Frank probably made his post in response, but it’s still kind of impressive he got it in when he did, given the article got over 40 pages of comments in about 24 hours.
Myself, I’m using List View now instead of the main Grid view. My issues reflect a lot of what others are saying:
Too much white space (and I see even less of it, since I subscribe and the design takes into account the now-unused ad space), which means a lot more scrolling and a lot less visible content.
Article headers are way too big, both font size and image.
The Grid view commits a huge faux pas by showing a large block of black with white text on it…when you select the Light theme. Not only is this illogical, it’s a legit accessibility issue. Light themes should be light.
Images in circles are small and not particularly easy to scan, which is overall minor.
I knew there would be griping a-plenty when the article about the redesign talked about updating to current design trends (which in many ways are bad and user-hostile). We’ll see where it ends up as they tweak, but history suggests it will be mostly as is and people will just get used to it.
Here’s the Grid view, as seen on the front page (click to see full-size):
That is a lot of dark for a light theme.
The headers on articles in Light view are still dark, too:
This is a 1780×1140 window.
Also, note that despite having my browser window set to 1780×1140 (not counting the address bar, etc.) I have to scroll just to start reading the article text. This seems suboptimal.
We’ll see how it evolves over the next few weeks. I’ll post an update if I remember!
I say this as someone who has owned an iPad Pro since 2017.
When the iPad debuted in 2010, Steve Jobs pitched it as a “between” device that could do things a smartphone could, and things a desktop computer could–but it could do them in a more convenient form. The activities included:
Browsing web pages
Reading magazines and books
Watching video
All of these activities require minimal interaction, so they are suited to a touch-oriented device. The iPad’s larger display–yet still eminently portable design–makes it superior to a smartphone for viewing web pages or magazines, though with more responsive designs and larger phone screens, this use case is not quite as compelling as it once was. It’s still better for watching video in bed than a laptop or phone, I’d say.
Jobs only lived long enough to see one iteration of the iPad, called, cleverly1Given Apple’s often byzantine and arbitrary naming schemes, this is not sarcasm!, the iPad 2. It refined what was in the original, but otherwise changed nothing. It was just a better iPad.
That changed a bit in 2012 when Apple introduced the iPad Mini. It was, quite literally, a smaller version of the iPad. This didn’t change much, but it did mean that consumers now had two distinct choices when buying an iPad: regular size or smaller.
Apple then blew things up when they introduced the original iPad Pro in 2015. This had some refinements, but mostly it was bigger, going from a 9.7″ display to a 12.9″ one. Apple muddied the waters by later introducing a 9.7″ iPad Pro, which really wasn’t much better than the standard iPad Air available at the time (also a 9.7″ device). Apple “fixed” this by junking the Air (for a while) and bringing in a new base model iPad that stripped away things like the laminated display, but also dropped the price to a mere $299 (the original iPad sold for $499). The Pro models also supported a stylus, the Apple Pencil.
Does anything in the above paragraph look like a carefully-planned, long term strategy? Because it is not. It is Apple deciding one thing (“We need an upscale iPad so we can charge a premium price”) and then shuffling everything else around to make the line-up work. The early iPad Pros, apart from supporting Apple Pencil–an arbitrary limitation that was lifted a few years later, when Pencil support was added to all the myriad iPad models–didn’t really do anything that the base model couldn’t do. They looked a bit nicer, they sounded a bit better, they ran faster (not that you could really notice).
It was the Apple Pencil support that got me to buy that 10.5″ iPad Pro in 2017, then to move to the 12.9″ model when it was new in 2020 (I still use it today). It seemed like a way to get a Cintiq-like device, but (surprisingly, given Apple) for less than an actual Cintiq would cost. (This year’s iPad Pro models have reversed that, as Apple leaned much more into making the Pro model “premium”–even though it still can’t do anything more than a $300 iPad you can grab at your local Walmart.)
When I bought the 12.9″ iPad Pro in 2020, I got it from Apple directly and paid $1167. That’s pricey! The equivalent 2024 version is $1799. That’s silly.
But the price is not the main reason the iPad Pro is silly. You were probably wondering when I was going to get to this.
The silly part is: No one needs an iPad Pro. I don’t, you don’t, Apple doesn’t. Apple started the line to generate more revenue, and now they’ve jacked prices because Apple is in one of its greed-driven, “squeeze them for everything” phases (the last time was in the mid-90s). But in the drive for more money, Apple has boxed itself in, adding bits and pieces to iPadOS (which, let’s be serious, is just iOS with a different sticker on it), trying to make it work more like a laptop, with split screen, Stage Manager, a Files app (which started terrible and has stayed terrible since its introduction). But it is still marred by terrible memory management, arbitrary restrictions, a lack of utilities, and turning one or two click operations on a PC into a maze of steps, swipes and taps that sometimes just fail at the end, forcing you to start over.
