Who is this type of graphic supposed to appeal to?
This is featured in a Dreamhost article on blogs and I assume it comes from a stock library of images, since there’s no attribution. But look at it.
What I see is random gigantism. This woman has absolutely massive arms and hands (her fingers can probably crush that laptop’s keyboard with a firm press), relatively normal legs and a freakishly small but happy-looking head. Is this woman cheerfully looking up cures for gigantism? Maybe methods on how to placate the menacing mint green blobs looming behind her?
I don’t know. But I do remember I’d seen a video on this art style before, and you can learn more about Alegria/Corporate Memphis and more via this excellent struthless documentary on the topic, appropriately titled “The world’s most hated art style”:
Yesterday, Apple updated its base iPad and iPad Pro models, along with the Apple TV box, via press release and tweet. Speaking of tweets, here’s one showing how you charge the Apple Pencil on the 10th generation iPad (that’s the one they announced yesterday if you aren’t a hopeless tech geek like me):
I had the 10.5″ iPad Pro from 2017 and it used the first generation Pencil–it charged just like in the Old shot above, though I used the female to female lightning adapter to charge it via cable rather than risk it snapping off while plugged into the iPad in what was an ill-considered charging scheme.
Speaking of ill-considered, the new iPad still only supports the first-gen Pencil, but eliminates the lightning port in favour of USB-C, thus creating a situation where there is no way to charge the Pencil (the 2nd gen Pencil charges via induction by magnetically attaching to a side of the iPad).
Apple’s solution is to now include (another) adapter with the first-gen Pencil that allows it to connect to a USB cable, which then plugs into the iPad. This is also how you pair the Pencil. It’s cumbersome and requires two separate items (the adapter, the cable) in exchange for previously needing none.
It’s silly and dumb and Apple is rightly getting roasted for it.
Some are speculating that Apple did this because they finally moved the front-facing camera to landscape mode and couldn’t figure out a way to also includes the magnets in the same space to allow induction charging. That’s possible. Did Apple make the right choice? Will more people use the front-facing camera than a Pencil? I really don’t know. It seems like six of one, a half dozen of the other to me, but I can’t help thinking Apple either should have found a way to make induction charging work, or not move the front-facing camera until they could. This solution is an awkward, muddled compromise.
And it’s an excellent example of the current state of Apple.
Also note: The iPad Pros announced do not get the landscape camera, because they’re just getting a spec bump. Fair enough, you might say, but people are inevitably going to wonder why the low end model now has a superior camera to the high end, and rightly so. Apple wasn’t forced to spec bump and release the updated iPad Pros at the same time–but they chose to.
This is also an excellent example of the current state of Apple.
(I didn’t even mention the absurd $120 increase in price for the base iPad, which Apple acknowledges by keeping the old $329 model in the line-up. We’re at a point now where it makes more sense to buy older Apple stuff than the latest, because the latest is overpriced, even by Apple’s lofty standards.)
Oh, Apple. Why are you always such an easy, juicy target?
The iPad copied the iPhone when it came to front-facing (selfie) camera placement, by putting them at the top of the device when holding it in portrait orientation.
It makes perfect sense for a phone, since you are basically never going to hold it in landscape mode when taking a selfie, which is what most people will use their phone’s front camera for.
No one takes selfies on an iPad. Okay, there are obviously some (odd) people who do, but for most the front-facing camera is used for a couple of things:
Face ID to authenticate on the iPad Pro
For video meetings using Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, etc.
For video meetings, it makes little sense to have the camera at the top, because most iPads are in landscape mode for these meetings, which means the camera is now off to the side. The same applies to Face ID, which often has trouble “seeing” my face when I have the iPad on my desk, usually forcing me to lean to the side that the camera is on to get it to work. It’s a minor but persistent annoyance.
In a rare display of independence, Samsung has actually moved the front-facing cameras on its tablets to the top when in landscape mode–like they should be!
Apple should do the same. They should have really done it about ten years ago, but doing it now will suffice. They have a chance this month when the rumoured revision of the base iPad is released. Will Apple do the sensible thing? (lol no)
UPDATE, October 18, 2022: lol yes! Apple announced the 10th generation iPad via press release and it has a front-facing camera in landscape mode! They also raised the price from $329 U.S. to $449, so, uh...enjoy the new camera placement, if you can afford it!
When you speak to old Mac geezers (OMGs), they will often wax poetic about Snow Leopard as being the best version of OS X (and remind you it’s the Roman numeral 10, not the letter X), not because it came with a boatload of new features, but because it didn’t. Apple advertised it as having “0 new features” because it focused on improving existing features and fixing bugs found in Leopard, the previous version of OS X.
