Apple: Please stop "improving" iPads and operating systems

The BBQ Pit
61

This is actually a really big improvement over how it used to be done. In iOS 5 & 6, you get the running app bar, then you have to hold your finger down on an icon for one second, until they start jiggling, then you have to hit the red X to close the apps you want to close; then, if you want to switch to one of the open apps, you have to close and reopen the running app bar.

In iOS 7, you can close apps in the process of jumping to another app, you can close the app you were using at the time that you opened the app bar (which would not appear in the previous design, because you were running it), and the closing flick is a one-step move on a much larger target. In addition, I believe Apple is leaving an opening for apps to background-update their thumbnail view, so that you could, in theory, open the running app view for a quick check for new content in Mail or BBC News (if they supported that) and go to the app that is most likely important just now.

The thing I hate, though, is that notification thing that swallows the whole screen. Why is that better (given that the primary list is no wider)?

62

Sorry, but I can’t be responsible for the fact that you can’t grasp that quotes around a sentence or phrase don’t necessarily mean I’m quoting YOU. The SDMB already has a function that allows you to quote users directly. If I had wanted to do indicate I was quoting you directly, I would have used it for the phrase I wrote.

The historical reasons I cited have a LOT to do with Windows’ dominance. Apple had an opportunity in the 1990s to capture a much larger share of the market (including the business market). They blew their chance…rather spectacularly…and folks just kept on using the system they were used to doing — at work, and thus at home, too. Macs were also more expensive than PCs (and still are). This also has much to do with Windows’ dominance.

Funny how I’m the bad guy for allegedly putting words into your mouth that you never spoke (even though I really didn’t do that at all). But it’s OK when you put words into my mouth — where in my post did I say I was “SOOooooOOOOoo sick of snarky Windows users”?

You know, I have to laugh. You’re the kind of person (and I encounter a lot of them in my life) who figures he’ll be more right if he puffs himself up and talks tough and swears a lot.

News flash: it’s not working.

News flash #2: I predict that, if you bother to respond, you’ll double down on this technique.

I don’t have a problem with your last two sentences. All of us can only speak from our own experiences, and I noted in my post (in the portion you didn’t want to spend your time on) that what one is used to has a lot to do with one’s experience on a different operating system.

Perhaps if I spent extensive time on a Windows system, I might find some things to like about it. But from the time I have spent over the years, I don’t believe I would ever be tempted to WANT to work on Windows regularly.

I ask a genuine question here, because I don’t know the answer: How is what this key sequence does on Windows different from what Force Quit (Command-Option-ESC) does on a Mac?

Assuming it’s not different, then your problem was simply not knowing what to do because you hadn’t learned it yet. The problem is not any deficiency in the Mac OS. You weren’t born knowing what ctrl-alt-del does either.

Well, there is a fucking screen capture key sequence (Shift-Option-3), as well as a capture selection key sequence (Shift-Option-4). Then you have to open the file that results from this and print it. So three steps instead of one — that’s one for your side.

63

Sure, and I acknowledged this in my post.

I just don’t believe that “many” = “most,” or anywhere close to it. Most users simply do want to accomplish something useful on their computer with a minimum of hassle, and don’t find customizing to be necessary.

64

I pretty much have all my notifications turned off. I’m glad I have that option.

65

It’s probably safe to say that those who began on the Mac platform and were on it for some time (like me) are the ones who dislike Windows the most. Reverse the two platforms in that last sentence for an equally true statement.

I agree, it is different strokes in the end — still, it would be fun to do some objective tests, perhaps on the few people you might be able to find who’ve never used computers at all. Let them try both, and see which one they like better.

Of course, there are those Windows users who will immediately seize this and take from it that the Mac OS is only for dummies and not for the likes of them. Fine, doesn’t really bother me. After all, the number one purpose of online communication sometimes seems to be to prove how much better you are than the other fellow by dragging him down.

And to be clear: there’s no question that Mac users are guilty of this as well, and it’s no more attractive when they display these traits than it is when Windows users do it.

Therefore, I apologize for the small part I played in this with the “Windoze” term in my original post, though I do think the point I made stands for some Windows users.

