Amen. App-store search is an offense sham, wasting users' time and stealing from developers.
And +1 to pitiful Mail search.
But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.
Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.
Thanks, but the point is to see the locations IN the result list, so you can eliminate hits that you know are irrelevant (like ones on backup volumes that aren't current, or whatever). Having to click on every hit, one at a time, and hold a secret hotkey is not just undiscoverable but absurdly cumbersome.
The Finder issue can be alleviated if you include the path bar in your Finder window, at least it is so before Tahoe. So you highlight a search result and the path bar shows you where it is.
Search on iOS Mail is… what is it doing? I can see the e-mail right there, but Mail can’t find it. Especially if it needs to be « connected to power and on Wi-Fi ». Why?
Thanks, but having to click on every single result one at a time and peer at a path bar somewhere is far from acceptable. This prevents you from sorting results by location, and skipping hits on volumes you know to be irrelevant.
I’m not sure if this still works as everything gets a bit more broken in every new macOS, but context menu ‘Reveal in Finder’ used to be my way to figure out where the search result was.
My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.
Thanks, but right-clicking on every hit, one at a time, and invoking a context menu option to see where it resides would take longer than searching for, downloading, and installing a competent file-search utility like EasyFind.
I never actually thought to try such an obvious and definitely-not-ridiculous approach, and I can (happily?) confirm it works, so thanks for that. Apple are certainly leaning into Think Different with this.
Apple's app-store "results" have long been absolute bullshit. Apple lied to judges, developers, and the public about the app store. I wrote an application for a popular company; and even if you searched for the company's exact name, the application didn't show up in the top 300 results (which is where I gave up scrolling).
Instead, Apple delivered results with misspellings of the company name or applications that didn't contain any portion or variant of the search string AT ALL. Not in the app name, description, publisher name... anywhere.
I complained to Apple and got a boilerplate bullshit response. Then I raised a threat of legal action for Apple's hijacking and perversion of our trademark in their search results. This at least provoked a specific response, where Apple claimed that publisher name is "one of the top three" criteria for app-store search.
Apple's guidelines have long been flouted by Apple itself, not to mention that they're replete with stupid ideas.
I've developed a few iOS apps, and one of my favorite Apple "guidelines" (which they essentially enforced at the OS level without developer choice) was that, upon launch, your app should show a fake UI while doing startup tasks in the background. The recommendation was part of Apple's admonishment against splash screens. Think about how dumb this is, and how it makes your app look inept. Apparently plenty of developers did, and shunned this dumb idea; because Apple then forced it on developers whenever technically possible.
Upon your app going into the background or being kicked out of memory, Apple will take a screenshot of what your app is showing. When the user returns to your application, Apple will present this old screen shot; but none of the controls on it will work. The user can tap away furiously, but nothing will happen. When the app returns to functionality, the screen will be replaced by the real UI.
The problem here goes beyond ineptitude into a major privacy issue. You can think you "closed" or changed what an application is showing before handing your device to someone, only to find that Apple still shows a screen shot of its old contents in the open-apps stack. This could be a disaster.
Sure, NP. Not attacking you at all. Just Apple's hypocrisy.
But all of Apple's UI missteps probably don't compare with the festering rot of glaring incompetence that has destroyed Windows and Office in this millennium alone.
Yes, was very fortunate to ditch windows decades ago. I've heard to latest iterations are atrotious.
And I agree with you about Apple's hypocrisy. They often have one set of rules for themselves that is very different than the set of rules they apply to others.
GUIs' beneficial "skeuomorphism" probably peaked around the mid-'90s, where controls and their states were clearly demarcated but not absurdly photo-realistic. The bevel on a button told you if it was depressed or not, but that amounted to flipping the brightness on a couple of pixel-wide outlines.
Apple did contribute to the backlash (and the over-correction to no design at all, AKA "flat") with their brain-dead skeuomorphic UI. One example hobbled iTunes for years: Apple depicted the current-track display at the top of the iTunes window as an "LCD" with a glass window over it; obviously you wouldn't try to interact or press on a glass-covered LCD. But in iTunes, there were controls hidden in there. WTF? Why would you ever even attempt to click in it?
Equally stupid was Game Center, where Apple depicted controls as painted onto the felt of a Blackjack table. Who the hell would attempt to "operate" the paint on a felt gambling-table surface?
But... your point is valid. I didn't interpret the original comment as being limited to app icons, but on another read you are right; it does emphasize them.
No, it isn't. Making your entire screen dark for all content isn't a solution for a dumb GUI color scheme.
"Back in the day, light mode wasn’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that computers were, we didn’t really think about turning everything light or dark. Sure, some applications were often dark (photo editors, IDEs, terminals) but everything else was light, and that was fine."
Several incorrect statements there. "Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible. The opposite was called "inverse." The Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers (and possibly others) even had dedicated keys that toggled between regular and inverse text; it is called that in the manual.
Word even had a checkbox option in it entitled "Blue background, white text." It wasn't removed until 2007, concurrent with lots of other UI regressions in Windows. Microsoft also removed the color-scheme editor from Windows, with which people had been able to set up global color schemes (including "dark" ones) since 1991.
When people finally realized how dumb it is to read dark text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, companies had to run around slapping hard-coded "dark modes" onto everything... after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac.
So how did we end up suffering through decades of inverse GUIs? I've always attributed it to
1. The "desktop publishing" fad of the late '80s / early '90s, which sought to make the screen analogous to a piece of paper.
2. The Mac, which imitated Xerox's GUI, which was inverse. Possibly related to #1.
3. Windows defaulting to an inverse scheme (although it provided a way to easily change the global scheme), as it imitated the Mac.
> after abandoning better solutions (user-defined system-wide color schemes) that had existed since the early '90s on every platform except the vaunted Mac
Even classic Mac OS (pre OS X) had thousands of third party themes via the very popular extension Kaleidoscope and later the built in Appearance Manager. Kaleidoscope schemes especially ran the gamut, with looks ranging from cloning other OSes to green on black “Hollywood hacker” to Star Trek LCARS to shiny chrome to a pair of blue jeans. A great number of those themes were dark.
The loss of user control over appearance like that is tragic.
>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible.
That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes.
80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs.
Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
It was not a screen-saver. Less ghosting? Most likely. But the fact remains that reading text off of a light bulb blasting in your face all day sucks, and once upon a time people knew that... but "forgot" it when vendors shoved inverse color schemes on them by default.
"80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents"
Yes, I noted that; but the analogy to a piece of paper fails because paper does not EMIT light.
Everyone with sufficient computing experience calls "light" schemes inverted. This was even documented in instruction manuals from the early PC era: https://imgur.com/a/aLV8tn0
Anyone experienced remembers that any 60Hz CRT is a flickering mess, especially computer monitors that used shorter-lived phosphors, and any old TV had terrible burn-in. That's why you want to reduce the amount of bright pixels on it. That's not a legibility thing.
A display is not a light bulb if you aren't specifically making it a light bulb against the poorly lit environment. There's no difference between reflected and emitted light, what you actually need is much better lighting in the room, so your display doesn't stand out when used on a brightness level that provides sufficient contrast (and just because working in a poorly lit room is unhealthy).
Moreover, a light scheme in a well-lit environment is less eye-straining, because your pupils contract and adapt to the light. If you're using a dark display against a dark background, your eyes adapt to the dark and then you're hit with the bright text. If you want to display more than just text, dark mode becomes a problem because most of the content (e.g. pictures, videos) is not largely dark.
tl;dr avoid excessive contrast and flickering. Everything else is individual eyesight differences, opinions, and snake oil.
And +1 to pitiful Mail search.
But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.
Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.
reply