Perfectly Cropped - <AUTHOR> https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/ <comment><USER2> "But I see them impact my aging parents all the time."

I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community.

20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it.

The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that:

1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.

2) And I can't do a "select all" anymore. I don't even know where that option is and I used it all the time. Something tells me I have to swipe somewhere now.

We all become the "aging" population no matter how much we think we know tech, design, etc.

I think my biggest problem with all of this is that things worked. I liked that things worked, and I liked that I knew how to use things. I cannot figure out why things have to change. Or at least, put an option in settings to change back/forth from previous functionality. When I wake up one morning with nothing to worry about except work, and find out I now have to relearn how to use the same phone that has been in my pocket for 2 years.... this is irritating.

<comment><USER3> To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks):

Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least:

1\. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.

2\. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the highlighted bar that represents where you want to place the cursor will move around on the last line of the text. If there are non-text elements (images, etc.) in the block, then this will be unpredictable in where the cursor ends up. Also your finger blocks the text and there's no more magnifying glass.

3\. Single tap in the text to place the cursor -- but if you tap on a misspelled word, it will go into "suggest replacements" mode. Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.

To select all, you have to have a free cursor (nothing selected) and tap on the cursor itself. To avoid accidentally double-tapping (and thus selecting a word instead of bringing up the context menu) you have to make sure that you wait a beat before tapping again.

To paste (most to least reliable):

1\. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.

2\. Enter the select all menu above and tap on the cursor (same caveats) and one of the options will be paste. But very often the second tap will either activate a double-tap (and thus select a word) or move the cursor a little bit, making a precise paste difficult.

<comment><USER4> Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un- pinch".)

<comment><USER5> It was in the WWDC keynote speech. The rest of the world else can "discover" it the next time a bug crawls on their screen.

<comment><USER6> Herein lies the problem: it doesn't matter how much 'better' or 'smoother' or 'consistent' the change is - or is not, in this case. It's a gross oversight to _never inform end users of the change in any way_.

How many iPhone users attentively watch WWDC or read each update's (often incomplete) release notes? 1%? 3%? 5% tops? Why roll out a feature when 95% of your users will need to discover it through trial and error? A relatively juvenile UX mistake for such a mature company, but seems to be their MO these days...

<comment><USER7> While we're on the topic, those screen-masking "tutorials" you randomly get when apps push out an updated UI are annoying. I always skip past them. When I open an app, it's for a reason, and I want to start using it.

<comment><USER8> Then they try to cram the entire UI into that "tutorial"; as if you're going to hold that all in your head after reading it once while trying to do something else. Then there's no clear way to get back to it (if it's even possible). And often if you accidentally click through one part you can't even go back to that part.

Video games do this a lot, too. I'd play more games but it's always a one-hour commitment to get started between opening videos and tutorials.

<comment><USER9> Some games manage to teach you most of what you need without an overt tutorial. See eg Hollow Knight [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWiDS8SUvds&t=55s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWiDS8SUvds&t=55s) or the classic first level of Super Mario Bros.

<comment><USER7> When they work new skill discovery into the natural evolution of gameplay it's genius.

<comment><USER9> In Hollow Knight, letting the player figure out how to 'pogo jump' is an interesting example. They don't hold your hand, but you need to learn eventually to progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's charming how he goes out of his way not to step on any designer toes. _" I'm a developer with an eye for design, but I'm certainly not a designer. So I don't know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs."_

No, yeah you do, you just said it in the previous paragraph: _" And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn't offer visual affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below."_

I don't feel bad being critical of their UI choices, precisely because Apple was the company that made a big deal about UI and how far ahead of the poor hopeless gray conforming IBM Microsoft masses they were. And I mean, yeah I would've bought it, back then. Their stuff at its best was always a holy union of simple, functional and beautiful. But function came first, then simple, and beautiful arose from that, kind of in the Zen sense. Kind of like how a well- crafted hammer can be beautiful even though it's just a hammer. But at some point they went whole-hog into putting "beautiful" first, probably because that's where the money is. If you're not careful with that, you wind up being beautiful and stupid like the popular kids in high school. A beautiful hammer with no handle is just a crappy piece of shit. Even though it might be a great hammer(head), it's crippled by its lack of a proper UI.

<comment><USER11> Leave poor "beautiful" out of it! It's innocent! Apple's shit is beautiful _because_ it is simple and functional, not the other way round.

I think the issue is now that their products become weirdly tacky looking from being functionally weird. The notch, the Touch Bar, the overladen gesture menus... it's all kinda aimless and floaty. Let's not even go into how they turned a MacBook workspace into dongle central.

<comment><USER12> I cannot for the love of my life understand why apple put a touchbar there. If someone regularly uses them, please share your experience.

My next personal laptop will definitely not be a MacBook at this rate.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious if Apple has some data that people secretly like the touchbar (I've never come across someone who uses it for anything). Beyond just being fancy-looking when you're in the Apple store comparing laptops... which I think is the whole point and makes you question the priorities of Apple's recent leader.

I wouldn't even care about the Touchbar if they left the rest of the keyboard alone, but apparently the escape key was seen as an unimportant key.

<comment><USER12> As a heavy vim user, I can't live without escape key. One Of the fast way to alienate an entire userbase. I know people sometimes map cap lock but my brain is not conditioned to bimodal action and I don't want to be tied to a certain specific keyboard layout, not to mention the pain to overwrite muscle memory.

<comment><USER14> So the escape key is there on the Touchbar.

It is always the same size. It never moves. It is always there.

And because the keyboard is already pretty thin the difference in feedback isn't that significant.

<comment><USER15> If it's always there, why not just shorten the touchbar slightly and put a physical key instead to get that sweet haptic feedback?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I need to use a MacBook Pro for work. Discovering that there is an option to make scrollbars always visible when there is scrolling to be done was, by a significant margin, the best QOL improvement I have discovered.

This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.

For anyone else in my boat:

System Preferences -> General -> Show Scroll-bars -> Always

<comment><USER17> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

<comment><USER18> > _Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a > design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one > another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen._

I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just _see_ the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of magnitude faster than the alternative of "checking" because it happens instinctively without the slightest motor movement.

"Checking to see if something scrolls" means _some_ form of finger or hand movement.

I know what you're saying though, because I do see people do it all the time. There is an awkward, to me, pattern of "I just started reading, so let's shake the content up and down to get oriented." It's just as foreign to me as people who highlight text as they're reading. Not my thing, but whatever. (On the highlighting behavior, I always figured it's both a visual cue and at least partially a matter of highlighted text becoming light-on-blue, which is easier to read than most web pages' black-on-white.)

> _I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for > people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong. _

That advice was commonly head in web design and it wasn't really about people not knowing whether they can scroll or not. But rather, that visitors might just decide _not_ to scroll before they leave your content because the first page is so uninteresting to them. It's _because_ scrolling requires interaction that you're motivated to make the "above the fold" content grab their attention.

A behavior of "let's see if this scrolls by actually scrolling" is, in my opinion, an anti-pattern of bad UX.

