Highlighting designs both good and bad
I figure it’s time to accentuate design that works, not just design that stinks.
The first is simple:
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Yes, Apple again. Apple makes this too easy.
This MacRumors story outlines a firmware update for AirPods today. Here’s the relevant quote:
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.
And on top of being needlessly secretive, Apple has pushed out firmware updates that have actually degraded the user experience, but with no way to opt out of the updates and no way to see what has changed, the user is effectively held hostage to the hope that Apple won’t screw up.
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:
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:
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.”
* Aw yes, another chance to post this:
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.
This is VERY SUBTLE, The Verge:
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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:
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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:
This week, Apple introduced the first M1 MacBook Pro laptops. Here’s an image that I grabbed from the Apple site:
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:
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.
At least the Mac mini has no bezels.
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:
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.
And probably others I’ve forgotten or haven’t visited. By coincidence, these are all Apple-related sites (though not officially affiliated with Apple).
I’ve written about this before, but after seeing multiple sites doing this, I am compelled to once more highlight this as bad design.
It’s bad design because dark mode should be an OS-level choice, one that provides a dark frame around content that may or may not be dark itself.
A good example of doing this right is the writing program Ulysses. Here’s how it handles dark mode:
A bad example is the iOS Maps app, which simply matches the OS setting, turning the map backgrounds into a dark gray mud that is hard to read. On the Mac, you can sensibly toggle this on/off. On iOS, you can’t because Apple is a trillion-dollar company and can no longer function properly (see also: the mind-bogglingly inept Safari beta that rolled out this summer as part of iOS 15 and macOS Monterey).
The best part is the fix for the three websites mentioned above if you don’t want to be forced into dark mode and don’t want to have to toggle an OS-level display setting every time you visit: Check them on a Windows PC, because even if you have Windows 10 set to Dark mode, the sites will not display as such–it only happens if you’re using a Mac, where these sites take an Apple-like approach of “our way or get out.”
I should point out that all three sites are quite fine in and of themselves, content-wise. I even pay for Six Colors! You should read all of them if you are a Mac geek.
The solution as I’ve mentioned before, is to offer a user toggle. The 9to5Mac website (among others) does this and it works just fine. There’s no reason the others listed can’t do the same. That two of them actually went through recent redesigns and still omitted this is not insanely great.
But the one I’m going to highlight here is, of course, Apple’s. Apple makes itself such a juicy target because the company’s leadership extols its superior design aesthetic while charging a premium price for the experience.
Specifically, I want to highlight one thing about the interface of the iOS music app, which is pre-installed on every iPhone. You can see it in this screenshot:
First, let me acknowledge the prehistoric nature of the songs highlighted (the newest is from 1992). I am old as dirt, and so is the music I like. Plus, I was sampling some music Apple has highlighted that supports the Dolby Atmos spatial sound standard (more on spatial music in another post) and I didn’t recognize the majority of suggested tracks (again, due to being an out of touch dinosaur).
(Also, the fact that the time was 4:20 p.m. when I grabbed the shot is not some sly signalling that I love the mary-ju-wanna, it’s just a coincidence. Sorry, my BC buds!)
You can see the currently playing song at the top of the screen. It’s Blondie’s well-known classic, “Hanging on the Telep.” It’s “Telephone,” of course, but because the song title is too “long” (four entire words) for the UI, it gets truncated. Apple’s solution (as with nearly all music players) is to slowly scroll the title from beginning to end, allowing the music lover to eventually piece together the entire title of the track they are listening to.
Look at the rest of the music app and ask yourself, “Is there enough room here to fit the entire four word title of a song so it doesn’t have to scroll?” and you may find the answer is, in fact, yes.
And yet this is almost never done. The UI of the music app isn’t actively bad or anything (Apple has much worse stuff tucked away in other areas of iOS), but this tiny space for song titles has always baffled me, because when you’re listening to music this is always going to be the active part of the interface. It just grates on me, especially since there is enough room to easily manage any title of reasonable length. I mean, okay, I don’t expect a music app to properly display Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict”, but still.
