SEARCH
diglloydTools™
Apple Core Rot: Little Things are not Little Things (iOS Image Display)
Little things are a big deal for professsionals. These days, Apple makes changes with little rational thinking as far as MPG can tell. Here’s one simple thing that matters to one professional.
Roy B writes:
Apple recently “bugged” those of us who carry our portfolio on an iPad or iPhone. When publishing photos with Adobe Lightroom to upload through iTunes, the photos now appear on the iPad defaulted to “fill” the screen.
Prior to iOS 9.0.2 (me thinks), the default behavior was “fit to screen”. Now, in order to see the entire photo, if not natively cropped to the 4:3 resolution of the iPad, I have to double tap to zoom in to full resolution, then double tap again to zoom out to fit-to-screen. What an annoyance to not see the full images as you scroll through an album!
Can you imagine how disrupting this is to a client or friend to have you constantly tapping on the screen to bring the image into its correct view? And even if you do the 4-Tap tango, the image defaults back to fill-screen if you scroll on to the next image then return to it! I deliberately crop my images to optimize the composition, but that is lost due to Apple’s incessant need to change things that aren’t broken.
MPG: change for the sake of change, possibly involving personal ego, rather than careful user interface evaluation as was the standard in Apple’s heyday of being the thought leader. Now Apple is the leader in arbitrary disruptive damaging changes to functionality.
Joe M writes:
Once again you are spot on. Are you also aware that in iOS9, Apple removed full screen capability from the iOS Podcasts app on iPads? This is a travesty -- it was reported during the iOS9 beta and is still not fixed. See long thread of people complaining -- many are simply incredulous:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7219353?start=105&tstart=0
Ironically the earlier podcast app featured prominently in the skeuomorphic debate, and was slammed as a poster child of tacky skeuomorphic overreach:
https://theindustry.cc/2012/06/26/apples-podcast-app-a-ui-breakdown-and-comparison/
But at least *that* version did full screen perfectly on iPads, and the "tape reel" UI instantly conveyed the app's function and state. Now we have a trendy flattened UI and broken functionality.
The iOS podcast app and OS X Disk Utility are not fringe utilities. In UI terms these are in a common user path -- they aren't like the OS X Chess app. They are frequently used. You can't even delete the podcast app -- it's that central.
You and many other smaller developers would never dream of intentionally shipping a product with "front and center" broken functionality. It would be unprofessional and embarrassing. How Apple can do things like this is beyond belief.
I don't see the purpose in Jony Ive sweating microscopic industrial design details like precision edge chamfers if the software is slipshod. It is all a single cohesive product. If he is now ultimately in charge of software design, his attention must be elsewhere.
MPG: maybe I should feel lucky that I don’t myself use these features. I worry mainly about the browser problems that make it harder to display high quality images—no support for color space for starters.
