Those people installing new OS on day one are my heroes. I applaud them for their heroic effort to find all bugs, so I can install it few months later and have good experience.
I've already fallen in love with the tighter privacy permissions. For example, I no longer have to give apps an all-or-nothing access to my pics. This is a gamechanger because I bet a bunch of apps scrape the geodata from pics to harvest your location history, and now I only have to give them the ones I want to give them.
As a concrete example, I've been running the iOS 14 beta for the last week and a bit, Facebook Messenger previously had full access to my photos, and when using it for the first time I got a message from the OS explaining that I no longer needed to grant it carte-blanche access and whether I'd like to deny it access, pick the photos I'd specifically like to give it access to, or let it continue having full access.
WhatsApp and some others keep trying to access photos, because I keep getting an prompt asking me if I want to choose more photos every so often even when I'm not trying to do anything with photos.
Many apps including Discord repeatedly snoop the clipboard/pasteboard even when I don't paste anything, and wouldn't know about if iOS 14 didn't alert me.
Then there's the major apps secretly accessing the camera and microphone, exposed by the green/orange indicator light in iOS 14:
I noticed you can also just share your approximate location, rather than your exact location. Therefore, as an example, weather apps where my exact location isn't necessary won't get it.
The real question is why doesn't Apple have enough Testing and QA to catch stuff like this? It's not like they can't afford it or they need to suport a bazillion possible HW configurations like Android and Windows. They design and own the whole product stack from silicon to OS so poor QA is inexcusable here.
Edit: if you're down voting my statement could you please elaborate why? Thanks.
Probably because cost of testing does not justify profits from well-tested software. Apple is commercial company. They didn't sign any obligations to produce bug-less software. And the fact that they are richest (or one of the richest) companies in the world means that they did math correctly.
No, it means they did some math correctly in the past. They built great hardware and coupled it with a usable OS/UX. I have tried Android several times and found it generally more buggy. However, iOS has progressively gotten more complex and buggy (I still have rotation bugs across all my devices.)
At some point maybe I'll stop paying the Apple premium if all things are equally buggy.
Maybe because Apple users consider themselves locked in tot the ecosystem so they can't vote with their feet/wallets and walk to a competitor when they're tired of bugs so Apple feels no pressure to do right by their users. Am I right?
I only feel locked in to Apple because I despise Google so much and the 2 Android phones I previously had were complete garbage. If there was a another viable option, I would go with it in a second.
The extremely deep integration with google services was always annoying for me. I'm still finding it hard to untangle myself now that I've fully moved to Apple devices.
My older smartphone (few years old) had less Google-related stuff. And for one, it had its own goddamn music player. Can you imagine? I did not have to use Google Play by default, and go to the Play Store to download a fscking music player. A music player!
It doesn't matter so much now, but I don't want them cluttering up my phone's rom with default apps I might not like, or that I can't take with me to a new phone. An ideal Android for me would come out of the box with a dialer (preferably AOSP), clock, keyboard, launcher, AOSP Browser, and a play store stub (play store might not be ideal, but it's the path of least effort).
Yeah, of course. It is a sad state of the store that I had to go through a few music players before I found one that did not shove ads in my face (or at all), and had all the basic functions you would expect a music player to have.
My similar feelings towards Apple ("despise" would probably be too strong, but I don't really like them either, plus I'm too cheap to put up with their prices) means that I am pretty much locked in to Android, but there I at least have a choice between different manufacturers...
QA is becoming an endangered species. As a software engineer I despise that my end users are my beta testers. Only a handful of times in my career have I had the luxury of a QA team and they were worth their weight in gold.
Of course business doesn't care, all they see is cost centers. Who cares if the bug count is 10,000 or 200, right?
My theory is that companies like Apple and Google - and, actually, smaller businesses even more so, because they can't afford a QA team - have intentionally offloaded much of the QA phase to the public.
In a way, it's a result of the "agile" approach, to "release early, ship often". And the larger the userbase, the more effective they are at finding and reporting bugs and edge cases. It also cuts down on the cost by reducing the time/effort spent on testing new features thoroughly.
What grinds my gears is when a company doesn't have a centralized bug database where the users can contribute and see the progress being made. If I recall correctly, Apple's support forums are like a blackhole of issue reports. Most of the time it's a bunch of users with the same problem, trying to solve it on their own; no input from an employee/developer; no way to know if they're aware or working on the bug; and no clear path to a solution.