It’s a mess and it’s a mess because Apple made a fundamental error in 2015 by introducing the iPad Pro. They got greedy, they made a mess, and in almost 10 years have failed to clean it up. WWDC 2024 is tomorrow, and Apple will probably make a few more token gestures to fixing iPadOS. But I don’t think they can.
The basic iPad experience is fine. Apple should refine what is there now to work better.
But here’s my advice for a company regularly valued at $2-3 trillion:
Keep the base iPad, Air and Mini. Lose the suffixes. They are all iPads now, differentiated only by size. If they insist on a cost-cutting base model, call it the iPad SE.
Kill the iPad Pro. Yep, kill it! No more iPad Pros! Continue to support existing models for 5–7 years.
Introduce a Mac tablet that runs a touch version of macOS. Include optional support to run a virtualized iPadOS.
Now you have a truly professional-calibre touch device. Yes, I’m basically asking Apple to re-invent the Surface Pro, but with Apple’s level of polish and precision.
The iPad Pro is just not going to get better, software-wise, without major surgery on the operating system that Apple will never commit to. So they shouldn’t. They should just give up and put out touch-based Macs instead.
LinkedIn decided to send me an unsolicited email recently. I immediately unsubscribed, because I have negative interest in receiving anything at all from LinkedIn.
Today I got another email. I followed the Unsubscribe link and logged into my LinkedIn account. There is a section called Notifications. Convenient!
It has a lot of categories:
That’s 11 categories–and several have sub-categories, each with their own notifications. You can disable all of them, if you like (I like this very much). What you can’t do, however, is just turn off ALL notifications at once–the option doesn’t exist.
This is LinkedIn, and by proxy, Microsoft, showing contempt for its users. Turning off all the notifications requires 24 clicks. 24! Absurd. This should be illegal. It probably is in Europe.
I’m now pondering whether to just delete my LinkedIn profile entirely, make it part of The Culling. LinkedIn is bad and should feel bad.
Yes, I’m afraid this is a complaint. I promise an adorable kitten at the end.
I updated to the latest version of Mac OS yesterday (I am no longer going to write out Apple’s stylized “macOS” anymore. I also say iPhones plural, so take that, Apple marketing department!), which is 14.1.1 as I type this. The update did not go smoothly.
It took multiple reboots to get everything working again. Why, I do not know. But now, the Photos app, which has always had stupid syncing settings on the iPhone, seems to have adopted these stupid, idiotic settings on the Mac.
I noticed that the last few photos from the phone hadn’t synced. I tried restarting the Photos app, to no avail. It said the last sync was yesterday and that was that.
I turned the Mac off, and went back to my Windows PC, which still behaves like a normal computer.
Today, I turned on the Mac and the Photos app presented me with this prompt:
Some context: I am using a Mac Studio with an M1 Max SoC. This is a desktop computer. At the time this prompt appeared, I had two photos to sync.
Two.
I am curious how much system performance optimization was achieved by not syncing TWO photos.
And look, Apple is being generous. If I really MUST sync, I can go ahead…for the next four hours, after which I guess I get this prompt again?
This isn’t just bad design, it is TERRIBLE design, and the people who coded and approved this are trying way too hard to be smarter than the user.
Here is your adorable kitten:
BONUS CONTENT:
I decided I should at least offer a solution or two instead of just griping!
Make this a setting the user can control
Allow granularity/context in the controls. Some examples:
Always sync photos
Never sync photos
Only sync when system has been inactive for [xx] minutes
Normally, if you want to repeat/shuffle music in your favourite music app, you just click or tap the appropriate control right there in the interface where you play the music.
Observe in Windows 11’s Media Player, the control to repeat is right there with shuffle/back/play/forward:
Easy peasy!
Even the desktop version of Apple Music–not a great app, by any stretch, puts the option right there with the main playback controls, albeit shoving those controls way up in the upper-left corner of the UI, for some reason:
But if you’re using Apple Music on your iPhone, behold the steps, taken straight from Apple’s support page:
A couple of points:
What should be a single tap is three
The controls for repeating or shuffling music are hidden behind another control
That control itself is hidden inside another option you must first tap
This isn’t just bad design, it’s shamefully bad design. It baffles me how Apple can do such a shitty job1You know I am ruffled when I start a-cussin’ on one of their core apps–and one that can also feature a monthly subscription fee–so millions of people are paying for this experience!
