Apple Maps is absolutely very late to the game when it comes to road closures. Google Maps somehow always knows which roads are closed, even if for a few minutes.
When I started using OS X, one of the biggest draws for me was first-class native keyboard shortcuts support that was consistently followed and applied by all apps (first party and otherwise). So you could be sure that a shortcut for search across all contexts (global) would work just as well as the shortcut for a contextual search within any app. No one writes great third-party native apps anymore and even Apple's own apps completely disregard this part of their heritage. Just try searching across the AppStore, Apple Music, and the legacy Finder.
For newer Apple apps, sometimes the keyboard shortcuts simply don't exist. I believe part of the problem here is the deprecation of AppleScript, which means there's no incentive to spend time on consistency, and the other part has to do with organizational indifference towards all the wonderful UX innovations from the past.
What Apple has successfully accomplished, in collaboration with other 'big tech' companies is drastically reducing user expectations from their software. I wouldn't completely blame the AppStore's forced race to the bottom for this alone. There is still a huge market for tasteful apps that cost more (even sometimes with obnoxious subscriptions), but if even Apple isn't leading by example, why waste time on it if you could just build another simple note-taking app.
If their problem was 'too many developers', I reckon they'd be building totally useless yet amazingly engineered SDKs and data/analytics tools or apps to improve the quality and satisfaction of your music consumption. Instead, they focus on all the things that just reek of an overabundance of marketers and Product People™.
Surely, Apple will respond by artificially hampering one or more of their products in the EU and hence take away even the slightest reason to upgrade hardware in the name of Apple Intelligence.
Customers need a company that acts and reasons like an adult.
It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.
This was my immediate thought upon seeing the title! I used to love the library telnet server, which worked for searching, placing a hold, renewing, and even inter-library loans. There was also rudimentary full-text search of engineering journals. Today, it's a 'modern' website with tons of whitespace, non-customizable fonts, and links out to events and what not. Simplicity is such a wonderful feature and yet it's somehow completely orthogonal to modern engineering.
...and after passing that hurdle, you're suddenly exposed to a large body of work in the organization that has no processes to ensure continuity and modernization other than some rudimetary coding styles and PR/code review flows. The only way to stick around is to make your output so incomprehensible that the only way to maintain it is to keep the lead around.
For all the talk about hiring the best, once they're in the goal becomes to stop hands-on development as quickly as possible and to add friction to improving the knowledge repository as much as possible.
Bad design is slowly becoming an industry trend, which is surprising because Twitter today has more design influencers than ever before. Personally, I feel that the marriage of design with data has created such a huge mess that there’s just no good escape hatch.
It’s all about simplicity and the 80/20 principle today, which means that designers are bound to look at usage metrics and clicks as evidence of a successful design. Upper management doesn’t have to care as long as the bottom line is doing well and they’re able to kill competition in other ways.
From a user standpoint, though, once you get attuned to the basic functionality you want more power features that cost a lot of effort to build but don’t really make you pay more for them. You just can’t win.
I have to wonder how much of this middle management heavy organizational structure was introduced by cultures that place undue significance to 'becoming a manager' in computing success in profession.
In my case, it appears that maximizing my download has a huge impact on my upload as well, which makes sense from a TCP/IP point of view. In this case, do you mean the ISP's flow control?
I appreciate the QR code menus in busy spots in Amsterdam (almost every terrace when the weather is nice). It means I could spend more time with family instead of standing in a line with people fumbling around. Service usually sucks anyway, and so the less time I could spend in line ordering the better! The PDF links are useless, but busy places will often link to a portal that also allows ordering, paying, customizing, and sometimes even has a quick repeat option for drinks. It's easier for the business (they don't have to explain the menu to everyone in the line) and also reduces friction for customers; who doesn't have a phone anyway, especially those with kids.
While there might be some tracking or what not, it's probably less harmful than all the other tracking going on, including even the carrier's own systems.
The irony is that regional smaller banks would now be supporting larger banks with insurance contributions if unlimited deposit insurance becomes a real perpetual thing.
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