<comment><USER19> I don't know if this is still done in grade schools or not, but long ago when I was in grade school, teachers would pass out strips of paper for reading - and as a bookmark. The idea that the student would hold it under the sentence in the paragraph they were reading so that they didn't get lost or lose their place.

I had been reading since before I started school; it was something I picked up early and that my parents encouraged in me greatly. So by the time I was in school and we were doing these reading exercises (which were mostly utterly boring to me at the time, because my favorite thing to read at home were my various science encyclopedia sets), I had no need for such a placeholder. Reading was natural to me, and I knew where I was in a paragraph, etc.

Of course, this upset the teachers, until they finally figured out that yes, I could read, and not only that, I could read well above my grade level (that said, my comprehension wasn't as great, unless it was geared toward topics of science).

I always figured that people who highlight text as they read on a screen do so for similar reasons; not that it's a stupid thing or anything - sometimes with long lines, small fonts, bad color/contrast choices, etc in text on a screen, you do need some kind of a marker to help you along...

<comment><USER20> Now you are supposed to put the strip of paper above the line you are reading. It reduce re-reading, gives you context of what's coming up next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On my iPhone SE, it is also well-spaced and perfectly cropped, omitting the 'copy' row and perfectly finishing below the second line of icons.

(I actually have a PhD in human-computer interaction and I'm a professor for UX design. It took me a two days to figure out where all those functions, which somehow appeared to be accessible 'only through apps' (or people ;)), went. Oh well...)

<comment><USER22> Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through your AirPods. Then even the touchscreen will be removed, to be replaced by a LIDAR chip mounted around your belt buckle. The design of the Great Wizards of Old will have come to fruition, and men will call forth driving directions and Amazon orders using mystic incantations and vigorous, unnatural hand movements.

<comment><USER23> And people think WH40K is silly.

Look at us trying to appease the machine spirits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In design this is called "the illusion of completeness."

"The illusion of completeness happens when the visible content on the screen appears to be complete, when in fact more information exists outside of the viewable area."[0]

It's a designer's job to create cues that ensure this never happens.

[0][https://www.nngroup.com/articles/illusion-of- completeness/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/illusion-of-completeness/)

<comment><USER25> This happens all the time with news articles. There's an enormous ad and call- to-read-something-else in the middle of the article and you can't see below it to know the article didn't end. It's happening more and more.

<comment><USER26> Exactly. So much so, you'll often see each ad prefixed with a text saying 'article continues below' (for those wondering why that text is there).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Our mainstream iOS app has tons of these kind of issues. Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things. I did UI design back in the 80's when it was actually a programmer duty more than an art thing. Of course back then were no phone sized screens and the UIs were much simpler in desktop apps. But the concept of making a UI usable for all sorts of people is still the same. Apple traditionally does not use user lab testing (which is not terrible in itself, often I've gotten mostly useless feedback when I watched them) but sometimes you work in an environment that has too many people who know the app too well to notice issues.

<comment><USER28> I seriously believe that the last time any real thought went into usability in UI was with Windows 95 - and even that wasn't free from form-over-function issues. In Windows 3.0 it was meant that only elements you could interact with the mouse would have a beveled 3D appearance, so people would know just by looking at a screen what they would be able to interact with. However it wasn't fully followed - checkboxes, radio buttons and input boxes were flat. Instead of addressing that Windows 95 made everything 3D.

Still, every time i hear one of those issues with "modern" UIs, it always gives me the impression that these are issues that wouldn't exist with a Win95-styled UI.

Sometimes i fantasize about working on something like that for Linux (not out of any special Linux love, just it is the only OS where thanks to X11 you can make fully custom UIs and still be practical), but fix all these inconsistencies.

<comment><USER29> > I seriously believe that the last time any real thought went into usability > in UI was with Windows 95

Way to throw Bob under the bus...

<comment><USER30> You know, speaking of Bob, one thing I've been meaning to experiment with is a Minecraft-based desktop UI.

I'm completely serious. Minecraft is relatively intuitive, the space is completely malleable, human minds are already tuned to navigating such spaces...

There's even some precedent in Bob and PSDoom, among others.

<comment><USER31> A couple months ago, after 5-6 years of not playing it, I installed Minecraft again fiddled around for a week or so. It took me a good day or two to get a solid grasp on all the UI changes that had happened since I stopped playing. I had to get on Google just to figure out how to _eat_.

I agree that it's relatively intuitive. Emphasis on the "relatively" part - I'm thinking here that it's intuitive compared to the UX changes and kippleization that iOS, Google web apps, things like that have undergone over the same time period. That's not exactly a high bar to clear.

<comment><USER30> I'm specifically talking about moving around and building things in the space, not so much the specific "game ui" elements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I switched to Android around the time iPhone 5 came out.

Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.

In the pursuit of a "clean" UI, iOS has become completely unintuitive and confusing.

<comment><USER33> My favorite unintuitive iOS feature is "shake to undo"

<comment><USER34> They replaced/depreciated it in iOS 13 with some crazy three finger swipe thing that for the life of me I can't remember, so I still shake my iPad or just hold down backspace.

They need to rebuild their software development team.

<comment><USER35> I think you mean "shake them up"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is a very common issue. The best and most common solution (besides visual indicators for scroll) is to make sure you are always cropping some elements. Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.

This is _very_ heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance. IIRC it used to show 3.5 elements, now it's more like 3.1-3.2 elements.

Edit: example, you can see how this is used in apps as well as screenshots: [https://www.androidcentral.com/play-store-getting- material-d...](https://www.androidcentral.com/play-store-getting-material- design-face-lift)

<comment><USER37> Or you could use the solution that's worked great for 50 years: scroll bars

<comment><USER38> I thought about this and while it does work, there's not enough screen real estate on a phone for this to be efficient. Phone screens are already very narrow and vertical. So either the scroll bar would be too narrow to be useful or too large.

<comment><USER39> Keep in mind that this "scroll bar" would only have to indicate that there is more content, or at most, which part of the content you are looking at. It doesn't have to be interactive (tap/drag to scroll) because you can still scroll by swiping. So a few pixels would be enough if the color stands out enough.

<comment><USER40> In general I'd much prefer a scroll indicator to a scroll bar on mobile. Google Play Music gets this precisely wrong: the album list lets you click a play button on the album cover as a shortcut, but the button is so close to the edge of the screen that it's very difficult to avoid hitting the scroll bar area and scrolling to a random section of the list instead of hitting play. So you have to seek to the album you want again, and, because you are optimistic beyond rationality, you try again, and whoops! Did it again...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.

I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours, contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no question or a dismissible message.

I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and confusing UI.

<comment><USER42> Waze is indeed really clunky in places. It crashes less than it did last year but the UI hasn't really changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> My non techie friend experienced the same thing, upgraded to iOS 13, went to see him and he started cursing about "how the f do I save a photo from my messages why the f does Apple got to remove something like that WTF!!!!"