I'd go the other way for big organizations like Apple and Google -- they need to do public testing, because the bug that impacts 0.1% of their users will impact hundreds of thousands. And no QA team, regardless of how they're empowered or resourced, will find every 0.1% bug (or even every 1% bug). You need broad beta testing in those cases, just to get enough hands on.
There is a need for public betas, but a private QA team could catch a lot of bugs before release, and catch regressions. The public beta builds might not be much better, but they'd likely at least come with reported known issues.
Of course, iOS was nototorious for not alarming on January 1st because Steve wanted to sleep in (actually I don't know why, but I think it happened at least 2 years in a row, and maybe three)
Given that "Unfortunately the migration is done by disabling your existing alarm and showing a button to open the Health app to set it up again." this sounds more like improperly specified behavior than poorly implemented behavior to me. Unfortunately bad specifications aren't really caught in QA testing because that's what you're testing to. This probably should have been caught in beta testing, but the author might have a rare set of conditions that resulted in this behavior.
Good beta testing is basically only done by have a really large userbase of testers. That said if apple wanted to improve this they probably have the capital to incentivize it through service discounts or something similar.
It’s probably a very rare combination of specific factors that caused this bug for this person. My iPhone alarm had no problems whatsoever this morning after installing iOS 14 last night. Your comment would be more applicable if we had reason to believe that they had simply completely broken the alarm feature and that no one at Apple had bothered testing it.
To be fair the public / developer betas this year were pretty good compared to iOS 13 betas. It looks like the internal testing changes somehow improved things:
I buy Apple products because they are supposedly held to a higher standard. They do not get a pass just because iOS 14 is not as awful as their previous attempt.
In fairness, they are held to a much higher standard. It's just that the vast majority of products out there are horrible, so when consumers get products like Apple makes they seem heavenly by comparison. And they are, but does that mean they are the best they can be?
Probably also has a bit to do with Apple actually making efforts to improve, whereas others seem to make efforts only to copy Apple. Which doesn't help the situation. For consumers, the ideal, in my opinion, is competition on innovation, not really competition on who can be more "Apple-like".
> In fairness, they are held to a much higher standard.
With premium prices come premium expectations. If I buy a $3,000 MacBook Pro, I do not expect the colossal screwup that was the butterfly keyboard design defect.
That's a hardware issue of course, but in general Apple's software quality has gone down, down down.
It’s not awful at all. I installed it yesterday on my iPhone X and I’ve had no problems. I also have the exact same alarm setup and my alarm worked fine. It’s unrealistic to expect there to be literally zero bugs for zero people, and of course the people who do experience bugs will post about it online, but that doesn’t really give a statistically meaningful impression of how reliable iOS 14 is.
Every OTHER time something has come out like this, I waited -- at least 30 days, sometimes 60 or 90. Let other people risk productivity and annoyance!
This time, though, I updated both my iPad and my phone last night, on release day. Why?
Well, first, because hey, COVID era. My mobile phone isn't my business line (I have VOIP for that), and I'm obviously not traveling, so the risk was lower.
But the REAL driver was this: iOS14 allows you to "pin" text conversations to the top of the list so you can get back to them quickly. This sounds trivial, but holy hell it really isn't. And in quarantine, I'm texting with people a LOT more than I used to.
I got downvoted in the other thread for saying this. Ppl are surfacing all sorts of bugs that I wouldn’t wanna deal with. So what that one or two guys had a relatively bug-free beta experience, generally software has bugs these days during its initial release.
The other day I missed my 1:1 with my direct manager because I was in Zoom, sharing my screen with a colleague and Zoom dutifully suppressed alerts, from the calendar, and the increasingly frustrated messages from him on Slack, while I was "presenting".
I've seen very unfortunate things happening when someone doesn't have notifications disabled when giving a presentation so I don't think this is a bad default.
It's actually a good argument for integration between screen-sharing apps and instant messaging/status - your status really should go to "Presenting" when you are presenting and for incoming alerts to automatically be hidden.
Yes, that was the default behavior in Lync/SfB, but could be changed to not go into "Do Not Disturb" status when sharing your screen or presenting slides.
I believe such a horrible misfeature would require support from desktop environment. I mostly use XFCE and believe it doesn't have that feature. I'm not so sure, but believe that Windows is also mostly fine: note that an app minimized to tray is still running, "Quit" is distinct from "Close". Did I miss something in popular desktop environments?