Windows 10 and macOS both offer dark modes for their UIs, allowing the user to exchange light colors for various elements like window borders and backgrounds for darker ones, which is nice if you are viewing a monitor in a dimly-lit room (as an example). Some also just prefer the aesthetic. For myself, I prefer a lighter theme in Windows, but like the Mac’s dark mode implementation.
Depending on how an app is written, it may adopt aspects of the OS color scheme (such as for window elements) or just ignore them entirely. Take my browser of choice, Firefox. Out of the virtual box, it does not comply with the dark mode of either OS, but it does have an included dark theme you can switch to that brings most of the UI in line with whatever you have the OS set to. The current version (88) has some gaps–context menus don’t properly reflect the dark theme, but these appear to be addressed in version 89, which is giving all of Firefox’s UI a going-over. The Firefox dark theme leaves web pages entirely alone, as is to be expected. If you want all websites to be darkity-dark, you can use an extension like Dark Reader, which tries to intelligently make bright websites dark, and works fairly well.
But then you come to the Bad Design–websites that sniff out your OS preference and then set their site to match, thinking this is what the user would naturally want. This is a bad assumption and should never be forced onto the user. At minimum, it should be a choice offered as a toggle between light and dark. Forcing it on the user means that they may end up with an inconsistent browsing experience, or have to deal with a site that may not have been as carefully designed for a particular color scheme (ie. dark mode).
My go-to example for this is https://sixcolors.com, an otherwise excellent and nerdy site focusing on Mac/Apple stuff. If you view it on a Windows PC, it will always look bright. If you view it on a Mac, it will be bright or dark, based on the mode you have chosen for the OS. I find their idea of dark mode a bit too dark, resulting in text that is too high contrast, making it harder to read. My fix is to use something like Dark Reader to fiddle with the colors and make something that looks better (this doesn’t produce great results), toggle dark mode off (inconvenient for one site) or, ironically, view the site from a Windows PC. A simple toggle would fix this.
I have opined before on the travails of getting the Windows version of Scrivener caught up to the Mac version. Then I found out that version 3 for Windows was released six days ago (March 23, 2021 to be exact). I am not even sure how to react.
Since I qualified for a discount on upgrading, I decided to spend the $34, even though I don’t use Scrivener anymore, to check it out.
I had used the beta off and on through its years of development (the original release date was projected to be 2018–see here for more), so I was broadly familiar with the update (and have used version 3 on the Mac). The upgrade and installation processes were both quick and painless, and the program looked much as it did when I used the last beta.
And it remains as inscrutable as ever. To be fair, the UI has been tidied up a bit, but large parts of it are unchanged and it wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t utterly ignore the conventions of standard Windows software–or any other software, for that matter.
Unlike other writing programs like iA Writer or Ulysses or, uh, Notepad, Scrivener is more like Microsoft Word in that it presents a WYSIWYG environment. As such, you can adjust indentation, font sizes and all of that, making the document look as pretty as you’d like. In the end this doesn’t matter as much, as you can specify different options when actually exporting your project to PDF, ePub or some other format.
To adjust how the text will look when writing, you go to File > Options. Pretty clear so far. The keyboard shortcut is cheekily Ctrl + , (CTRL and the comma), which is the same combo used to invoke Preferences on a Mac. You then choose the Editing tab from the vast array of options presented. OK, this mostly makes sense, as you are changing what the editor will look like. Here you have three more tabs: Options (er), Formatting and Revisions. Formatting is what you want. Here you will finally see where you can adjust the settings. Strangely, the sample text is highlighted–it turns out the preview will not actually show your changes unless the text is highlighted when the changes are applied, so it has pre-highlighted the text for you.