What’s funny is that one sentence out of a much longer post was seized upon, when the balance of it had to do with several of Apple’s recent decisions that really piss me off — the original point of this thread!

66

What gets me is that older hardware seems to be abandoned when it can no longer run the latest and greatest software. Which is fine when your business model is selling new hardware. I guess most folks expect 3 or 4 years max out of their devices.

Which makes me wonder about the coming Apple CarPlay. That software will be attached and integrated in a $30,000 or so piece of hardware that many people will expect to last for 8 to 10 years or more. I wonder if this means that Apple will be forced to support old hardware that they really would rather not support? If not, I’d be skipping adding CarPlay to a vehicle if I knew it wouldn’t be useful after a few years.

67

For me, the podcast app now works nearly exactly the way I would want a podcast app to work…
(1) I choose some number of podcasts and subscribe to them
(2) without me having to do anything at all, certainly without having to plug into my PC, the most recent N episodes of those podcasts will show up on my phone, new ones show up automatically as they are avilable
(3) When I’m listening to a podcast, then go do something else, then come back, it remembers what podcast I was listening to and how far I got
(4) When I finish an episode, it immediately starts the next one, sequentially
(5) I can mark podcasts as played and unplayed
(6) A quick glance shows me how many unplayed episodes there are of each of my podcasts.

Many of those are things that do not apply at all to listening to music. You don’t want to have a song in your collection of songs marked as played once you’ve listened to it once, etc.
Still not sure what’s going on with the download failures… but given that it’s never once happened on new episodes, only on scattered back episodes, I’m tempted to think that the files are just missing on the server or something, but I have no real evidence for that one way or the other.

68

Okay, but … what’s the purpose of the quotes, then? Because if not a direct quote, they generally are used to to paraphrase the other person (like to distill an entire paragraph or post into one basic sentence). So when you say

That implies that I gave reasons for Windows’ dominance (that it’s more intuitive and it’s more user-friendly) that you disagree with. But … I didn’t give any reasons (intentionally), so it’s like you’re disagreeing with an argument I never made. THAT is what upset me. My point was actually that it’s obvious that people using Windows do “get work done” because they haven’t thrown their hands up and switch to Mac. If people couldn’t get work done on Windows, businesses sure as hell would have a lot more Mac users than they do.* That’s what I meant.

Actually, I clarified that in post 58, because I realized the wording was ambiguous. The quoted sections were paraphrases of those I talked to in person, not you. Their arguments for why Macs are better are very similar to what you’ve posted; the questions I wrote are what they asked me - thus are not the arguments I was referring to. It totally was sloppy phrasing and I apologize for that.

Actually, I’m not. I went to bed soon after posting and when I woke up, I did feel I was unduly harsh in my post. My overall sentiment is still the same, but I’m very rarely aggressive in any internet postings (feel free to look at my post history here) because I don’t like feeling like (or being) an asshole. I’ve never agreed with the common sentiment that someone’s behavior online “doesn’t count” because it’s not “real life”, so my philosophy is to not post anything that I wouldn’t say to someone’s face.

I wouldn’t be that rude or harsh to someone’s face, so I really and truly do apologize for that.

Unfortunately, I think you misunderstood my intentions with those examples. This was a footnote for the sentence saying that neither OS is more or less intuitive than the other, so my point was that things like Force Quit or Screen Capture aren’t “intuitive” just because they’re on a Mac. They’re the same as Windows: key combinations that you have to learn.

  • Which isn’t to say that they are more productive than Mac users, or that they are more productive than they themselves would be if they switched to Mac. It’s impossible to know that. But they get enough work done that they don’t see the need to switch.
69

This is usually up to the developer of the app. There are probably still iOS 4, and possibly even 3, compatible apps out there. I gave my dad our old original iPad and he still uses it daily. Developers tend to want to move on to newer versions because there are often additions or revisions to the codebase that make their jobs easier, and maintaining forked versions or backward-compatible apps gets cumbersome really quickly. CarPlay compatibility should be relatively easy, since it’s just I/O. The manufacturer is responsible for the integration app, however, so who knows how that part will go.