I immediately thought no way they would remove that he must be mistaken, I just upgraded too and hand't tried to do that action. Looked at his phone and sure enough it was gone, tried all sorts of things finally Googled it and oh wow you got to be kidding me scroll down but no indicator you can, that's bad, there is going to be a lot of confused people, why would they do that?

<comment><USER44> Tip: long press the image you want to save, tap Save.

<comment><USER43> I am pretty sure that was one of the first things I tried and nothing happened. Just tried on my iPhone X and the long pressed showed that menu, is there any difference there between models, he has like a 6 or 7?

Either way long press has the same non discoverability issue especially for not techie people who are used to it working a certain way before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rlv-dan Grumpy Website deserves to be mentioned here: [https://grumpy.website/](https://grumpy.website/)

<comment><USER45> Brilliant. Every single image that I saw is of an Apple product. The so-called masters of UI.

<comment><USER46> We (the authors) are Mac and iPhone users, so yeah, our exposure to things is skewed towards MacOS and iOS :)

And yeah, it pains us to no end :)

<comment> rlv-dan 1\. Please keep up the good work! 2\. Please add a way for visitors to submit content. (Unfortunately) I have lots of content that I want to share...

<comment><USER46> 1\. Thank you!

2\. It's a challenge because someone would need to approve submitted content, but I hope we'll figure something out

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Another iOS 13 ui issue I ran into today

I have a lot of tabs open on safari on my iPhone. Both because I continuously open in new tab and forget to close the old one and also as a low tech "read later" list. Today I went through cleaning up tabs, and while going through the list pressing the x on some tabs, a pop up came up and asked me something (didn't have time to see what) and as I was on semi autopilot pressing x'es to close tabs I accidentally hit the option Saying something About "1 day". I figured it had something to do with cleaning up tabs (which I don't want) so I go to the settings for safari and sure enough it's now set to clean up old tabs after one day

So when I went back to safari all of my tabs had been cleaned up

I always browse in private mode (because why not?) so I lost a ton of "bookmarks"

Goddamnit

</comment><comment><USER48> Semi-related: My biggest UX gripe with iOS is that the option to hide a picture in the Photos app is part of the share menu.

Those are such diametrically opposed interactions, I really don't understand the thought process that went into that. Usually sharing is the last thing you want to do with a photo you're trying to hide, and with the share dialog open it always feels like you're just one mistap away from sending it to whoever.

I guess with the "Duplicate" / "Slideshow" / … options the share menu has become more of a general action menu, but if that's the idea, they should really change the icon imo.

<comment><USER49> The name "Share" is probably just a holdover from older iOS versions when it actually was purely a share feature.

It ought to be renamed to something else now, like "Actions" or something to reflect the fact that that one button is how you: open the file in a specific app, run automations on it, share it with friends, save or bookmark the thing, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm personally torn on the new share sheet. It's actually fast now, which is nice, and I like the fact that it (supposedly) can put contacts in the top bar that I talk to frequently (which I guess no app has added support for yet?) But it's still a bit confusing how it's organized, and now it has two planes of scrolling and sometimes apps disappear off of them unless I pin them in "Favorites" or something like that and the list only has a limited number of items unless I go into the "More" option. But more on point, I don't get why it doesn't flash scroll indicators…isn't that the standard way that iOS has hinted at scrollable content for years?

<comment><USER51> I've seen the contacts in the top bar, though I can't remember what apps use them. Maybe the share option in Photos.

I find it annoying that I cannot turn it off. It's very easy to accidentally get _close_ to sending a contact an image I do not want to send them

<comment><USER52> Eh? There's still another confirmation step before it actually sends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Had the same issue the first time I was using Uber, around 1.5 year ago. Uber is not available in my region, and I was in the States, wanting to catch a ride with my colleagues to the airport, so that was my first time in the app. We were going long-haul and had a lot of luggage. First car that comes in is a Corolla in which there is no way we could fit. The guy (in poor English) tells us to choose a bigger car. We try to tap around, just to get a Jetta.

At the end we asked a guy in a shop near the spot we were waiting, for him just to swipe the ride type right to left. Felt like an idiot, because the three types available at were perfectly centered and aligned.

</comment><comment><USER54> > Oh my god! This is just like the dumb new Music app. I didn't even know I > could scroll down!

I went a long time--months?--thinking Apple had simply removed support for "repeat song" because of this exact same issue. When someone told me to "scroll down" it was like someone said "just open that wall, the peanut butter is inside" and I'm staring at a blank wall wondering who is insane.

<comment><USER55> Hey, thanks! I only just learned that the scrollable area exists thanks to this comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn't offer visual > affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content > further below.

> I'm a developer with an eye for design, but I'm certainly not a designer. So > I don't know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs.

Isn't it obvious? The solution is to _not get rid of visual affordances like scroll indicators_ just because some designer thinks it looks "cleaner" that way. It may surprise some, but they actually serve a purpose.

</comment><comment><USER57> Windows Phone 7 was really interesting because the OS UI _very intentionally_ did "bad crops" of items to indicate scrolling was possible

[https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+phone+7+ui&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+phone+7+ui&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER18> That still looks better, in my opinion, than the mobile operating of today. A proper dark theme many years ago, and an elegant (IMO), simple, touch-oriented UI. It avoided the "play skool/AOL" aesthetic that really rankles me with more popular UIs: rounded corners, circles that should be squares, etc.

All that said, I agree with the article's point that UIs that do not more clearly reveal the totality of their user interface actions are frustrating. I've often found iOS to be especially bad at this for outsiders like myself, especially with respect to hardware features outsiders are completely unfamiliar with such as "press harder than usual."

<comment><USER57> Windows Phone's aesthetic was certainly a welcome, effective change compared to iPhone's dominant paradigm. I suspect you'll pry rounded corners from Jony Ive's cold, dead hands.

I agree that iOS's "discoverability" is awful. I wish Apple had some head of UX like Android has with Matias Duarte. Instead, they put Ive in charge of software UX and it's clearly not something he cared about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Simple solution: add a blur gradient at the bottom so people know there is "something more" going on down there.

</comment><comment><USER59> I had exactly the same experience. It really is not obvious that additional buttons lurk just offscreen in that dialog.

<comment><USER60> Me too! Until reading this article, I hadn't found the other commands. I had been missing "Save image" and "Set as wallpaper" and wondered why they had become so difficult to access. FYI, it's also possible to save a photo in iMessages by long-pressing it.

<comment><USER61> Wow...this is TOO weird. I was helping my mom the other day with her iPhone (I use Android so I'm not all that familiar), and I could NOT figure out how to save the image. Now I know why...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> A friend of mine got bit by this sort of thing when setting up their Amazon Echo on their iPhone. When they got to the page where they were supposed to choose a wifi connection, it was perfectly cropped and showed no indication of being scrollable, so they thought those were all the networks it could see and there must be something stopping it from seeing theirs. Being a curious person, I walked through the process with them and when we got to this screen I was also confused, but I tried touching and dragging the list and sure enough it scrolled. Surprise!

