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Also why did they get rid of select all? Is there any excuse for that?
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Select all always appears if you have no text selected and never appears if you have some text selected. Insane UI decision by apple but that's how it is.
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Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!
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It honestly doesn't surprise me. Apple is not some bastion of good design. They are mediocre at best, always have been.

It was pretty hilarious to me that for so many years the keyboard on iOS only had CAPITAL letters. No matter the state of the shift key, the letters on the keyboard just stayed the same. After many years they finally figured it out, but it's one example of many about how Apple just doesn't have the great UX people claim they do.

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I actually prefer the all caps keyboard and switch it on on iOS. It looks like a physical keyboard and the constant flicking between upper/lowercase is distracting and annoying
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As bfinn once said on IRC, as he wrote in caps:

<BFINN/#debian> ALL BIG LETTER ON KEYBOARD HERE!!

<CosmicRay/#debian> haha

<BFINN/#debian> TO NO LITTLE LETTER!

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.misc/c/7AdXvE7KQz...

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Well good for you, I guess?
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they are not bastion of good design. they are the bastion of intentional opinionated design. Meaning they don't listen to feedback. ("we don't have focus groups" - Steve Jobs).
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Not always, if we go back to the 1980s. But in very modern times, they've lost all the learnings from back then.
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old school apple design stubborness: I remember they insisted on putting the grooves on the "D" and "K" keys instead of the "F" and "J" keys. So you had to find home base on the keyboard with your middle fingers on an apple rather than index fingers like on everything else. No, that place has always been a design shop run amok.
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lol, no, they sucked even more in the 1980s.

Did you ever notice that "About this software" is the first thing on the first menu of every application? Is that because people have to know what version of the software they are using every time they start it? It's still like that today, and it's very very stupid. Other OSs get it right and put the version information on the last menu, where it doesn't clutter up the most prominent area in the most used menus.

Finder was crap in the 1980s. Still is crap, but it used to be crap too.

The window system in the 80s and 90s was also crap. Could not resize a window from any side or corner of the window except the lower right. Windows has had resizing from any edge or corner since forever.

Apple "design" is just not as good as people seem to think it is.

They've also had plenty of weird and unloved hardware designs... the infamous trash can, the clamshell laptop, the weird anniversary macs, a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging, and the list goes on and on and on.

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As someone who has switched from Windows to Apple recently, my God the Finder is terrible. I can't understand how people aren't flipping tables over how bad it is.
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Because Mac OS X Finder has always been kinda terrible. There was a lot of talk about this in the early 2000s and it's just faded away since the people using macOS now probably never experienced the good old Mac OS 9 Finder.

And its Windows competition Windows Explorer has likewise gotten worse and worse each revision of Windows.

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Oh... Finder is the name of the default file browser? I always thought it was the search results that popped down from the top right search area.

Last Mac I was on still had OSX on it.

Thank goodness for Dopus.

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lol, directory opus? I was using that on the Amiga way back in the day. I tried it like a decade ago, but it didn't stick for me. It doesn't seem to run on Linux, and it costs $$$, so no chance I'll try it again.
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I can't think of a better rationale for the ubiquitous worsening of local search than increasing ignorance of comp sci fundamentals.

There's no reason a senior at undergrad level shouldn't be able to write an efficient, fast, deterministic, precomputed search function.

... and yet, professional developers at major companies seem completely incapable.

Minimum acceptance criteria for any proposed shipping search feature should be "There is no file / object in the local system that fails to show up if you type its visible name" ffs.

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Heh, you're going to mention a mouse without bringing up the puck?!
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I'm a little surprised they never came out with some oversized mouse pad and a mouse that charges from it.

Always seemed like an apple sort of idea.

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> a mouse with a charging port on the bottom so that you can't use the mouse while it's charging

I'm surprised you went for that over the puck. At least when you unplugged it, you could use it. The puck was just terrible. And old.

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In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help.

What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.

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It’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)
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I know when I was on Android they'd do some smarts to detect stuff like that (handy for copying links)

But I swear if that's what they're trying to do here, I've never seen it work properly once. It's always just a random substring of the sentence.

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It works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful
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Word segmentation has been a longstanding problem in CJK languages too. Coupled with the terrible text selection in iOS it makes it really hard to select substrings.
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Just keeping my finger on the word works for me every time to select it. Double tap works only works in the edit fields. Also works reliable for me here in the hacker news post editor, as long as I do it in the middle of the word.
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It's still there, it's just difficult to know when it will appear. Sometimes it takes one more tap than expected, or sometimes one must deselect a word and tap again, or change focus away and back again. Very sloppy UI.
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Yeah, it is still there, and there is a pretty clear cut logic for when it will appear.

If you tap while a word is selected, it won’t appear. If you tap on the cursor while a word isn’t selected, it will appear.

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If by "clear cut logic" you mean a consistent process, then sure. But if you mean intuitive, I must disagree.
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Yeah, good point. Your guess was right, I meant it in the sense of consistency, not in the sense of it being intuitive without knowing about it
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Especially because it was working fine and understandable in older iOS versions.