What makes it even worse than it already is: the present UI has plenty of room to have controls like shuffle and repeat right there in the main music player UI. Look:
A metric ton of unused space, let’s hide common controls! – some Apple design genius, probably
Yes, I realize that the Bad Design category here has been almost exclusively Apple, but that’s because they are so huge and carry an equally outsized amount of influence in design. And for most of the last decade, it’s been (IMO) largely in the wrong direction.
I’ve changed the body font again. Why? Because I can. Also, because I was randomly looking through Google Fonts and Gabarito caught my eye. And it sounds sassy and fun. Gabarito!
Anyway, this is what it looks like via screenshot, because I may change it again in a week as I continue to ponder the site’s design:
Maybe it’s me (it’s probably me), but when I saw this ad in an unnamed email flyer, I thought:
a) That annoying art style I so fervently dislike b) The person done in that art style, with the spaghetti limbs, is shaped…sort of like a swastika?
So I looked up an actual swastika to compare. According to Wikipedia, the left-facing swastika is “a sacred symbol in the Bon and Mah?y?na Buddhist traditions.”
It looks like this:
And if you tilt it 45 degrees, the legs work, but the arms are bent the wrong way, because that would be a very odd way for someone to hold their arms while running.
Still, it made me think of a swastika, and I can’t be the only one. I mean, yes, I totally can, but I’d like to think I’m not (fake edit: apparently this has been discussed on social media of some sort and the consensus is totes a swastika).
Dear advertising wizards: Don’t make your stuff look like swastikas. And pay more attention in history class!
The piece linked below is a very long, exhaustive blog report on why a certain pedestrian bridge exists on I-494 in Minnesota. That might not sound like a subject worthy of a lengthy investigation, but author Tyler Vigen goes on a nerdy, obsessive hunt to figure out why a pedestrian bridge that doesn’t seem to really connect to anything came to be.
Stick around till the end. It’s not exactly a twist, but it is satisfying. This is why blogs are still such a great resource.
Let’s say you are selecting a large swath of text in the Apple Notes app on your iPhone. First, I am very sorry for you because doing this is a tedious and finicky task. And let’s say once you select the text, instead of tapping Copy you hit something by mistake and delete the text. How do you get the text back? Simple, just tap Undo!
Except there is no undo option. It turns out there are two ways:
Shake the phone vigorously. This assumes that you have the option enabled and that you are shaking the phone in the correct way.
Tap on the Markup icon at the bottom of the screen. Next, look at the top of the screen and tap the now visible and visibly tiny Undo arrow.
Neither of these are anything even remotely close to being discoverable or obvious. The second one doesn’t even make sense. Why is the Undo option that works on text buried under a completely unrelated function? If you look at the Notes app, there is plenty of space for Undo/Redo icons at the top of the main screen. Why aren’t they there? Who knows! But hooray for Apple being so stupidly big they can’t keep themselves from making idiotic UI choices like this. Maybe invest a few tens of billions into fixing these kinds of things.
For the past week or so, my brain has just not been cooperating with this blog. Giving myself permission to write about anything I want here was liberating, but even that freedom hasn’t been enough the past few days. I stare at the blinking cursor, and then I feel my mind drifting off, not to some great blog topic, but just weird little mundane things and thoughts. Nothing that I’d want to share in this space.
I do have a backup–a collection of blog ideas saved in Obsidian. But a lot of the topics I’ve jotted down no longer appeal. A lot of them are Apple kvetching, and I exceeded my quota on that at least 50 years ago.
So I end up doing these meta posts.
Oh, I just thought of a topic: Mastodon clients!
Mastodon is the only social media I use semi-regularly right now and I like it because:
No ads
No “reels” or other unavoidable short form videos
No algorithm–I only see the people/orgs I choose to follow
Not overwhelming. I like that I can easily keep up with what I’m following. It feels cozy and approachable.
I also don’t visit Mastodon on mobile. It’s strictly on my Mac or PC. On the Mac, I use the Mona app, which is a one-time purchase (hooray) and works well. On Windows, I use an alternate web version currently in alpha called Elk. It improves on the web interface and is pretty good, with only a few minor shortcomings. Still, I’d rather use a dedicated client, but all the Windows clients seem to have some flaw, the most common of which is they are ugly as butt. Windows apps don’t have to look ugly, but so many do. Every Mastodon client I’ve tried has been butt ugly. So I use Elk.