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't how many options I've missed or hours I've wasted trying to figure out for myself or others how to do certain things because there were no visual indicators of those options... and I've even had people become disconcerted with me or devices or tech people in general because of difficult-to-decipher interfaces, sometimes to the point of someone panicking and making things worse or getting angry and argumentative.

The false simplicity and "freshness" factor designers and developers are doing to change or add interfaces that cause confusion just for the sake of trying to get attention or change how something looks is a minor change for a major disfunction.

If the change doesn't improve something's usability, DON'T DO IT. I just noticed today iOS changed how some buttons look and menus operate, completely unnecessarily, throwing off recognizability and flow. Totally disruptive to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Just stop, make interfaces that are easy to understand, figure out, operate, and remember. It's much easier to leave something as is than to change it unnecessarily.

</comment><comment><USER64> The author claims to be "a developer with an eye for design" yet the blog is very hard to read with the giant images in between the text blocks.

<comment><USER65> Yeah it's noticeable. I think it's because the site is a "mobile first" design that accidentally became a "mobile only" design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> It only there was an indicator on the side of the screen telling you how far you are from the bott of the screen, like a bar. On the side.

</comment><comment><USER67> With the proliferation of different screen sizes and zoom factors, these kinds of usability problems will continue to happen. The only way I see around this is by re-introducing the 'obvious scroll bar' element, or alternatively a different kind of indicator that advertises where the current view is in relation to the entire content.

<comment><USER68> Like a tiny down triangle in the corner? This stuff is super not hard. You just have to give a shit.

<comment><USER69> It's incredibly hard to make a great user experience look great.

Lots of people can't tell the difference between something looking awesome and working well.

<comment><USER68> User interfaces are testable. There's a whole field of practice on this. Considering how sloppy this is (and Apple's recent trends in slop) I bet they didn't test it on all their screen sizes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> An easy fix would be to do the gravity/pointmass type deal that Messages does for the message bubbles, so when the sheet "shoots up", you see that they're movable.

</comment><comment><USER71> It's not just iOS, it's the web too -- buttons and error messages that are off-screen with no indication.

A banking site I use commonly has a "next" button that is inexplicably about 3/4 of a screen's worth after the main page content which is only a few lines long, with just blank white space in between -- so just below the fold. For weeks I thought the site had a bug where there was no way to get to the next stage of the operation.

Similarly, it happens regularly in a shopping checkout site that I'll click "Complete order" at the bottom of a long form and... nothing happens. Click again and again... still nothing. Finally think to scroll up to the _top_ of the page and there's a tiny message in red that I didn't fill out the "state" field or something like that.

Off-screen indicators/functionality is a problem everywhere.

<comment><USER72> >Off-screen indicators/functionality is a problem everywhere.

Yes, but an iPhone 8 costs at least 450 dollars, and Apple products pride themselves in the "premium experience" they provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It's that crappy "flat design" BS that provides minimal meaningless indicators. An entire generation of designers needs to unlearn this crap.

</comment><comment><USER74> So many UI issues like this could be fixed if we just brought back the bloody scroll bar!

All those hidden scrollbars result in undiscoverable UI elements. They would only need to be a few pixels in width and it wouls be easy to tell that things are scrollable.

</comment><comment><USER75> The iCloud authentication issues are the real nightmare for me. I can't tell you how many times I've been rejected using the correct email and password, and how many times I've had to use the reset function only to have it mess up again immediately after.

Now, on one machine I just habitually click to dismiss the iCloud window. On another, I've just moved it as far into the bottom corner of the screen as I can get it tucked away to just ignore it.

I'm also working on moving my web development setup over to Windows (with their new Linux support, which is excellent) so my next machine won't have this problem.

<comment><USER76> I was a MacOS user since system 9. Every one of my computers was a Mac and I never used windows for anything except the occasional game. A year ago I had to use Windows for my dev environment at work (a dotnet core shop), and I've since bought a Windows workstation for my personal dev environment and stopped using my macs completely. It's absolutely mind boggling to me that windows is now arguably a better dev environment than MacOS now that WSL is a thing, but here we are! I haven't regretted the switch at all and having access to the ocean of software for Windows has been great (minus a few things like Sketch that are Mac only).

Edit: To preempt the "why not linix" comments, I have used linux on and off through the years, but I didn't enjoy spending a large fraction of my time fiddling with the OS instead of getting work done.

<comment><USER75> Similar story to mine! I started on System 7 at my first industry job back in 1999. Used Linux exclusively on servers, and needed a personal laptop with a usable command line. Mac was pretty much my only option, since I wasn't interested in fighting with Linux's weak hardware compatiblity back then. Bought my first MBP in 2000 or 2001 and I'm still on one now.

But since I also do a lot of VR development these days, I also have a PC both at work and home dedicated to that. VR obviously dictates my platform choice pretty heavily, so moving to Windows for web stuff makes everything simpler. WSL pretty much sealed the deal, although I wish there were more VR-capable laptops that didn't look like an army tank...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Ugh... it's the same in Apple Music (as tfa mentions). Biggest iOS 13 complaint: going from a a song on a list to it either at the beginning or end of your queue used to be:

Toich and hold on song, move finger to "play next" or "play later" button, release.

Now, it's: touch and hold on song, release when menu comes up. Scroll menu up. Tap button.

Sounds small, but it's such a usability setback for no gain. I want a full screen modal, that's why I'm going into the song options. Why would I press and hold on the song, then only want half of its options?

</comment><comment><USER78> Testing on older devices is something many (any it appears iOS) doesn't do well enough.

I ran into this with an apps verification system. Because of the positioning on an iPhone 7 you couldn't perform verification. When I contacted them I learned they don't test on iPhone 7's because they are too old. This was prior to the 11 coming out.

I've also had to help someone with this problem on their older device.

A casualty of always chasing new is design and QA for older devices.

</comment><comment><USER51> This issue confused me too, on my iPhone SE. The top action is _copy_ and is partially cut off on the screen, and I didn't know _save image_ was below it. At least it being cut off eventually led me to scroll down. Apple has destroyed UI intuitiveness by going too far in the minimalist direction. Sometimes we need some damn scrollbars or indicators.

However, it appears this changes based on the app? If I long press an image to save it from the browser or from the Toot! (mastodon) app, I get the regular _save image_ dialog that I've always gotten on iOS.

If I long press an image to save it from Twitterific, I get the share sheet.

Ugh. The share sheet annoys me too. I get the convenience of having "most common" contacts at the top to send things to, but most of the time this is in the way for me and I'd prefer it completely off and as expected with Apple's "features" they rarely provide options to turn them off.

While I prefer iOS over Android, it's stuff like this that I realize is a big trade-off for me.

Edit: Looks like I can at least re-order so "Save Image" is the top option... but it's still buried beneath the contacts and apps

<comment><USER79> Pixel forces the Direct Share too. Can be removed if you root it apparently. Samsung allows it to be disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> This article focuses on the crop issue, but there's another issue with the UI that is more important: broken hierarchy. Saving the image is almost as important as texting it, but texting is given 90% of the share sheet. Meanwhile emailing, airdropping, tasks(!) and copying(!) are all given more importance than saving.