If your job (as I've seen recently) is to give real time support it looks pretty nuts. Traditional landline telephones just ring loud and long enough to just work. In 2020 the laptop needs to be kept awake, the mail client has to be active, the wifi has to be connected. Woah, Reboot? just like that? I might get fired!
Then, in the middle of the daily 8 hour tech paranoia she went to the toilet and the mail notifier was loud- but not long enough. It got flushed pretty much. I had to tell her she got an email. "WOAH? Really??" :rolleyes:
The false alarms are also comical. Things like separate notification settings for different mail accounts is still a puzzle while it should be a simple filter settings. We got volume control in software but we didn't get to adjust it on a per feature-basis.
I guess we are back at: 'Jack of all trades, master of none'
One of the most annoying and bad-taste shocking developments in OS X was when they changed the Messages app so that it still gives you notifications even if its not running, unless you deliberately enable Do Not Disturb.
It's really really glaring and galling how bad that choice is. It's Microsoftian.
Maybe the issue isn't with the default notification behaviour in a teleconference program, but with the expectation that someone should always be instantly accessible via zoom/slack/what have you during work hours.
(I mean, yeah, the meeting was presumably scheduled but the manager could have phoned or texed.)
In some places they even push the expectation of being accessible immediately at any time ("being on call"), and it’s not paid hours. Crazy times we live in.
I am an underpaid (for my area, experience, title, coworkers, etc) software developer who has occasional on call shifts and once a year holiday shifts with no extra pay or benefits
Your argument seems to be that he should be instantly available on his telephone but not on zoom or slack? Seems like you're just shuffling the problem around.
I think that's pretty reasonable. Most people at the end of the day are available whenever via a phone call. But if you use it for something trivial, they will be pissed. Seems like a decent system to me.
In this age of mobile phones, a phone call is the gold standard for realtime business communication. It's pretty reasonable to expect someone to answer their phone if their direct supervisor calls during work hours. Text messages are more fuzzy with the implied expectation of response time. Online messages (IMO anyway) shouldn't be considered a realtime channel.
A coworker had his work Macbook synced up to his iPhone messages app, and was getting blown up during a meeting by his friends in a group chat ranting about Trump.
It could have been way worse. I've never understood why people sync their personal messages/emails to their work computers. It can and does get watched - gods help you if your friends have a borderline taste in memes and send you something offensive while you're presenting.
I dunno, I'd generally think of this as probably the better failure mode for this particular feature! It's popular enough that there are dedicated apps to help with it (https://muzzleapp.com – which if I'm honest I'm just sharing because the website is that good).
Now I wish there was a prank app generating those kind of notifications when someone shares a screen. Would be great to install on any friend/coworker who forgets to lock his laptop before stepping out.
You can keep notifications disabled on desktop but enabled on phone, and keep your phone in front of you while presenting. Ignore single dings and notifications with silent / vibrate. But you should notice multiple slack dings this way and can react. Also can see calendar notifications pretty easily.
With the expectation being that people should be reachable via phone?
I mean, I guess I gave in too, with Slack notifications now showing up on my phone, which feels like a defeat, but this expectation of reachability seems wrong to me, at least if it’s not a dedicated work phone.
My own private phone should ideally not receive any work-related notifications.
> increasingly frustrated messages from him on Slack
I always say to people "if it's urgent then phone me".
Software has too many ways to fail to notify you. I miss text messages because my phone is charging in the other room, I miss Slack notifications because I reinstalled Windows on one machine and relied on the Slack web UI rather than the desktop app. There's so may ways to misconfigure notification services. My phone ringing is hard to ignore.
Also - I forget to act on SMS and WhatApp messages all the time because they conflate "read" with "done". I have a second rule - "if you want me to remember it then email me."
Disabling distracting notifications during a presentation is a good feature. Presumably you were going over actual work with your colleague. Your manager sounds like a nightmare control freak, if you're not over-stating their frustration.
Edit: more charitably, I don't know anything about your manager. But if you did accurately represent their frustration and they're normally a good manager who can take feedback, feel free to share that they came across as a nightmare control freak in this situation.
> missed my 1:1 ... increasingly frustrated messages
>> nightmare control freak
I don't know why you jumped to that, seems like a totally normal reaction to me. I think your judgement is a little harsh or at least making a lot of assumptions.
I disagree that it's a normal reaction to missing a virtual 1:1. An appropriate reaction would perhaps involve at most 2 messages, one a prompt for the meeting, and if not responded to, a followup asking to reschedule when they're available. If I finished a collaboration with a colleague that ran over time, and came back to "increasingly frustrated messages" from my manager, I would take that as a rather large red flag.