Back then (roughly the first decade of the 2000s) Apple released its updates on a “when they are ready” schedule, which meant you could go almost two years between updates. That changed in 2012 when Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) came out a year after Lion. Henceforth, all Mac OS updates would come out on a yearly basis, ready or not.
Ready or not.
iOS updates and the rest of Apple’s lowercase-Uppercase OS releases followed suit, and now yearly releases are the norm.
And they are a bad idea, bad for the industry, bad for users, and Tim Cook should feel bad.
Why? One word: Bugs.
Apple has tacitly admitted it can’t keep up with yearly releases, because it now regularly leaves out major features until “later”. Just this year they delayed iPadOS 16 altogether from September to October just to get things working properly. Yearly releases are not sustainable, they’re dumb, and serve no one when they come with incomplete or missing features and copious glitches. Apple is the 800 pound gorilla in consumer electronics, so if they change course, the industry is likely to follow. And they should!
And the thing is, if Apple switched to updates every two years or “when they’re ready” people would still buy tens of millions of iPhones, plus oodles of iPads, Macs and AirPods, not to mention staying subbed to the cash cows that their services have become. But Apple is not only gigantic, they are incredibly conservative and unlikely to change course unless forced by circumstance or the law (but mostly the law).
Why do I think this? Why am I posting now?
Because watchOS 9 is a bug-riddled mess and since I use my watch for my running workouts, the glitches affect me on a regular, ongoing basis. None of these issues happened before watchOS 9 was released (Apple eventually forces updates, so you can’t even just stay put, eventually you’ll need to upgrade).
Among the bugs I’ve encountered:
Stuttery or missing animations (not a big thing, but annoying)
Unreliable heart rate monitoring, especially at the start of a run (this is a big thing)
Music playback on the watch being permanently muffled when interrupted by a notification. It happened today (again) and even closing the music app did not fix it. I restarted the app and tried three albums before the music finally popped back to regular volume.
Pausing music playing from the watch via the AirPods (clicking the touch control on one of the earbuds), then unpausing, and the playback switches to whatever you were previously listening to on the iPhone. It’s like having someone come into your living room, quietly pick up the remote, change the channel from whatever you were watching, then just as quietly leaving the room.
I suppose I should be happy most things are still working. But bleah, the yearly updates are clearly not going to improve, so I really wish Apple and the whole industry would move away from them.
There are a bunch of examples for this one, but I came across the one below when I was using the venerable Microsoft Word.
The design problem is especially common on mobile OSes, but as you can see, it’s not limited to smaller screens where companies might argue space is limited and there is a need to compact options down to only showing the most essential out front.
Word checks spelling and grammar using its AI-driven Editor, which is also available in Edge (browser) and the online version of Outlook, among other apps.
It works as expected, highlighting a misspelled word and offering options when you click on the word. Observe:
Note the three-dot menu at the bottom, next to Ignore All. What do we have here?
Two of the options, Ignore (basically “ignore this one instance”) and Add to Dictionary are pretty common options for spell checking, and having these in the main pop-up menu would not take up much more room, particularly for a program that is going to be running on desktop and laptop PCs with decent-sized to humongous-sized screens.
So why is the user forced to click on three dots to even see these options? There is no good reason, which is why it’s bad design. It’s simply in line with the current fad of minimizing UI, even when it makes no sense to, and makes the experience worse for the user.
Good design would at least offer the first two options to the main pop-up, so you’d have:
Ignore Ignore All Add to Dictionary
Then you could bury the other options behind the three-dot menu, though I think it would be better to just include all four of the sub-menu options in the main pop-up. What if the menu is too long because someone is using Word on a 2005-era netbook they got for $10 at a garage sale? Just dynamically have the pop-up appear above instead of below the misspelled word. Even the tiniest usable screens would be able to accommodate the pop-up menu somewhere.
Yes, I promised to be more positive, so think of this as me highlighting a UI issue in hope of a positive change. It’s a stretch, just go with it!
The Ciderapp is currently in beta, and generally I find it to be a superior and certainly a much better-looking experience for listening to Apple Music than Apple’s own decrepit iTunes program (the fact that it still exists on PC years after being retired on Mac shows the contempt Apple has for people who don’t fully buy into their ecosystem).
If you have an album in Cider queued up that is in your library, you’ll see a strip of icons above the list of songs like this:
Remove from Library is pretty clear, so let’s move on to the other two.
Play: The button is red. Does this mean it is waiting to be clicked, then the music will start to play?
Shuffle: This button is also red. Does that mean shuffle mode is currently toggled on? Or off?