</comment><comment><USER81> I've struggled with the update to the iOS Music app in iOS 13. Mainly the shuffle button. I'll leave it on quite often but then want to turn it off sometimes when I want to listen to a complete album. Couldn't find the location for the longest time. It was easy before. Now it's 2 clicks away,

</comment><comment><USER82> "Who killed the scrollbar" was a rant I'd posted on this about three years ago:

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq)

</comment><comment><USER83> I had a similar issue in SQL Server Management studio when importing a database from a backup file. The window was unnecessarily large and spacious and couldn't be properly resized, and the 'OK' button was perfectly situated just off my corporate laptop's piddling small screen.

For quite a while I had no idea what was happening, there was a verify/test type option which was passing and I thought would prompt me to continue but I didn't. Only after looking for tutorials online did I realise my buttons were missing.

I think I fixed it by trying to resize the window. It didn't actually resize, but did jumble around the UI elements just enough to get 2 pixels of the top of the button to click on.

</comment><comment><USER84> I don't doubt that Apple has big teams of people who do nothing but try to perfect the UX. Maybe this shows how difficult it is to get it right more than any inherent problem at the company.

Aside from that, I don't really care much for iOS any more than anyone else. Mostly because Safari is now buggy and once every day or so I have to kill & reload it to get a page to display. And the new gesture implementation has me going forward & back when I am just trying to get a page to scroll left & right. And the touch-and-hold popup activates too easily. And ...

Well, I hope they are still tuning it. I admit to holding iOS to a much higher standard than I do Android, but I can't help that.

<comment><USER85> _Safari is now buggy and once every day or so I have to kill & reload it to get a page to display_

Yes, me too — hope they fix that soon.

 _I admit to holding iOS to a much higher standard than I do Android, but I can 't help that._

Take both the price differential and Apple's historic UI quality into account, higher standards seem pretty reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> It took me a long time to figure out in the first place that I had to "share" to do actions that are not sharing, like saving to my photos. I was also surprised by this new wrinkle on the iPhone SE. I'd use android if I had a phone in this form factor.

<comment><USER87> Yeah, the share button really means more like "send to other apps"

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> It's funny he mentioned this:

> "My wife typically only charges her phone when she's at her desk during the > day. She doesn't leave it plugged in overnight, which means iOS's software > update never happens automatically for her. So, she just recently upgraded > to iOS 13 a few days ago."

About 3 months ago, I _finally_ got rid of my landline at home. I had it just for emergencies, and I had a wired POTS phone on my nightstand.

So now I keep my iPhone on my nightstand. It's in the charger all day at work.

And I, too, stopped getting updates automatically! I just looked at my phone and saw that there's been an alert up for a few days that I need to update to the latest 13.1.3.

</comment><comment><USER89> WOW. Ok I had no idea you could scroll that menu. wtf. I was also confounded by the new iOS 13 update not being able to save photos, but I got around by tapping on the pic from the conversation thread and getting a save action sheet.

</comment><comment><USER90> My mom had the same issue the other day. Even I didn't realize the save option was concealed below the fold. My workaround was having her long press the photo in iMessage, which reveals a prompt with an option to save.

</comment><comment> martin-adams Usability is getting harder, not easier. I thought there as a bug in iOS 13 that I couldn't turn the torch on or access the camera on the home screen.

I press the button, nothing happens. Go to my control center, and it works fine there.

Is it a bug. Nope. It's user error.

It looks like a button. It animated when I press it like a button. It has only one primary action like a button. But nope, you have to _long press it_ for it to work.

[https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1184846835241967616?...](https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1184846835241967616?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER79> The contacts in the share sheet annoy me. Pixel also has this "direct share" that can't be disabled and simply uses up real estate while being a privacy issue for me. Samsung has an option in settings to remove it.

</comment><comment><USER91> The simplest solution would be to group the Copy and Save buttons into the group thingy that's been common on iOS since forever. So that the Copy's bottom corners wouldn't be rounded.

</comment><comment><USER92> My primary complaint of the share sheet is that it's suggesting I share things with people I either never text or texted once for a specific purpose with no reason to communicate with ever again.

<comment><USER79> I've said elsewhere. Pixel also has this and can't be disabled. Samsung allows it to be disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> As an iPhone 8 owner, TIL. I was wondering where that capability went...

</comment><comment><USER94> half of the UI stuff we know would have been called "Easter eggs" in a previous generation. I dropped out of gaming around the time of Pitfall! - when controllers got more than one button, that was it for me. But I saw my brothers and friends all geeking out of "left up down down left A B A BB A down up left" and finding cool shit in their games. It sort of feels like ios/mobile stuff has become that.

"3 finger long press, swipe down, dbl tap - oh sweet, I can save the picture you sent me!"

</comment><comment><USER95> In e.g. Windows 95, there would often be a box around the text. Since the bottom of that box would not be visible, it would indicate that something is missing in that direction. Now that boxes (and other visual indicators) are gone, this kind of thing can happen.

I've always considered this a tradeoff, but I also get the feeling that some people did not even consider that the old designs had an actual reason in usability (for boxes, the second big reason is preattentive recognition in the human brain).

</comment><comment><USER96> ...This blog post explains an issue I have been experiencing that I didn't realize I had.

iOS has always had some very explicit misses on affordances. Force touch led to a lot of them.

</comment><comment><USER97> Maybe we could bounce all scrollable areas along their scroll direction when you open an app so you can see they're hiding a control. Like a 0.5 second tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER98> It would be handy for apps to have some sort of method of showing how far down you've scrolled on a given screen. Maybe we can call them scroll bars?

</comment><comment><USER99> Apple could do something smart with the Tips app – if the phone 'notices' someone not able to position the cursor, or doesn't know about the hidden gesture. They can send a quick how-to via Tips. They can even do an overlay on the screen to get people started.

This is only for things like keyboard. Even the OS won't understand that somone wants to save a photo and isn't able to discover the save button.

</comment><comment><USER100> I only figured out these new menus because I knew already that the top action used to be in the horizontally-scrolling menu, and that some other things that used to be in the latter no longer were.

For the record: overall I think this new structure makes more sense; it was always weird having "Share to [App]" intermingled with random other actions.

But Apple has definitely gotten worse at designing things holistically to be intuitive.

</comment><comment><USER101> > _I'm a developer with an eye for design, but I'm certainly not a designer. > So I don't know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs._

The solution is right there in his screenshot. The list of contacts and apps indicate that you can scroll along the X axis by showing a partial icon that extends off the screen.

The fact that Apple didn't do this on the Y axis is an issue in this particular UI that should be fixed.

</comment><comment><USER102> I'm not one of those aging parents, but it definitely bothered me when I could not find the other actions besides copy and share on my phone, then realized one must scroll to reveal additional options. WTF, the first is "flat UI", then this. Our UX is totally dictated by those no-talent ass clown designers. Seriosuly why do they keep changing the UI when it is perfectly fine?