Yes, that is a nightmare. You know how many messages you need to send over chat in situations like this?
ONE. Not at least. AT MOST.
This isn't like yelling across the hallway and being unsure if your friend heard you.
This isn't like coming to your spouse's room to tell them dinner is ready, them not coming in 5 minutes, and you coming back to get them again.
Work chat systems show read receipts. YOu know if the person got the message. And there will be a permanent record for them to see it.
If they're not responding there are two possibilities:
A) They saw the notification/you message
B) They didn't.
If it's B, more messages won't help notifications appear.
If it's A....don't you maybe have some trust in your coworkers (presuming this isn't a 15 year old on their first job at MacDonalds) that they know how to prioritize and if they're not responding to another human being it's probably because they have some reason not to?
They might be mid conversation.
They might be dealing with a production issue.
They might have a screaming baby in the room next to them.
And in all these cases, if you give them a minute, they'll arrive, apologize profusely for missed the 1on1 or keeping you waiting, and either proceed or reschedule.
Meanwhile, you've already blocked this time off for the meeting. So go and reply to some emails, or work on a promo doc, or hell if you work too hard already, take a break, and click around on hacker news for a few minutes.
It'll be fine.
I would absolutely without hesitation would not work for, and would quit working for a manager who treated me with three messages like you just described.
Windows 10 is a bucket of shit, it doesn't show me any notifications (I think it thinks I'm connected to a projector instead of a second monitor so it helpfully switches to "presentation mode"), but a few hours later it would flood me with the suppressed notifications from the whole day. Yay!
It also likes to fuck with my keyboard layout settings: the PCs at work come with German, French and Italian layouts (guess the country!), and that's the default for the "system", which is the configuration Windows uses at the login/lock screen, but I just use German and added English. Very often, Windows would decide that my keypresses should now be interpreted as French instead of English, despite the language icon saying "ENG"...
The "ENG" just means the user interface is in English, not the keyboard language, if you use a default height taskbar it will show, "ENG" with "US" below for the layout which you can change using multiple hotkeys one is Windows Key + Space another is alt + shift I think
Nah... the problem is, I would remove the French layout from my user configuration, but Windows would randomly decide to re-add (and use) it. If I go to the languages menu in Control Panel, French would not be listed there. I'd have to add French, and then remove it again. But a few hours later the same bug would hit me again and I'm outputting accented letters all over the place.
I present a LOT -- not with Zoom, EVER, because why trust them, but with other tools -- and I definitely have my OS's "do not disturb" on when I do that.
But I also have 2nd and sometimes 3rd devices rolling so I can keep an eye on email and IMs during those times. Doesn't everyone do that?
This is an awful user experience. IOS asks to make these kind of updates while plugged into power at night. If I understand correctly, most of the users will be left with their alarms disabled in the middle of the night. I couldn’t understand how does Apple miss a critical point like this when their update functionality is focused on user’s sleeping hours.
I don't think this is the case – the article mentions that this is explicitly related to the "bedtime" feature, rather than the more general "alarms" feature.
I use this feature as well, updated to iOS 14 last night without changing anything or updating my settings, and the alarm still went off this morning – so it at least seems like it's a more complex failure that it might first seem.
same. i had multiple days of confusion 'cause i thought i was sleeping thru the alarm / half-consciously dismissing it (something i've had trouble with before)
i'll never trust apple to provide a simple alarm clock again for anything important
This is like the fourth time an iOS update has broken the ability to use your phone as an alarm clock. Incredibly frustrating. I definitely missed meetings a couple times back when I owned a first-gen iPhone and relied on it for this - I eventually bought an old-fashioned clock.
FWIW I've had similar problems with other phones in the past, so this isn't exclusively an Apple thing - but insufficient QA of alarms is a distressing ongoing problem with iOS and I don't know why they haven't made sure that it's a core part of their release process by now.
Unfortunately once you generalize all your notification infrastructure, it becomes easier to break alarms. The Windows Alarms and Clock app relies on system notification infrastructure, so if notifications are silenced (there is a longstanding bug that causes this, and the people responsible for Win10 Notifications don't give a shit), the alarm sound doesn't play until the notification appears - often hours later. If they played the sound directly this wouldn't be an issue, but they assume notifications will work. Yay for abstraction and infrastructure...