I don’t know why, exactly, the odds of a Mac app looking better than a Windows app is so high, but I suspect that it has something to do with the Mac GUI always being “good” and remaining fairly consistent over the years, with few dramatic changes. There’s a polished kind of consistency.
With Windows, well, just look at the GUI for different flavours:
Windows 1.0. I mean, yikes. But it was also 1985.
Windows 3.0. Pretty slick for the time, but crude by today’s standards.
Windows 95. Pretty decent, really.
Windows XP. Changed pretty much all UI elements in a way some liked, but others didn’t, feeling it was too “cartoony.”
Vista. Ignoring the initial quality of the OS, it again completely revamped the look, giving everything a pseudo-3D effect and having a glossy, reflective sheen to it.
Windows 8. Another complete change, flattening everything and subbing in garish colours and simplified icons.
Windows 10. A hybrid of 7 and 8 that reverses some of 8’s design.
Windows 11. A refinement of 10 that again changes the look of many elements, though perhaps not as dramatically as before.
Basically, if everyone followed the design language of Windows 11, apps would look pretty good. But a lot of apps seem to be weird hybrids of older versions of the OS and that’s when you get butts meeting the ugly.
Oh well. In the end, we’re seeing fewer native apps on both Windows and Mac as more devs use tools like Electron to make apps that look and feel the same (and don’t feel particularly native) on all platforms. I guess that’s the future.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: This is not actually about programming. I just wanted to pre-apologize for YANP (Yet Another Negative Post). I'm still recovering from a surprisingly long illness and am kind of grumpy about it. I promise to be more charitable, loving, etc. soon™.
The Browser Company, makers of the Mac-only (but eventually also Windows) browser Arc, sends out a periodic newsletter with updates on all Arc things. This is good! The newsletter is full of pictures and animations and is written in a fun, engaging style. This is also good!
The newsletter is written in 10 pt. Courier. This translates to around 13px.
I have a pair of monitors that run at 2560×1440. 13px type looks like this relative to the screen size (it may look larger or smaller depending on the resolution of the device you read this post on, but for reference, it is, on my displays, SMALL):
Most of the email I get is in some sans serif font, like Arial, and in sizes ranging from 14px up to 18px. The reason why most email uses these settings is because it makes the text clear and readable.
Tiny Courier is the opposite. It’s also ugly as heck. It’s not 1986. Stop trying to be cute and “retro.”
And yes, I did complain (tactfully) to Arc about this.
If I do a search for “the best” on engadget.com, I get 10 results in the portion of the site that is revealed without further loading:
The best iPad accessories for 2023
The best laptops for 2023 (twice)
The best early Prime Day deals for 2023
The best 2-in-1 laptops for 2023
Fisker gives the best look yet at its 600-mile range Ronin EV (twice)
The best wireless earbuds for 2023
The best projectors you can buy in 2023, plus how to choose one
The best budget wireless earbuds for 2023
The story in bold doesn’t really count, as it’s using “best” differently.
These are the exact kinds of articles you find on pages that exist solely to be SEO results in Google web searches. And engadget is now stuffed with them.
What makes this funnier (or sadder) is that engadget has recently started recycling a number of these SEO-friendly articles, constantly bringing them back to the front page, often with few or any updates, seemingly to push this kind of SEO stuff to the top (I can’t say what their actual motives are, of course, this is just my best guess).
For example, their article on running watches, cleverly titled Best GPS running watches for 2023 does recommend the current Apple Watch Series 8 (though keeping in mind it’s nearly a year old and one might argue the Apple Watch Ultra is better for running), but then it recommends the Garmin 745 for triathletes. The problem here is while Garmin does still sell the 745, it’s now an old model that is not getting replaced with a newer one. The Forerunner line has been simplified and the upper end, once held by the 245/745/945 is now represented by the 265/965, with the 265 (and the 255 before it) absorbing features of the 745. Any of the 255/265 or 955/965 are better options for triathletes, in terms of price, functionality and longevity (the 55 and 65 series are mainly differentiated by the display, with the 65s using AMOLED).
The story has a byline of June 9, 2023, yet the first comments date back to March 2022, belying its recycled history. The comments are almost uniformly critical of the choices, too, pointing out issues of comparing old Garmin vs. new Apple. And the article is by the editor-in-chief, so there’s no ambiguity about whether engadget is okay with this sort of thing.
It’s transparent and kind of gross and makes engadget seem less interested in being about quality news and reviews and more about ranking high in Google search for the $$$. Which is a thing, I guess.