</comment><comment><USER103> It's not realistic that iPhones could have had the same screen size forever, but this kind of thing and many others like it show that sticking to 3.5/4 inch screens for so long was not necessarily misguided. Consistency counts. As well as not diluting your design, development, and testing efforts across a plethora of configurations.

</comment><comment><USER104> Is there a solution to this in DOM+CSS? I had always wondered, we have the same issue in some of our UIs and I'm never sure if there's some pseudo-class that I haven't discovered that can style overflow without Javascript. Never got to the point of researching it in-depth but quick looks didn't find anything for me.

</comment><comment><USER105> Seems to have already changed, because that's not how it looks on mine. There's no whitespace between the buttons in the list, so (on iPhone X) the first two and a tiny bit of the third are visible. I'm assuming their view would now be the first and a small piece of the second.

Crazy something like that was ever released though.

</comment><comment><USER106> If you're ditching the scroll bar, maybe just add a dark triangle to the lower left corner of the screen, just a few pixels, as a "continued below" indicator. Have it disappear when you're at the bottom.

That's the most minimal UI element I can think of that would people if they're at the end of a screen or not.

</comment><comment><USER107> I too found that horizontal scrolling as a bit of an unintuitive change from previous versions of iOS.

But the new feature above that is my favorite feature in _years_. Quickly iMessage your most frequent contacts.

No more typing the first 2 letters of your spouse's name tens of times throughout the day. Just tap their face to iMessage them.

</comment><comment><USER108> The new iOS update would disable scrolling on Safari - but only on some websites, and only about halfway through the page. You had to quit and reopen to fix the effect. This bug was remedied in 13.0.1, but I have to wonder: Did no one try opening Facebook in Safari with an iPhone XR? Seems like shoddy testing to me.

</comment><comment><USER109> Hmm. I'm on iOS 13 and I just clicked a picture in a message and my screen looks slightly different. I see more options and I can tell from the design there is more. What I can't tell is if I'm the edge case or his wife is, but for all the iOS 13 hating people enjoy doing, I'm not convinced this is a real issue.

<comment><USER110> If you see more options, it's quite likely you have a taller phone. I use an iPhone X, and my screen is tall enough that this issue doesn't affect me.

But Apple still sells iPhone 8, which is affected by this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> My favourite Apple UI 'enhancement' was to remove pinch-to-close from 'Books'. You now have to fiddle around with a perfect touch in the right part of the top of the screen to get the top menu to appear, to then press a tiny 'back' button. Before, pinch anywhere on the screen.

Thanks Apple.

</comment><comment><USER111> Is OS X / iOS trying to be more like Windows? In mobile Safari, the icon in the address bar used to go straight to Reader view, now it goes to a menu with four items. It's a running theme; formerly concise, direct functions are replaced with overloaded menus like the Microsoft world.

</comment><comment><USER30> Shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in today's UX culture. Hide all the things, make them indistinguishable, it might not be usable but at least it meets some designer's arbitrary definition of "beautiful".

Fuck. Every day I grow to hate technology more and more.

<comment><USER10> If only you could blame the technology. It's humans all the way down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> This same bug hit me when I upgraded. I literally thought they removed the feature. Then I thought surely not, and went back and tried again. Took me a solid 2 minutes (which felt like way too long) of poking around to realize to scroll like your wife.

</comment><comment><USER113> I had the same issue with my mother in law. She said she isn't able to share to an iCloud group. She was used to the fact that the iCloud option was part of the upper rows. And having an iPhone 6s she was also left with any indication to scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER114> One way to design UI to make this discoverable without scrollbars would be to do a transparency 100% to 0% gradient at the bottom. That way the copy button would be semi-transparent/vanishing which might trigger the user to scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER115> It has always been an iOS best practice to keep object sizes so that half an item visible if an area is scrollable, so to let the user know there's more below the fold.

Since the first iPhone I never found them breaking this guideline. Not so badly at least.

</comment><comment><USER116> There's also some really bad "ML" that reorders everything in very unpredictable ways across different Apps / UI contexts that are very similar. It's not the worst, but it's definitely not reminding me of a simple Apple experience

</comment><comment><USER117> How many iOS NN Beta users are on the 'old phones'? I think this is a serious problem because then you don't catch the problem before the iOS is out of Beta.

Same at Microsoft (in Norway) where every developer is eligible for a new PC every year.

</comment><comment><USER118> UX has been trying to remove scroll bars for ages. They are ugly as fuck but they are also incredibly useful UI feedback.

I think UX is missing the grander design challenge of making scrollbars that are both useful _and_ beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER119> You can see the solution on that same screenshot. Make a sliver of the subsequent button visible. Hard to do with all the variable resolutions, but theyre smart people, im sure they can figure it out.

<comment><USER120> Or, and hear me out on this, they could have a widget off to the right that signals to the user when content could be scrolled down. Heck, you could even get _really_ crazy and have it display _where you are_ within the scroll content.

On second through, nah, the world isn't ready for that kind of idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Great article. It frequently occurs on iPhone SE for 3rd party apps with its smallest dimensions.

SE seems to also have the unique problem of cropping of instructions and phrases on the right of screen.

</comment><comment><USER122> I have an ipad at work we can't sign into, since we changed the email address on the iCloud account (months ago), and the old address is on a domain we don't use any more...

</comment><comment><USER123> This is yet another product of magical thinking around scrum and agile. WE NEED TO SLOW DOWN. Bar none, business needs to totally readjust their velocity gauge, its totally broken.

</comment><comment><USER46> > Here's a fun, personal story about what can go wrong in an otherwise fine UI > when things are redesigned.

writes the person whose blog is typeset with a nearly invisible thin gray font

</comment><comment><USER124> I have heard complaints about this too in the form of "Whatever you do, don't upgrade to iOS 13." (Me: "I've been running 13 since July..")

</comment><comment><USER125> Aye, this is a pattern which indeed seems to become more and more common in an attempt to "modernize" design and "making it more lean". Yeah, right

</comment><comment><USER126> On a related note, There's no reason the "find on page" should burried in that share menu, and not in the "aA" menu on the url bar

</comment><comment><USER127> Minor nitpick: a "visual affordance" is called a signifier. A button affords clicking, the visual style of the button signifies its affordances.

</comment><comment><USER120> This is what happens when designers fetishize minimalism... eventually, you minimalize to the point that no one can use your product.

</comment><comment><USER128> iOS 13 also completely butchered the screenshot editing interface.

It's approximately 4 times slower than the old one. The markup button is hidden in the 3-dot menu in the far upper-right (such a strain to reach this!). Oh and the "full page" safari screenshot feature? It only saves PDFs. What a joke.

I'm moving to Android or PinePhone.

</comment><comment><USER129> I wish we could put contacts from different apps in the share sheet. iMessage isn't really s thing where I'm from.

</comment><comment><USER130> I miss the skeuomorphic design days.

</comment><comment><USER131> Don't they test on people?

Really, this stuff should have been caught before shipping.