I think brazilocene is a reference to the movie Brazil (mostly about bureaucracy), and "cene", which is a suffix to design a geological epoch (like Paleocene)
It is a conflict between physical and mental health. If you sleep in you'll get anxiety about missed appointment and if you wake early you'll feel tired.
Overall, HN has always been supportive of original, on-topic, relevant, insightful humor. That means though that any kind of meme-ish, repetitive, or obvious joke is going to fail.
Basically HN in a great place for techie jokes that are essentially unique to this one tiny corner of the internet. The 4 or 5 we get per year are often some of the best content.
Right, I would say there's a difference between a low-effort joke/meme/pun vs a biting critique done as a joke.
It this case, the criticism was, Apple products will narrowly optimize for something pleasant (well-restedness) at the cost of what you really want (getting to work on time). This is a very common complaint[1], and it's kind of witty to joke about them doing it by accident here, when it's what they deliberately do in other contexts.
[1] Examples: making the URL bar look nice and minimal at the cost of you knowing where you are in a site, removing the scroll bar at the cost of knowing where you are in a page or how to move it, making the mouse unusuable when charging just so you don't have a hole on the top.
I note that the rules are "guidelines", not "rules", and I think that's deliberate. There's meant to be an element of human judgement that can't necessarily be spelled out in advance. Allowing things that you might not inspect seems like the inverse of https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
Except if you ever challenge the guidelines they magically become rules, consistently.
I don't think we are even supposed to talk about that since its "unsubstantive", when convenient - which is always the case to the people that don't want to be challenged on it.
I note that while dang writes there that it's a hard rule, the comment it was in referenced to wasn't killed. That's different from my understanding of what a hard rule is; in communities I moderate, I will always remove content that goes against something I consider a hard rule.
Most of the HN guidelines are subject to a fair amount of human interpretation.
Or the kind that is presented with absolutely 0 context.
Most of those tweets are pretty funny, but I can't help but think that a lot of them wouldn't be so hard to read if we knew the context in which they were said.
Eh, that's nothing, few friend of mine had issues where Android would sometimes not ring alerts. Why? Who knows, maybe some weird bug that manifested itself in some combination of system settings and phone firmware.
I have multiple devices so I usually set alert on home phone + work phone if it's something really important like a flight at 6 AM; but if I were to use an alarm clock everyday I'd probably buy the simplest one I can find for few bucks.
I stopped using Samsung's clock alarm for this reason. It's quite hard to figure out as a heavy sleeper whether actually only 1 of my 5 alarms went off or I was just sleeping through them.
One day I just stared at the clock app, not ringing, as my alarm time came and went. At least validated all those times I've doubted myself.
Downloaded AMDroid now. Much better, and much more customizable, and it turns out I never actually sleep through an alarm, they just never went off.
I also got really good at multiplying 2-digit numbers in a sleep-daze.
My Samsung and now Nokia have gaslit me into long-term self-doubt if I sleep through alarms. In one near miss, I noticed the volume was lowered without my intention.
I got bit by that twice and figured my old standard alarm clock would be good enough. Had it for 15 years and it has never missed a day.
In industry, the more reliable you need something to be, the more simple it has to be. Phones are too complicated to be a good alarm clock. Plus I don't have to blast out my eyeballs to see what time it is in the dark.
Ah, a disabled alarm. Classic. Let me tell you about my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet.
I always used a flip cover with a magnet which automatically puts the device in standby when it's closed. The tablet was always closed next to my bed as an alarm clock. After some time I noticed, that my alarm apparently didn't work.
Turns out, that an update introduced a new feature: Closing the flip cover will automatically snooze the alarm. Problem is, that it also prevents an alarm from even starting, when the cover is already closed.
Later they realized that it's a bug and disabled it again.
iOS has had alarm issues for years. Sometimes my alarm will go off silently for no obvious reason (e.g., does not depend on whether phone is on silent or not - alarm should sound anyway). It happens so intermittently that I've never managed to figure out reproduction steps.
Nevertheless, it's caused me problems enough times (missed trains to London, for example) that nowadays if it's really important for me to get up I'll always set a backup alarm on a different device (even a good old alarm clock).
This happens to me so many times, sometimes I will wake up about 30 minutes after my alarm was supposed to go off. I've always wondered if I was somehow turning of my alarm while waking up and instantly falling back asleep or if my alarm just never went off.
I have the Bedtime alarm set for 7:30 AM. It went off at 3:00 AM the next morning.
I’m pretty deaf, so awoke to my wife kicking and yelling at me. It took awhile to fumble it off.
