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Uupis

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I'm slowly moving away from the Apple ecosystem, and this is what I rather like about Linux. I find it obviates the anger — there's no specific entity making decisions that make my user experience worse. If something's annoying me, it's quite likely to be my own fault.

On work devices I've been using iOS 26 since early betas and macOS 26 for a few weeks now, and I still think about the user experience degradation. On the bright side — it makes me appreciate iOS 18 and macOS 15 more.

At this point I'm not contorting myself into skipping an update; I'm looking at exiting the entire Apple ecosystem. I don't want Liquid Glass to be my computing experience for the next numerous years.

iPhone Air 11 months ago

They also made the displays have some weird scaling factor that caused an annoying bloom in dark mode. Took me a while to realize why it felt off, even though the form factor was right up my alley.

ChatGPT Search 2 years ago

It feels like YouTube search doesn't even deserve to be called search anymore. If I'm lucky, I get 1–3 not-totally-irrelevant videos, a row of shorts, then a couple tangential videos, then a bunch more shorts, then "Explore More" or "Previously Watched" or "People Also Watched"... and shorts. It's pretty disgusting all around, because it totally does not seem like there is any intent to surface actually relevant videos.

3) People will guard their data more and will be less willing to share it.

I recently came across this myself when writing a reply on another forum. A feeling of reluctance to attempt to contribute something maybe-useful in a public, 'minable' space.

Almost feels like this has tarnished the 'magic' of Internet, of sharing information and knowledge. I'm not saying this is the appropriate reaction, but it is what it is.

I've been a fan of Queal[0] for numerous years now. When these meals became popular I tried out a handful, and ended up liking Queal the most. Have stuck with it ever since.

A couple years back I tried out Huel, but I didn't quite get used to the flavoring. I find Queal's to be much less artificial-feeling and subtler. But it's probably all subjective.

- [0] https://queal.com/

I never managed to actually fix it. Maybe the links in the sibling comment can be of help there. But I feel like it became less of a nuisance after Monterey. Nowadays, it seems to move my app windows between displays after sleep, but that is resolved by applying the window layout snapshot from Moom.

My exact script seems to be gone — goes to show that I've not needed it for a while now — but the gist of my workaround was:

• I set up my display arrangement the way I wanted,

• followed the instructions in the displayplacer repo to work out a command to reproduce the desired arrangement,

• put the displayplacer command and the AppleSript call to Moom in the same shell script, with a short sleep between the two,

• and created an Alfred action to make it a tiny bit more convenient for myself.

The display arrangement would get out of sorts, but getting it back to my liking was just an Alfred action away.

You don't have to use Alfred or Moom specifically, those are just the convenience utilities I prefer.

I believe the bookmarks panel just defaults to half-height now. You can pull it up to fill the screen, but otherwise — tapping the button opens it at half-height for me.

It is a user experience choice. Most decent native macOS apps adhere to system conventions. Text editing works as one would expect in a system text field. Keyboard shortcuts behave as expected. Custom keyboard shortcut definitions from the Keyboard section in Preferences actually work. And on and on.

Slack in particular is extremely, extremely slow, even by Electron standards. I can't expand it to the full-height of a 4K (running at 1080p) portrait monitor without typing becoming unbearably laggy, so I either have to keep it at 1/3 monitor height, or have to use another application for writing the text.

Their streak of blunders(1) has already made it challenging to convince myself to give them money this upgrade season. Polluting my experience with even more(2) ads has a really great chance of being the final straw.

1: mismanagement of bug bounty program, declining software quality, ham fisted CSAM efforts, endless series of App Store fiascos... off the top of my head right now.

2: their push notifications pushing [to me] useless services, noise in the Settings.app, parading Apple Music all over iTunes Store, Maps.app editor's picks seem like glorified ads, App Store search is both useless and has ads. It's already bad.

if an app has ongoing development that you benefit from, it seems entirely fair to pay a subscription.

Agreed. Though, this latest development – the move to Electron – is a negative for me, so it leaves a part of me wondering what kind of development I have been paying for. I imagine I am not alone with such a sense of disappointment.

I could have written this comment myself, albeit less eloquently.

That is a very accurate representation of how I feel about this, too. I enjoy building apps, but I don't know that I can keep using these devices.

I was looking forward to upgrading to the new hardware in the fall, but now I'm not sure I can stomach the implications of buying a new device that may at any point start policing what I do far beyond what I'd accepted at the time of purchase.

Group Video Calls 5 years ago

Of all those, I have tried Discord and Slack, and I had a really, really horrible time. Neither are things I intend to use of my own volition, and am inclined to argue against using if I have a say.

Drag and drop, text inputs, selections, UI elements, keyboard shortcuts, state preservation – none of those worked as they should. I would accept a divergence for a legitimate improvement, but it's just system-wide basic functionality missing.

All of that works correctly in Telegram. There is great value in adhering to the system conventions, design, and using native elements – it's fairly clear what is supposed to be what, a good chunk of the time, and there is minimal context switching as I use other native apps.

Group Video Calls 5 years ago

I've never used Clubhouse, but on iOS and macOS Telegram looks and feels very native.. but better. Snappier, faster, more responsive, yet still looks correct, and works as I expect native apps to work.

It’s not in Apple’s interest to do it.

I think an argument can be construed that (one of) Apple's interests is to control what and how users can do on Apple devices. iOS-like lockdown seems entirely in line with that.

Going Mac App Store only would drive tons of developers off the platform and do absolutely nothing to increase sales on the Store anyway.

And others would fill in the gap. The Store sales would inevitably have to go up – it would become the only way to get software on the device. Not like every user would immediately drop the Mac. I can imagine a non-trivial fraction of users wouldn't even notice that something has changed.

It wouldn't happen right next year, or in one go, but the more I think, the more I am growing convinced that it's sneaking up.

It would be widely panned as a ham-fisted move.

If it doesn't affect the bottom line, it doesn't really matter. They got away with 4 years of perhaps the worst laptop keyboard of the decade; are getting away with inflicting the TouchBar price tag on tens of thousands of users(1), making devices unserviceable, and even with the matter in question.

Given Apple's size and user base, I'm afraid that outside of straight-up illegal activity, there's little Apple can't get away with. Especially if the janky move is factored into small, cruddy steps.

(1) I realize it's a lame point, but it annoys me personally

macOS Big Sur 6 years ago

Ah, shucks. I never managed to find a conclusive "acknowledgment" of my issue, so once Safari 14 rolled around, I only checked whether I can make my issue reoccur and shrugged it off as resolved. Guess I was wrong, because your description feels eerily familiar. Maybe we're using it too fast.

Agreed about the user experience. Really unpleasant to work around some indiscernible and apparently unfixable problems. I feel like in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario with Apple software, but I suppose that is a topic unto itself.

With Firefox I sometimes notice oddities with how fonts are rendered, and it generally feels "less native", but at least I don't run into miscellaneous issues like that anymore.

macOS Big Sur 6 years ago

uBlock Origin is glorious.

Safari 14 has resolved an inconsistent, tedious bug I kept experiencing (most often on reddit): changing the URL query parameters in the address bar and hitting return immediately resulted in the page merely being reloaded. Had to wait a solid second or so before hitting return to have a decent chance of getting the correct page.

But I've grown much, much too fond of this "No Javascript unless I say so, etc etc" experience to give it up without a substantial other benefit.