</comment><comment><USER132> Design is how it works

If it's guesswork, or not working, is it good design?

</comment><comment><USER133> Bring back skeuomorphism.

A little bit of shadow would sort that out ;)

</comment><comment><USER134> Wow, this site is horrible to read on a desktop...

</comment><comment><USER135> Loved the OMFGWTFBBQ in the message on the phone

</comment><comment><USER136> My god this has been confusing me for weeks.

</comment><comment><USER137> The solution is Scott Forstall

</comment><comment><USER138> Nationalize it already.

</comment><comment><USER139> > So I don't know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs.

Obviously a scroll bar should be an acceptable solution? Why do designers hate scroll bars these days?

</comment><comment><USER140> ITT: people who do not use OSS and use apple because "it just works" doing free tech support and QA-via-tweeter to apple numerous bugs.

sigh.

</comment><comment><USER141> Good callout of usability. Does it need to be presented so dramatically?

"she couldn't figure out how to share photos, so I called her"

Could this not wait until later?

<comment><USER142> I very much agree. Valid point, bad presentation. Embedding screenshots of dialogues and Twitter threads is something I'd really prefer not to get widespread.</comment></comment>


Mint.com says it's hired hackers to test its private data protections - <AUTHOR> http://trueslant.com/garyandrewpoole/2009/06/25/i-tech-mintcom/ <comment><USER2> The title ^^ refers to about one line in the article:

> the company hires white knight hackers to try to penetrate the system > (Patzer says they have been unsuccessful)

Which, honestly is something any big company (or really ANY company handling financial data) should be doing anyway.

Im not sure where the news is..</comment>


What we learned about human origins in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/12/30/what-learned-about-human-origins-in-2013/?intcmp=features

<comment><AUTHOR> To me the skull seems weirdly deformed. I guess time and geologic pressure can do something like that.</comment>


Twelve Months Notice - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2009/10/23/twelve-months-notice/

<comment><USER2> What? No! What?

I've worked in startups my entire adult life and, please take my word for this, there is nothing magical about startup bosses that change the dynamic between employer and employee, and there are no special obligations startup employees shoulder.

If you give 12 months notice, you should prepare to be marginalized in your last year at the company. If you give 2 weeks notice, you should not expect to be blackballed in the industry. If someone gives you a bad reference for giving "only" 2 weeks notice, you should urge your friends never to work for that person again; if a prospective employer makes a stink about that kind of reference, you should avoid working for that employer.

Tech startup employers are fond of a "third-prize-is-you're-fired", "reward for just OK is a severance package" mentality. They don't feel like they owe _you_ a year's advance notice about their plans. Stay professional, but don't bend over backwards for an employer unless you have a specific, personal reason for doing so. "That's how it works in startups" is _not_ a valid reason.

And please, please remember: it is a seller's market for talent.

<comment><USER3> _If you give 12 months notice, you should prepare to be marginalized in your last year at the company._

I gave 12 months notice when working for a startup before leaving for graduate school, and I wasn't "marginalized" at all. Giving my employer plenty of notice gave us time to talk about whether I really wanted to go to grad school (I did); to find a replacement (which I helped with); and to transition projects to other people. It also helped my employer plan: if you have a small technical team and a major contributor leaves, most startups would like more than two weeks to find a good replacement.

Any startup that "marginalizes" an employee who gives extra notice would be petty and small-minded: the employee is doing you a favor. Besides, by marginalizing you, they'd just be wasting the time you have remaining at the company.

<comment><USER2> If you love your current employer and want to do them a favor, give them lots of notice. I'm not saying you're a crazy person for doing that. I'm saying it's a poor rule of thumb. You are not obligated to give huge amounts of notice to your employer.

I'm an employer. I've had people give me 2 weeks of notice at _extremely_ inopportune times. I am good for a solid recommendation for all of them. You don't dick around with people's careers.

Consider also the flip side of this issue. If you give me 2 months notice, and I need someone for a solid 4 months to execute a project, I may have to start recruiting now to fill that slot in time. We can talk all we want about the sacred bonds of trust between startup founder and startup employee, but _none of that_ competes with the requirement to keep feeding and providing health care for the families of everyone else who works at the company.

<comment><USER3> No one (certainly not the original article) has suggested that employees should be "obligated to give huge amounts of notice" to their employers. Dixon's point is just that the legalistic, "by the books" approach that is orthodox at a big faceless corporation isn't always the best strategy in a startup.

 _I'm an employer. I've had people give me 2 weeks of notice at extremely inopportune times._

Right; I certainly wouldn't expect a bad recommendation if I did that. On the other hand, if I recognized that only giving two weeks notice would be inconvenient for my employer, and if it wouldn't be problematic for me, I think giving more notice is just a decent and honest thing to do.

<comment><USER2> _For this reason, if you are an employee working at a startup where the managers are honest, inclusive and fair, you should disregard everything you've learned about proper behavior from people outside of the startup world._

 _For example, let's suppose you are a two years out of college and have a job at a startup. You like your job but decide you want to go to graduate school. The big company legalistic types will tell you to secretly send in your applications, and, if you get accepted and decide to attend, give your boss two weeks notice._

 _What you should instead do is talk to your boss as soon as you are seriously considering graduate school._

This is bad advice. You should disregard it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even as a lawyer, I would heartily concur that relationships based on trust and cooperation are far better than those based solely on legalistic concerns.

That said, I think the author underestimates the risk of opportunistic behavior by those involved in startups. Even years ago, when I started practicing, I vividly remember the refrain: "My buddies and I started this thing and everything was going well . . . but then it became really valuable . . . and then . . ." You fill in the blank but it was always some variation of "I would never believe he would have done that to me" as the "buddy" stuck some knife in or grabbed some disproportionate share of the reward from the once cooperative effort. The most frequent situation involved a dominant founder, who legally controlled everything, taking opportunistic advantage of co-founders who had trusted in his integrity and ultimately found it to be wanting. There were many other variations, however, and these can take any forms made possible by human ingenuity.

It is important to strike a balance. Normally, nothing good will come out of bad relationships, even if they are documented to the hilt with big, fat contracts. On the other hand, blind trust in a business setting, or even relying on your instincts to judge the character of others while believing them invariably to want to do good, is normally not wise. Trust but document. Just don't overdo it in a way that kills the spirit of cooperation.

<comment><USER5> Having been there and done that, I totally disagree with the original poster. Once there's money on the table, bad behavior follows soon after.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's _inevitable_ ... just very likely.

It's a time at which you're going to find out for certain what someone's character is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having worked for (and left) a couple of startups, I'd be reluctant to follow his advice. Most entrepreneurs think of their companies as something between a beloved child and a religion. For some, quitting is like you declared their kid is an ugly git. It's better just to sever the relationship quickly before it has time to sour.

<comment><USER8> I agree 100%. Whatever the reason, once you make that declaration, you've made it clear that something else in your life is more important than "the company" Most employers don't take that well, and startup founders even less.