The podcast directory in iTunes is just a listing of directory files submitted to Apple. They don’t do anything to maintain it. If you want to have your podcast listed, you are responsible for providing a valid feed, maintaining a server, and hosting the files. I know, because I have a couple of friends who started their own podcasts. They bitched and moaned about how “un-Apple-like” all the back-end stuff was. It’s not at all like the forward-facing customer-centered part of Apple since the presumption seems to be that if you’re producing podcasts, you are technical enough to know what you’re doing, or if you’re not, you should be. Of course, that means that if something breaks on your back end, like when Google stopped Reader and something like 80+% RSS feeds stopped updating, listeners can’t download your podcast files. And then they think that iTunes is screwed up, not that the podcast guys didn’t update their feed address.

70

Does anybody use Keynote? Well I do. I’ve got dozens of lessons on Keynote. Whereas iOS7 in general goes to the extreme bright colors end of ugly (bright white text on bright red background), the new Keynote for iOS7 takes ugly in the opposite direction, namely ultra-subdued shades of mauve, brown and beige. Oh wait, there’s also gray. There is NO red, blue, green or yellow as we commonly understand these colors. Don’t believe me? Here’s a screenshot of the color palette.

So if I import my existing Keynote presentations into the new app for iOS7, there’s no way to work with them unless I go through each slide and change all of the colors to match the new color palette. If you don’t want to do that, you’ll just have to accept that any additions you make to existing documents will have a new color theme that is an utter and total mismatch to the existing slides.

I have two iPads - one for personal use and one for teaching. I used the personal one to test drive iOS7, and I’m glad I did. My teaching iPad will stay on iOS6 for as long as possible.

Guess what happens if you try to edit an iWorks document in iOS7 and then save it back to the cloud? You won’t be able to open that document on ANY of your iOS6 devices any more! “Sorry, this document requires the new Keynote for iOS7”, the application gleefully reports.

So one of my presentations that I tried to edit in Keynote for iOS7 is no longer viable on my other devices because they are iOS6, and I won’t be upgrading them. They are effectively holding my presentation hostage in iOS7 Land, requiring me to upgrade the OS on my older devices in order to get them back. This is nothing but a dirty trick, in my opinion. I will just have to manually recreate that presentation all over again on the iOS6 device.

71

What does the other three quarters of it look like?

72

zweisamkeit:

It would be difficult to respond to you point-by-point in the fashion I would prefer, since so many of your quotes depend on my quotes that preceded them, and vice versa.

So let me reply more generally…first by saying I’m glad the temperature has cooled between us. I appreciate your apology and am glad to add it to my own earlier.

I concede that when I wrote “NONE of [the reasons] is ‘because it’s a more intuitive, user-friendly computing environment’”…it would have worked just as well without the quotes. I think I was trying to indicate what unspecified users might say when asked why Windows dominated the market. Not so different from what you later did when you combined something I did say directly about snarky Windows users with stronger sentiments held by others.

Also, I never said that people “couldn’t get work done” on Windows systems. What I said is that Windows appeals to (a certain segment of) users who like to work on (i.e., tinker with) their computers — whereas others simply want to get work done with no thought of customization.

The whole thing is a crude (and admittedly, somewhat snarky) metaphor I’ve used in the past, and I’m probably better off without it. As I’ve admitted, there’s plenty of snark to go around on the part of users of both platforms, and it’s unattractive no matter who’s displaying it.

Mac users think they have a superior operating system for their reasons; Windows think the same on behalf of their system for their reasons. From all the debates I’ve seen (and I’ve seen more than a few), I don’t think either side has a monopoly on condescension.

As for Windows dominance, I stand behind what I said that there are valid historical reasons for this that don’t have anything to do with it being an innately superior operating system. Under the best possible scenario, Windows would no doubt still dominate even if Apple had done everything right in the 1990s (assuming the price differential remained great between PCs and Macs). But I do think a great opportunity was missed to expand Apple’s market share then. Instead of that happening, the company nearly went belly-up.

Finally, as to “intuitive” — of course, that concept doesn’t apply to key combinations or other techniques that must be learned on both platforms. It applies more to basic tasks like moving and copying files, or how elements are represented on the screen.