You will also see a strip of formatting options, much like you’d see in a typical word processor. You can change font, size and style, paragraph type, indentation and more. It does pretty much what you’d expect. Now when you create a new project, it will use these settings. Yay, all done!
But what if you want to change the look of a current document? Well, you can do that by going to the Documents menu, choosing Convert and then Text to default formatting. You get to choose a few options, but strangely (see a trend here), if you had somehow selected bold for the text in some scenes (maybe your fingers slipped and hit Ctrl + B), there is no way to change this across multiple scenes (that I have found). You have to go into each individual scene, hit Ctrl + A, then uncheck Bold from the formatting bar.
There is, still, no way to select an entire document/project at once and apply settings globally, apart from the Convert method above, which doesn’t actually convert everything. It is odd. It’s not even wrong, per se, but Scrivener continues to chart its own course when it comes to interface.
I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but the upgrade costs less than a single year of subscription to Ulysses, so I’ll at least tinker with it for a bit.
Seriously, this should be a solved problem, but the only way to get consistent performance on a mouse when I’m using any Mac (I have owned three in the past four years) is to use one that plugs in using old-fashioned cables.
Tonight I have been using my MacBook Air with the Logitech Marathon mouse and it started out fine, but over time the mouse cursor starts to become slow and then erratic, glitching across the screen. It improves for a bit, then starts glitching again. If I dig out one of my old wired mice it works just fine, so it seems like there’s something up with both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity on Macs.
This never happens in Windows. In fact, I can take this exact same mouse and use it in Windows right now and it will operate perfectly fine. My regular Windows mouse is a Logitech G703 wireless gaming mouse. It works perfectly when untethered.
I just don’t get it. It’s like Apple optimizes the OS to only work with their mice and nothing else. It’s incredibly annoying and reminds me why I never manage to make it long whenever I try using the Mac. For an OS that gets lauded for its stability and design, it has some pretty deep flaws.
At least the keyboard works properly. Oh wait, it’s plugged in. Bleah.
EDIT: Here, have an amusing (?) semi-related gif:
Conan Exiles is a survival/crafting game that is sort of like an MMO, with servers, private and public, in which you create a barbarian (complete with endowment if you like) and go forth into the desert and jungle terrain, building, hunting and gathering. You can even craft a wheel of death. It’s very pretty and there is always satisfaction in making stuff.
But the UI is not great. The crafting part of it tries to be so helpful it actually confused me, because it includes a non-interactive “demo” of the crafting UI next to the actual crafting UI and I tried interacting with both until I realized that only one worked. Sure, I was being a bit of a noob, but at the same time it’s a cluttered mess.
But the worst part are the keybindings.
You can rebind most keys to your liking, which is good. Way back in 2001 I switched from the classic WASD layout to the default used in the game Tribes 2, ESDF. You can argue over which is better, but WASD is still the default for moving around, and so it is in Conan Exiles. I changed it to ESDF and called it good.
Then I discovered that when you open a box or container, there are certain shortcut keys to do things, like Loot the selected object or Loot All to take everything.
The Loot All key is set to F by default. You see the problem here. If I looked into a box filled with a dozen items and then stepped to the right, I would grab everything as I shifted slightly over. I did this a few times before wondering why my barbarian was becoming spontaneously over-encumbered.
I went into the keybindings to change this and, oddly, could not find a key for Loot All. Because there isn’t one.
I could not believe there was no way to re-bind the key, so I hit the internet and DuckDuckGo led me to a Steam Community Forum post that gave me the info I needed–buried deep within the game’s subfolders is an input.ini file, and you can manually edit it to change these otherwise un-bindable keys. The Loot All key looks like this. I set mine to P for Please Don’t Loot All Anymore:
This is bad design for two reasons:
The Solution: Add another section to keybindings, titled Containers or something to that effect, and allow players to easily change these keys–and when you use a key that is already bound to something, tell the player and then unbind it if they confirm the new binding.
Any other way is barbaric.