardware is gorgeous and the product feels great! :)
Swipe from the left edge of the screen, or tap the chevron in the top left.
> The lock screen and the notification panel look the same but don’t show the same information (some notifications only show up in the nOtification panel).
The lock screen hides historical notifications. You can scroll down to see them.
Thanks for the tip with the lock screen!
You can tell this in the original iOS which lacked multi-tasking completely. Only later was it shoe-horned in (along with undo, copy/paste, the concept of a cursor, etc)
The result of what we have now has been an iterative journey, the product of a bunch of user requests who insist on trying to create the same experience on a mobile phone with limited and far different interaction modalities.
At a certain point, you need to know when to stop and just open up your laptop rather than cursing something that was never originally designed for the task you’re trying to accomplish.
Right tool for the right job!
Thin, small grey fonts on white background, makes me want to tear out my own eyeballs.
Eat your dogfood, perhaps ?
That would make me cry too.