To give an example off the top of my head, I think it’s more “intuitive” to have a named, graphic representation of a thumb drive (or a floppy disk before it) that appears immediately on the desktop as a separate item when it’s first inserted — as opposed to one having to dig through another directory to “find” it (arbitrarily labeled as an “E:” drive or whatever).

In the end, as I said, different strokes. And again, the irony is that I’m at the moment I’m seriously pissed at the platform I’ve supported so faithfully for 26 years.

73

Yes, in addition to the crippling of the new versions of iWork in terms of their capabilities, this is another completely unacceptable “innovation” they’ve added — actual destruction of data YOU created if you made the mistake of importing a document created in the old version into the new.

I’m surprised a class action lawsuit didn’t develop over this, because, at least in the first few weeks the new editions were released, there was virtually NO documentation that indicated this would happen. Nor was there any indication of all the features taken away from the new version that had been present in the old.

I really and truly would like to line up the bozos responsible for this, look them in the eye, and say “OK…now YOU tell us why it was perfectly all right that you did this.”

74

I’ve deleted Keynote from my iPad as it wasn’t much use to me any more, but from memory the other swatches were the same colors in (2) gradients, (3) metallics and (4) monochrome. So you’ve got a wide range of taupe, gradient taupe, glittery taupe and black/white/gray.

But wait, there’s more!

iOS7.1 was released yesterday. I downloaded it onto my guinea pig device, figuring that things couldn’t get any worse.

Things have gotten worse.

If all the black, stark white and neon red wasn’t intense enough for you, Apple found something else to take from subtle to screaming: The entire system keyboard is now in bold font. It hits you like a punch in the face when you first see it.

What is worse: I can’t figure out the white/gray/black scheme of the keys. Example: in my screenshot above, is the shift key shifted or not? I have to toggle it back and forth to test it while I’m typing, to make sure.

(answer: yes it’s shifted in that picture.) Even though it’s black-on-white, same as all the other keys. Here’s what it looks like unshifted. That seems backwards to me. You’d think it would get a different appearance (compared to the other keys) when it’s shifted, instead of the same color.

Yes, they’s probably patched some bugs with this latest release, but that’s certainly not going to be the first thing you notice about 7.1.

75

Another way to make the state of the Shift key obvious is to change the characters shown on all the other keys to either upper or lower case as appropriate. That would be tough to do on a physical keyboard, but when the ‘keyboard’ is just a display on the screen, it would be quite easy.

76

I mean, the shift key? Are you in the habit of randomly hitting the shift key and forgetting which mode you have it in? With automatic capitalisation at the beginning of sentences, I rarely even have the need to touch that button.

77

I’m in the habit of hitting the shift key automatically (because of all the time I spend on manual keyboards), and then remembering that Apple often helpfully toggles the shift key for me in certain situations (like after I’ve typed “Mr.”). So I sometimes reflexively tap shift when Apple has already done it for me (or sometimes I don’t do it, thinking the OS will). It’s like having a second person sitting next to you watching you type, and hitting the shift key when they think you might want the next word capped.

The result is that I sometimes need to glance at the keyboard to see what state the shift key is in.

But the bigger point is: why the change? Those of you still on iOS6 look at your keyboards. What was wrong with that? What problem were they trying to fix by making some keys dark in their rest state (that toggle bright when you hit them) and some keys bright in their rest state (that toggle dark when you hit them)?

78

Obviously, the function keys are now gray and the character keys are white. What’s wrong with that? The shift key is the only one that toggles back and forth, and having the arrow itself go from white to black to show shift engaged seems sensible to me.

I’m puzzled by your boldface complaint, since my iPad Mini keyboard doesn’t look like that after the update.

79

“Stop Helping Me!” I cannot count how many times I have yelled that at Excel on the PC at work. And I was never able to figure out how to turn it off. Fortunately, on the iPad, there is a thing in Settings->General->Keyboards that allows you to do just that, for about five of the keyboard conveniences, including auto-caps, spell check, the two-space period and a few others. Unless, of course, they got rid of that in 7.1, which I have not installed yet.

There is also a setting in there that controls the weight of text (under “Text”, IIRC) which may be affecting how your keyboard looks.