Why? And why 4 1/2 hours difference?
In the morning, I screwed around with it for a bit and got it reset to 7:30.
Or so I thought. It went off again at 3:00 PM.
More screwing around. I suspect it’s somehow related to the fact I have the phone set for 24 hour time. Seems to be ok now, but I still have to update to 14.
One of my favourite things about the old blackberrys was that the alarm went off... even when the phone had 'run out' of battery! seriously awesome feature.
The whole site is an amusing and satisfying read, mostly because it's reassuring to know I'm not the only person who is really bothered by these kind of little UI niggles.
[For non-europeans: the first two characters of an International Bank Account Number are the ones that identify the country; if they really wanted to insist that only Germany-registered bank accounts are allowed, there are more intuitive ways to validate that.]
On iPadOS 14 the bedtime feature got removed entirely since there is no Health App available for iPads. I guess i have to say goodbye to using my iPad as a high tech alarm clock for now...
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadI've already fallen in love with the tighter privacy permissions. For example, I no longer have to give apps an all-or-nothing access to my pics. This is a gamechanger because I bet a bunch of apps scrape the geodata from pics to harvest your location history, and now I only have to give them the ones I want to give them.
As a concrete example, I've been running the iOS 14 beta for the last week and a bit, Facebook Messenger previously had full access to my photos, and when using it for the first time I got a message from the OS explaining that I no longer needed to grant it carte-blanche access and whether I'd like to deny it access, pick the photos I'd specifically like to give it access to, or let it continue having full access.
What iOS apps (that you've given access to your photos) can you have any confidence don't do this?
https://www.engadget.com/2011-01-09-the-gpl-the-app-store-an...
Many apps including Discord repeatedly snoop the clipboard/pasteboard even when I don't paste anything, and wouldn't know about if iOS 14 didn't alert me.
Then there's the major apps secretly accessing the camera and microphone, exposed by the green/orange indicator light in iOS 14:
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/25/instagram-unexpectedly-...
Surprise, these are the people fighting against Apple.
Edit: if you're down voting my statement could you please elaborate why? Thanks.
At some point maybe I'll stop paying the Apple premium if all things are equally buggy.
Of course business doesn't care, all they see is cost centers. Who cares if the bug count is 10,000 or 200, right?
In a way, it's a result of the "agile" approach, to "release early, ship often". And the larger the userbase, the more effective they are at finding and reporting bugs and edge cases. It also cuts down on the cost by reducing the time/effort spent on testing new features thoroughly.
What grinds my gears is when a company doesn't have a centralized bug database where the users can contribute and see the progress being made. If I recall correctly, Apple's support forums are like a blackhole of issue reports. Most of the time it's a bunch of users with the same problem, trying to solve it on their own; no input from an employee/developer; no way to know if they're aware or working on the bug; and no clear path to a solution.
Of course, iOS was nototorious for not alarming on January 1st because Steve wanted to sleep in (actually I don't know why, but I think it happened at least 2 years in a row, and maybe three)
The amish have the right idea.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-21/apple-ios...
Probably also has a bit to do with Apple actually making efforts to improve, whereas others seem to make efforts only to copy Apple. Which doesn't help the situation. For consumers, the ideal, in my opinion, is competition on innovation, not really competition on who can be more "Apple-like".
https://web.archive.org/web/20090414133729/http://tomkarpik....
With premium prices come premium expectations. If I buy a $3,000 MacBook Pro, I do not expect the colossal screwup that was the butterfly keyboard design defect. That's a hardware issue of course, but in general Apple's software quality has gone down, down down.
Every OTHER time something has come out like this, I waited -- at least 30 days, sometimes 60 or 90. Let other people risk productivity and annoyance!
This time, though, I updated both my iPad and my phone last night, on release day. Why?
Well, first, because hey, COVID era. My mobile phone isn't my business line (I have VOIP for that), and I'm obviously not traveling, so the risk was lower.
But the REAL driver was this: iOS14 allows you to "pin" text conversations to the top of the list so you can get back to them quickly. This sounds trivial, but holy hell it really isn't. And in quarantine, I'm texting with people a LOT more than I used to.
Thank you, Zoom.
Then, in the middle of the daily 8 hour tech paranoia she went to the toilet and the mail notifier was loud- but not long enough. It got flushed pretty much. I had to tell her she got an email. "WOAH? Really??" :rolleyes:
The false alarms are also comical. Things like separate notification settings for different mail accounts is still a puzzle while it should be a simple filter settings. We got volume control in software but we didn't get to adjust it on a per feature-basis.
