Bad design

Design that doesn’t quite work

The iPad Pro is silly

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.

Because the iPad Pro is silly.

LinkedIn’s malicious notifications

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.

Resume Being Annoyed with iCloud

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
    • Sync if there are fewer than [xx] photos
    • And so forth

Bad design: Repeating or shuffling a song in Apple Music

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.

When your apple cider ad goes subliminally Nazi

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!

Bad Design: Apple Notes (iPhone) undo

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:

  1. Shake the phone vigorously. This assumes that you have the option enabled and that you are shaking the phone in the correct way.
  2. 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.

Vacantly staring (bonus: UI discussion and Mastodon clients)

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.

10 point Courier is not retro cool

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.

Anyway, I’m off to look at kittens now.

How to recognize when your tech website is being slowly transformed into an SEO-driven clickbait hellscape-to-be

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.

Device theme and why is YouTube crazy

UPDATE, June 26, 2023 (a day later): YouTube changed Appearance to Device theme again--and is once again blinding white on Windows 11.

Conclusion: YouTube is bad and should feel bad.

Or maybe I don’t understand it (this is possible–see below for details).

When I watch YouTube, I do so primarily on two devices:

  • My Mac Studio
  • My custom-built PC running Windows 11

Each respective OS allows you to choose an overall theme for the interface, and each OS refers to these as Dark and Light. I have both macOS and Windows 11 set to Dark because I find it easier on my old man eyes and particularly for working on images, photos or watching videos.

YouTube seems to go slightly crazy now every time I open the site on a different device and chooses to reset three settings each time:

  • Appearance changes from Dark to Use device theme
  • Always show captions gets checked ON
  • Inline playback gets set to ON

Also, why is one of these a checkbox and the other a toggle? See screenshot below.

YouTube being bad and it should feel bad. Because it is bad.

It also turns Ambient mode on, and this can only be toggled back off when you click on an individual video. It then remembers the setting for all videos, which is ???

Anyway, the issues I have are:

  • YouTube arbitrarily changing all of these settings
  • Changing them on what is now a regular and perpetual basis

But mostly:

  • What is “Use device theme” and why does it exist as a choice when the only themes the OSes come with are Light and Dark, both of which are covered?
  • Why does it switch to “Use device theme” and make the YouTube interface bright as the sun when I have all OSes set to Dark?

I thought it might refer to using one theme or the other and then customizing it somehow, like choosing Dark but having hot pink window borders or something. But while I do something like that in Windows 11 (well, not the hot pink), YouTube still interprets Use device theme as Light mode, which is wrong, and you know, as I’m typing this I think I may have discovered the issue. All this time I thought “device” meant hardware, but it may in fact be software–specifically, the browser. Because in Firefox, I have it set like so:

A few sites will impose their dark theme on you unless you specifically set the above to Light, so this is my way of insuring these sites stay light. YouTube may be using this setting. I am going to change this to Automatic, set YouTube to use Dark for appearance, and see what happens.

I will update this post with exciting details in the near future.

If it works, YouTube is still bad, because the language it uses is ambiguous–and it still changes three other settings willy-nilly on its own, anyway. But it won’t be quite as bad.

Addendum: If I was obscenely rich, I would totally start a competitor to YouTube.

Creepy photos done wrong, Apple Vision Pro edition

UPDATE, July 133, 2024: Apple is promoting the Vision Pro on the Apple Canada site, as it is now available for purchase by moose and other Canadians.

The image on the landing page is below. It basically reverses everything I list about the original image in this post.

Original post:

If you’ve seen anything about the Vision Pro, Apple’s new don’t-call-it-AR headset, you’ve probably come across this photo:

I’m here to tell you why it’s creepy and bad, and Apple should feel bad for using it.

In a list, of course!

  • The black void behind the person is off-putting. Where is she? Is she just floating in nothing?
  • The ultra-white starched dress shirt with the buttons done up to the top. This is incredibly twee and so very Apple. It’s a look that comes pre-dated. No one dresses like this.
  • The light around the fake eyes make them look dopey, as if the person is tired and wants a nap. They also look unreal and your brain will constantly be reminding you of this every time you see them.
  • The slightly-parted mouth is off-putting. She’s not smiling1You may argue that she is, in fact, smiling, but the fact that we have to debate it proves the point. So says I!, so why is she showing her teeth? It’s like she got a shot of Novocaine and her jaw is hanging slightly slack as a result. Also, the way the light bounces off her lips and chin is unnatural. Is she holding a flashlight at her waist and pointing it up? I used to do that to tell spooky stories when I was 12 years old. I also didn’t need a $3500 headset to do it.
  • The hair. It’s hipster hair. I’m willing to let this one go, though, because it is, in the end, just hair.
  • The ears do not look like they are part of her head. Again, this is a lighting issue.
  • Airbrushing. Yes, every face gets airbrushed in ads, and it still makes the skin look plastic and fake, like a glossy mannequin.

Other than the above, it’s a perfect photo to represent Apple’s Vision Pro don’t-call-it-AR headset (it’s totally AR).

EDIT: I made the following on request.

Bad Design: Web page images you can’t embiggen

This has always been a pet peeve of mine and while it seems less common now, I still see it more than I’d like (which is never!)

I won’t call out specific sites since I can illustrate this directly. Observe!

Let’s say I am writing an article about how a Mac Finder window does not show the + (plus) sign to open a new tab until after you have opened at least two tabs. I provide an image to illustrate this, like so:

This is a tiny screenshot. You can probably make out that there’s a window being shown, and multiple tabs, but that little + symbol? Maybe if you have superhero vision.

But this can be solved by making the image clickable! Go on, try clicking on it.

I have not enabled the ability to do this, so it remains tiny. Some sites go halfway on this if you right-click the image and choose Open Image In New Tab. Go ahead, try it!

Nope, the image is just plain tiny and largely inscrutable. This is bad design.

Good design is making the image pop-up in a lightbox that keeps you on the same page, lets you view the image in all its loving detail, then close the image and continue reading the web page in delight and/or wonder, like so (bonus points, though this is optional, the author can add a caption to indicate you can click):

Click image to embiggen

And that’s it! Make this a priority for Web 4 or whatever is coming up before AI runs amok and destroys everything.