Also for some reason autocorrect seems to have gotten a lot worse. It has become nearly impossible to type a grocery list without all kinds of annoying wrong corrections.

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YES. WHY?! GOD WHY!?!!?!?!?! I'M GOING INSANE!!
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It's not just the keyboard. My iPhone 15 is often so unresponsive I am tapping twice as much.

Example but the issue not limited to web browsing; Safari will do nothing, I tap again, it does the thing, then it does the thing again due to the second tap. I have to tap back to get to where I really wanted to go.

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Sounds like the liquid glass animations are so heavy that if the system is busy with anything else for a second then everything simply breaks.

I remember seeing the videos about cpu usage spiking over 40% just to show the control center.

And similarly, even on a Mac I find myself clicking on links and button multiple times, just for things to work. It has a dedicated keyboard, how is it that they messed it up so much that a physical keyboard stops working. It's an interrupt based interface, it takes less than a millisecond to process things, how can someone mess things up so freaking stupidly.

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Shortcuts run but often do not trigger all the stages in a pipeline. No issues with same shortcuts prior to installing iOS26. These Shortcuts do not trigger UI transitions. They send data over network.

Sounds like Apple management enabled a quality assurance failure that is fostering so many distractions for users it's turning people against Apple.

Tim Cook handing his replacement a dumpster fire.

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Extremely common pitfall in UI engineering. If you treat all input as a queue that's divorced from output, you end up with situations like this.

It's kind of a paradox, but in many cases you need to actually discard touch inputs until your UI state has transitioned as a result of previous inputs. This gets extremely nuanced and it's hard to write straightforward rules about when you should and shouldn't do this. Some situations I can think of:

- Navigation: User taps a button that pushes a screen on your nav stack. You need to discard or prevent inputs while the transition animation is happening, otherwise you can push multiple copies of that screen.

- Async tasks: User taps a button that kicks off an HTTP request or similar, and you need to wait on the result before doing something else like navigation or entering some other state. Absolutely you will need to prevent inputs that would submit that request twice. You will also need some idempotency in your API design to handle failure/retries. A fun example from the 1990s is the "are you sure you want to make this POST request again" dialog that Web browsers still show by default.

- Typing: You should never discard keystrokes that insert/delete characters while a text input field is focused, but you may have to handle a state like the above if "Enter" (or whatever "done" button is displayed in the case of a software keyboard) does something like submit a form or do navigation.

Essentially we're all still riding on stuff that the original Mac OS codified in the 1980s (and some of it was stolen from Xerox, yes), so the actual interaction model of UIs is a mess of modal state that we hardly ever actually want to fully realize in code. UI is a hard problem!

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This analysis ignores the fact that the user experience has regressed from a previous version which didn’t have these issues.

So it’s not like some longstanding industry-wide UI issues they’ve ignored forever, it’s that Apple has introduced new tradeoffs or lowered their quality standards to the point that some users feel their experience has worsened.

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Just to correct a common error, nothing was stolen from Xerox. Apple gave Xerox stock (which they later sold too early) for demos and access to the Parc work on Smalltalk and GUIs.
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Okay, how long is the debounce window? Where in the input pipeline do you debounce (obviously not immediately on keystrokes)? Will debounce work for long-running requests, which are event-driven and not time-driven?

I have seen, far too many times, naive approaches like wrapping all click handlers in a "debounce" function cause additional issues and not actually solve the underlying problem.

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To clarify - I am not stating that simple debouncing is the solution to all the issues you're identifying. I agree with you that handling some of them can be very complex. I just shared the article as a pointer to a broadly similar concept that can be used to help communicate the gist of what you're talking about.
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Autocorrect not getting simple character substitutions is beyond frustrating.
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Do you know a corrector that "understands" a typo at the third or fourth character?

If it's 1st or 2nd, then it's ok.

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It's not just apple - windows and android autocorrect are more auto incorrect these days.
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Your statement isn't incorrect - but I think it needs a slight qualification of "And none of them are acceptable". Both Apple and Android have regressed in quality and it's only possible because of a duopoly.
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Is there a windows autocorrect? I thought that was a feature implemented by the individual program, not any sort of OS functionality.
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I can't tell about windows - never used autocorrect there - but GBoard became laughable. I don't think I was able to use its suggestions since a few years. For instance, it will NEVER but really never put a uppercase I when I'm talking about myself. Never. I could select it from suggestions if I feel like, but I kinda gave up (this is written in Windows, that's why you see capital Is). Or my name, used quite often right, is also never spelled correctly - although it's there in the suggestions. I am using a yahoo email, GBoard knows the username, but it will ALWAYS suggest a gmail extension, which simply doesn't exist. I don't know any other keyboard which can properly handle multiple languages, so I'm stuck with GBoard, but it's nothing to be proud of.
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I have the same email @yahoo.com and @gmail.com (one is mostly for online shops etc), and the amount of time GBoard thinks it needs to recommend @gmail.com, it's obnoxious...

But the correction offers are still okay for me, I can mash keys around my email username and one of the corrections offered will be my username...

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