I guess we are back at: 'Jack of all trades, master of none'
It's really really glaring and galling how bad that choice is. It's Microsoftian.
(I mean, yeah, the meeting was presumably scheduled but the manager could have phoned or texed.)
I'll admit I've quit over it.
It could have been way worse. I've never understood why people sync their personal messages/emails to their work computers. It can and does get watched - gods help you if your friends have a borderline taste in memes and send you something offensive while you're presenting.
I mean, I guess I gave in too, with Slack notifications now showing up on my phone, which feels like a defeat, but this expectation of reachability seems wrong to me, at least if it’s not a dedicated work phone.
My own private phone should ideally not receive any work-related notifications.
I always say to people "if it's urgent then phone me".
Software has too many ways to fail to notify you. I miss text messages because my phone is charging in the other room, I miss Slack notifications because I reinstalled Windows on one machine and relied on the Slack web UI rather than the desktop app. There's so may ways to misconfigure notification services. My phone ringing is hard to ignore.
Also - I forget to act on SMS and WhatApp messages all the time because they conflate "read" with "done". I have a second rule - "if you want me to remember it then email me."
Let's not blame too much on tech
Edit: more charitably, I don't know anything about your manager. But if you did accurately represent their frustration and they're normally a good manager who can take feedback, feel free to share that they came across as a nightmare control freak in this situation.
>> nightmare control freak
I don't know why you jumped to that, seems like a totally normal reaction to me. I think your judgement is a little harsh or at least making a lot of assumptions.
"you there?"
"still waiting... ETA??"
What a nightmare control freak, huge red flag, jeez...
ONE. Not at least. AT MOST.
This isn't like yelling across the hallway and being unsure if your friend heard you.
This isn't like coming to your spouse's room to tell them dinner is ready, them not coming in 5 minutes, and you coming back to get them again.
Work chat systems show read receipts. YOu know if the person got the message. And there will be a permanent record for them to see it.
If they're not responding there are two possibilities: A) They saw the notification/you message B) They didn't.
If it's B, more messages won't help notifications appear.
If it's A....don't you maybe have some trust in your coworkers (presuming this isn't a 15 year old on their first job at MacDonalds) that they know how to prioritize and if they're not responding to another human being it's probably because they have some reason not to?
They might be mid conversation. They might be dealing with a production issue. They might have a screaming baby in the room next to them.
And in all these cases, if you give them a minute, they'll arrive, apologize profusely for missed the 1on1 or keeping you waiting, and either proceed or reschedule.
Meanwhile, you've already blocked this time off for the meeting. So go and reply to some emails, or work on a promo doc, or hell if you work too hard already, take a break, and click around on hacker news for a few minutes.
It'll be fine.
I would absolutely without hesitation would not work for, and would quit working for a manager who treated me with three messages like you just described.
It also likes to fuck with my keyboard layout settings: the PCs at work come with German, French and Italian layouts (guess the country!), and that's the default for the "system", which is the configuration Windows uses at the login/lock screen, but I just use German and added English. Very often, Windows would decide that my keypresses should now be interpreted as French instead of English, despite the language icon saying "ENG"...
Nope, this is incorrect.
Depending on settings/version of Windows, the input method is actually tracked per-window so it's really easy to end up with weird/annoying behaviour.
If you haven't already I'd suggest disabling that hotkey. You may find the weirdness partially resolves itself.
But I also have 2nd and sometimes 3rd devices rolling so I can keep an eye on email and IMs during those times. Doesn't everyone do that?
I mean, that puts you at precisely the disadvantage your outlined, but if you don't trust your employer than that's where you are.
I don't have any "work software" on my phone, but I can still see my work email there.
Dude, your manager should never get frustrated with you because you didn't come or are late for your 1on1.
Your 1on1 with your manager is YOUR time. It's not THEIR time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24525026
I use this feature as well, updated to iOS 14 last night without changing anything or updating my settings, and the alarm still went off this morning – so it at least seems like it's a more complex failure that it might first seem.
did it pop up a warning? no
did it default to a built-in alarm sound? no
did it just stop sounding the alarm, but still show it as active and selected in the config screen? yes
i'll never trust apple to provide a simple alarm clock again for anything important
Looks like a happy accident to me.