Answers:
Play: This is what the Play button looks like when music is playing. It’s also what the button looks like when music is paused.
Shuffle: This is what the Shuffle button looks like when shuffle mode is off. It’s also (go ahead, guess!) what the button looks like when shuffle is on.
In other words, these buttons convey nothing about their current state. To me, this is bad design, but as you’ll see below, it’s actually pretty common, so it would seem to be the expected convention as I’ll explain below.
By comparison, the new Media Player for Windows 11 is…well, it’s exactly the same. The Play and Shuffle buttons don’t change state when these options are on:
Both buttons will highlight on mouseover, but neither otherwise changes when clicked. How do you know shuffle mode is on? You don’t!
I believe the thought here is these are “top level” buttons used to initiate an action, and are not meant to represent the current state. For that, you look at the full set of controls, which do reflect changes when music is paused or playing. Cider again:
Music paused
Here, the shuffle icon is highlighted, indicating shuffle is on. The Play arrow indicates music is paused. We can confirm this by clicking on Play and seeing the change:
Music playing
So, am I complaining about nothing? Maybe, a little, but I still think a button should change to reflect the current state regardless of where it sits in the UI, so I’m still hoping UX gnomes will fight to get these changed.
P.S. I am obviously not a UI/UX designer, so if all of this seems silly and obvious, remember that…I am not a UI/UX designer! I’m just a slob with a website who would prefer more informative buttons, regardless of what current conventions are.
I don’t even know what “Woke Sci-Fi” is, so I can’t be tired of it (I think), but apparently it’s a thing because it made it into this randomly-served ad in today’s BookBub newsletter:
I’m also unclear if “Gamer Kids vs. The Deep State” is the plot of the novel or a part of “Woke Sc-Fi” that I should be tired of. I do know that appealing to my alleged political leanings negatively in order to induce me to read your novel is a strategy that will never work. Convince me you write an interesting story and I might click your link. Otherwise, pass!
Apple does not offer information on what’s included in refreshed firmware updates for the AirPods, so we don’t know what improvements or bug fixes the new firmware brings.
Why would any company push out updates to a product and not tell the customer what the updates contain? I cannot think of any reason for this that is not consumer-hostile, and the Apple executives who have signed off on this policy are wrong-headed and dumb.
It’s just such a bad way to treat customers. It really baffles me. If anything ultimately brings down Apple, it will be the hubris behind its “we know best” policies and actions.
This could be a “maybe it’s just me” issue, but I’m reasonably certain it isn’t.
Facebook (how I loathe thee and wish the few people I communicate with on it used something else, even Fidonet) famously features a Like button. How it works depends a bit on the platform you’re using, but it’s roughly the same:
Tap on Like to add the generic “thumbs up” to that adorable post showing a cat trying to walk on ice*
Do a long press (mobile) or hover over the button (desktop) to get a choice of several emojis, ranging from sad to angry to sympathetic, to add the needed nuance to your wordless reaction
Here’s my problem, and it only happens in the iPad version of the Facebook app: When I tap on the Like button, which is actually a small thumbs-up icon and the word Like, it will sometimes turn the icon a bold blue, adding a Like to the post–as intended.
But way more often when I tap on the Like button, it instead takes me to the separate page for that post–while also not actually adding the Like (the Like button is also on the separate page for the post, so you can tap it there, too, where it always works as intended).
The maddening part for me is the inconsistency. Sometimes I tap and a Like gets added, as I want. Sometimes it takes me to the post’s page–which is *never* the desired response. It doesn’t even make sense that tapping the Like button even does that. It’s either a bug or bad design.
The inconsistency makes it that much worse, because doing the same thing can yield different results. I can get a Like added, or be taken to the post’s page (with no Like added) by:
Tapping on the thumb icon
Tapping the word Like next to the thumb icon
Tapping somewhere over both (it’s not a big target)
I may experiment with running the desktop version on the iPad, which has the bonus of actually having a working dark mode. I’ll also see if I can replicate this behavior on another iPad and if not, will be willing to amend this post to “Facebook continues to undermine democracy and poison our world but the iPad app is working as intended.”
This is probably more a complaint than actual bad design, but it’s my blog, so here it is!
There are a billion or so tech sites out there that review tech products. One such product commonly reviewed are laptops.
Apple just released updated MacBook Pro laptops that “correct” many of the features of the previous model, released in 2016.
Tech sites are reviewing these. And a few choose these reviews to indulge in a little branding:
They put their own website up on a browser running nearly full screen on the laptop’s display. You know, in case you were reading a review on engadget and forgot you were on engadget, or on The Verge and forget you were on The Verge.