FWIW I've had similar problems with other phones in the past, so this isn't exclusively an Apple thing - but insufficient QA of alarms is a distressing ongoing problem with iOS and I don't know why they haven't made sure that it's a core part of their release process by now.
Unfortunately once you generalize all your notification infrastructure, it becomes easier to break alarms. The Windows Alarms and Clock app relies on system notification infrastructure, so if notifications are silenced (there is a longstanding bug that causes this, and the people responsible for Win10 Notifications don't give a shit), the alarm sound doesn't play until the notification appears - often hours later. If they played the sound directly this wouldn't be an issue, but they assume notifications will work. Yay for abstraction and infrastructure...
And as usually with iOS, the user experience is excellent!
HN is a an uncanny reflection of the tech sector in its current state, same people
Basically HN in a great place for techie jokes that are essentially unique to this one tiny corner of the internet. The 4 or 5 we get per year are often some of the best content.
It this case, the criticism was, Apple products will narrowly optimize for something pleasant (well-restedness) at the cost of what you really want (getting to work on time). This is a very common complaint[1], and it's kind of witty to joke about them doing it by accident here, when it's what they deliberately do in other contexts.
[1] Examples: making the URL bar look nice and minimal at the cost of you knowing where you are in a site, removing the scroll bar at the cost of knowing where you are in a page or how to move it, making the mouse unusuable when charging just so you don't have a hole on the top.
I don't think we are even supposed to talk about that since its "unsubstantive", when convenient - which is always the case to the people that don't want to be challenged on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482110
Most of the HN guidelines are subject to a fair amount of human interpretation.
Most of those tweets are pretty funny, but I can't help but think that a lot of them wouldn't be so hard to read if we knew the context in which they were said.
I have multiple devices so I usually set alert on home phone + work phone if it's something really important like a flight at 6 AM; but if I were to use an alarm clock everyday I'd probably buy the simplest one I can find for few bucks.
Well, that's what my boss thinks anyway.
Tried for a while to resolve it, but, fuck it, WhatsApp just works
One day I just stared at the clock app, not ringing, as my alarm time came and went. At least validated all those times I've doubted myself.
Downloaded AMDroid now. Much better, and much more customizable, and it turns out I never actually sleep through an alarm, they just never went off.
I also got really good at multiplying 2-digit numbers in a sleep-daze.
In industry, the more reliable you need something to be, the more simple it has to be. Phones are too complicated to be a good alarm clock. Plus I don't have to blast out my eyeballs to see what time it is in the dark.
I always used a flip cover with a magnet which automatically puts the device in standby when it's closed. The tablet was always closed next to my bed as an alarm clock. After some time I noticed, that my alarm apparently didn't work.
Turns out, that an update introduced a new feature: Closing the flip cover will automatically snooze the alarm. Problem is, that it also prevents an alarm from even starting, when the cover is already closed.
Later they realized that it's a bug and disabled it again.
Nevertheless, it's caused me problems enough times (missed trains to London, for example) that nowadays if it's really important for me to get up I'll always set a backup alarm on a different device (even a good old alarm clock).
I really wish Apple would fix it.
I have the Bedtime alarm set for 7:30 AM. It went off at 3:00 AM the next morning.
I’m pretty deaf, so awoke to my wife kicking and yelling at me. It took awhile to fumble it off.
Why? And why 4 1/2 hours difference?
In the morning, I screwed around with it for a bit and got it reset to 7:30.
Or so I thought. It went off again at 3:00 PM.
More screwing around. I suspect it’s somehow related to the fact I have the phone set for 24 hour time. Seems to be ok now, but I still have to update to 14.
I particularly love the one where a German insurance provider insists on ignoring the point of the 'I' in 'IBAN': https://annoying.technology/posts/8b0e0f1083d21073/
[For non-europeans: the first two characters of an International Bank Account Number are the ones that identify the country; if they really wanted to insist that only Germany-registered bank accounts are allowed, there are more intuitive ways to validate that.]
It’s Error’d articles are so much fun, and have been going on for ages.
http://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery
Edit: The real daily wtf is that they're still on http
https://thedailywtf.com/
It is possible someone may post something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World
which may disable the editors and be accidentally posted, leading to your death or dismemberment.
http allows for government monitoring of this type of situation and possible automated interdiction.
There is an article in the German Wikipedia about this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBAN-Diskriminierung
You can put in a complaint here: https://www.wettbewerbszentrale.de/de/beschwerdestelle/sepah...
You were “holding the phone wrong”.
Edit: The alarm went off at the appropriate time.