The Verge is especially bad at this when reviewing phones or tablets, as they’ll use their own wallpaper for the background, which more often than not, is some hideous-eye-bending vomit of neon color, festooned with their logo.
You’ll never guess which site this product review image came from. (Bonus points for giving Sony some extra ad exposure.)
This is VERY SUBTLE, The Verge:
In which The Verge chooses to associate itself with Apple’s notch
Really, looking over the first batch of reviews for the new MacBook Pro, it seems The Verge and engadget are the primary culprits here. And I should add a caveat–The Verge piece is only a “first impressions”, not a full review. We’ll see how they handle that shortly.
UPDATE: Here’s a screenshot from The Verge’s full review:
Hmm, what site could be reviewing these laptops? Hmm!
Still, every other review or first look I’ve checked so far does not advertise the site in shots of the laptops themselves. I almost wonder if engagdget and The Verge are mandated to do this. They lean more toward “filthy casual” than sites like TechRadar, so it’s possible.
Anyway, it’s annoying and unnecessary, and I already have enough ads in my life without cute versions of the same being snuck into product reviews or similar articles.
In which I argue you Apple made the bezels on the new 24″ iMac white for reasons of fashion, not functionality.
Earlier this year Apple revealed their first M1 iMac, a 24″ model that replaced the Intel 21.5″ one. It comes in a bunch of colors. All of them have white bezels, as show in this image from Apple:
Image from Apple
This week, Apple introduced the first M1 MacBook Pro laptops. Here’s an image that I grabbed from the Apple site:
Image carefully pruned by me from Apple
As you can see, the bezels are black. What you can’t see in the shot above is the notch housing the camera that is at the top of the display. Apple is not shy about making it as close to invisible in their promotional shots because secretly they know it looks dumb. Because it’s dumb.
But I’m not here to rage against the notch, I’m here to rage about bezels.
The closest Apple comes to describing the white bezels of the iMac in the initial press release is:
iMac features softer colours and thinner borders on the front to allow users to focus on their content, while the back pops in bold, saturated colour.
Thinner borders, softer colors. To allow users to focus on their content. Remember that.
So why aren’t the bezels on the new MacBook Pros white as well? Shouldn’t white bezels there also allow users to focus on their content? Or is black now a “pro” color?
I believe Apple actually wants people to think that.
The actual reasons for black bezels continuing on the MacBook Pro are more likely:
MacBook Pros are used for video and photo editing and white bezels can be distracting, whereas black bezels tend to blend into the background, allowing the user to focus on the content they are editing. Notice that every professional monitor in existence (that I have seen, though I admit I have not seen every single one) has black bezels, including Apple’s own Pro Display XDR. To put it differently, no one ever averts their eyes while shouting, “That black t-shirt is blinding me!”
The black bezels are necessary to help hide the notch/camera module as much as possible
Rumors are suggesting the redesign of the M1 MacBook Air will also feature white bezels. If this is true, it further underlines that Apple sees the white bezels as being a “consumer/non-pro” thing.
If true, this is dumb, because the practical arguments on black vs. white bezels stand regardless of how Apple positions its computers. Someone editing photos on an iMac will still notice a white bezel more than a black one. A minor distraction, sure, but still there.
I admit some bias because I think the white bezels look cheap and plastic.
Still, this seems like an affectation and I hate when Apple does this kind of design, because it almost always looks bad.
Usually, for reasons of security, some websites will only allow you to automagically login for a limited time. After that, the sites will stop and force you to enter your credentials again. They will then work automagically again for whatever the specified time is.
This is an inconvenience, but a minor one, and I can see the justification for it.
However, a surprising number of websites–so many I won’t even attempt a list–completely mess this up by following this pattern:
You have a link to an interesting article/feature in a newsletter to a site you have an account on. I’ll use Goodreads because their site is generally terrible and it’s the most recent one where this has happened.
When you click the link in the newsletter, you are taken to the site–you can see the article, but over top of it is a pop-up demanding that you log in (or create an account).
You enter your credentials.
You are taken to the main page of the site.
You must now find the article you came to read, or go back to the newsletter and click the link again, which will now take you, logged in, to the article in question.
This is bad design, because it adds multiple steps to what should be a simple click and worse, sends the user off to somewhere they never meant to go, forcing them to retrace their virtual steps to get back. It wouldn’t surprise me if this extra friction results in a lot of people just not bothering at all.
The correct way–and the way all properly managed sites handle this, is to let the user enter their credentials, then keep them on the same page, so they can see the content they had come for. It sounds astoundingly obvious and logical, yet even in 2021 many sites fail to offer this.
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