Having watched fellow startup employees be let go and told to clear out by the end of the day, I don't believe they (or you, or I) have any duty to give more than the culturally accepted 2-weeks notice.

<comment><USER9> What I've never understood is the double-standard. Why is it culturally acceptable for the employer to give same-day notice, but the employee should give 2 weeks?

I always advise to give the amount of notice (or severance) the employer would give. If the departure is prompted by a recent layoff, there's not even need to speculate.

<comment><USER10> In Australia, you might leave the office the day you give notice, but you'll still get paid for the minimum notice period even if the company doesn't want you showing up to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having worked on agreements of trust I have had both good and bad experiences. I had one client whom I had developed a beautiful blog for that was actually starting to get half decent advertising revenue and traffic. Having known the person for a few months outside of the professional relationship, I agreed to work for considerably less than I would have normally. The person had the experience necessary to sell the product, but none of the technical know-how or understanding. They could barely understand how to use technology. They also wanted to consume a huge amount of my time, and at times unnecessarily. After doing some initial brainstorming and kind of getting a feel for the project we decided on terms. Some cash weekly + equity. After delivering a beautiful site and working with the guy to get posts and adverts processed, I was supposed to have started to receive additional payments due to revenue coming in. This wasn't happening. I attempted to explain that I couldn't continue without getting the payments promised and knew that there was no legitimate reason payment couldn't be made. There was almost zero overhead. After a few days of trying to stand my ground, I informed him that I would no longer be willing to work on the project. He tried to convince me to continue to train a replacement without pay. I laughed and explained that I wouldn't help him find someone else to cheat, and that no amount of money could at this point get me to continue working for him. The moral of the story that I took out of this is simple, the relationship works well when partners recognize the importance of fairness and understand the importance of each other and their worth. I think that a huge factor in these relationships is finding someone to work with that doesn't have an over inflated ego. On the converse, legal agreements are drafted for one reason: to protect oneself and remain within the law, and they are intrinsically selfish. Legal agreements that are intended to provide protection and establish terms fairly generally will only be a few pages and can be interpreted by anyone capable of analytical thinking.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think what Chris Dixon highlights here is _exclusive_ to the startup world, but it's pretty close. A friend once gave 2 month's notice, then extended it to three after the boss begged him to stay, but as soon as he left he was a persona non grata, still dissed behind his back.

There are some other industries (big time consulting, for example) where transience is expected and encouraged, and it's a fair question to ask about that type of commitment up front. Particularly if you're up front about your intentions or expectations _during the hiring process_ , people will be more willing to be understanding when you want to move on, and those recommendations, suggestions and connections can come in handy.

<comment><USER13> I don't necessarily know if everyone _can_ give those expectations during the hiring process. Personally, I'm going to leave a company as soon as I see a good reason to do so. In other words, I can't give a potential future boss a clear picture of how long I will work there because I don't know myself.

In other words, this advice might work out if you're the kind of person who will think "I want to work for this job for about x months/years and then move on to something else". But not everyone thinks that way.

Regardless, +1 for being clear about your intentions up front. You can't go wrong that way (for most jobs).

<comment><USER12> I absolutely agree with that, Jason. But I think rather then saying "I want to be with this company x years," possibly say "At some point, I want to move from x to a management position" or "I want to get a graduate degree in 3 to 4 years." This kind of transparency can encourage incentives to keep you around: Partial or complete tuition reimbursement if you take night classes, for example.

Again, not always feasible if _you_ don't know what you want yet or if you're in the wrong environment, but a good strategy when it works </tautology>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This difference in thought process is often described as "cooperative" vs. "adversarial". I like the "relationship" vs. "transactional" analogy as well.

I always start out with a cooperative approach, and fall back to adversarial only when the other party makes it necessary. Over time, you learn to recognize certain personality types and can predict which category a boss or business partner falls into.

My cautionary advice would be this: In a game of rock-paper-scissors, the transactional/adversarial personality almost always "wins" because the cooperative personality will accept a less advantageous position in order to avoid conflict. It's wise to recognize which personality type you are.

If you're cooperative by nature, write out on paper or at least have decided what your minimum acceptable position will be _prior_ to bringing up the subject or entering negotiation. And realize when you're being pushed past that point.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just another comment - I see no indication that hunch is going to give it's employees 12 months notice before letting them go.

</comment><comment><USER15> Especially relevant, as I'll be moving to Kansas City in July and have yet to start the process. Now that I'm only 4 months away, I'll probably tell my employer (a medium sized startup of 25ish employees) and get to applying!

<comment><USER9> +1 for not classifying 25ish as "small."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I counter this with another question: how many startup bosses/founders transparently discuss with their employees how much money they've left in the bank and how much longer they can actually meet payroll. Usually they tell you this like maybe a month before but there are always signs if you look for them :)

</comment><comment><USER17> I ended up giving four months notice before going to grad school in 2001. Company was too disorganized to really make use of it, but they appreciated the gesture.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think that this is advisable when you're making a dramatic change, such as going to graduate school, where the nature of that change is such that your departure can't be taken to reflect on the company that you're leaving. If it's April, and you accept an offer to attend graduate school in September, it's probably best to let your boss know as soon as you've made the decision.

If you are moving to another company, then it's touchier because it raises questions about why you want to work at Y instead of X, and I think the 2 weeks' notice and generic exit interview are the better approach. There's nothing you gain by saying the reason you'd rather work at Y.</comment>


Show HN: Remote mobile app debugging with AppSpector - <AUTHOR> https://appspector.com/#features <comment><USER2> This looks really nice. I like it you're supporting Flutter!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've just discovered AppSepctor and it blew me away! Especially being able to inspect the network requests is amazing!

One question though as we're serving customers from the EU: is AppSpector fully GDPR compliant? I sincerely hope it is, I have to use it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> AppSpector is designed to help teams to inspect and debug their apps during development process. So it's not supposed to have real users data.

If you intend to deploy it to production we could provide a self-hosted version so you'll own all the data. Please contact us for more details.</comment></comment>


Google Cloud's Secrets Manager - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/introducing-google-clouds-secret-manager <comment><USER2> Hey everyone - sorry for the delayed reply, I've been on a plane. Seth from Google here, the same Seth in the byline of the blog post.

We are very excited to bring Secret Manager to the market. Let us know if you have any questions!

<comment><USER3> Hi Seth!

I wonder how is GCP Secrets Manager comparing to Hashicorp Vault? Is GCP SM implemented in Hashicorp Vault (or Berglas) behind the scene? If not, what are the differences in terms of feature set?

<comment><USER2> Secret Manager is a Google Cloud first-party fully-managed service. Vault still works and runs great on GCP for users who want more advanced functionality like dynamic secrets.

<comment><USER3> No feature comparison?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Comparable AWS Version: [https://aws.amazon.com/secrets- manager/](https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/)

Pricing: AWS: $0.40 per secret per month. GCP: $0.06 per active secret version per regional replica per month.

i don't understand the GCP pricing correctly. Can someone shine a light here ...

<comment><USER5> For AWS, as with many cloud offerings, read the pricing small print: AWS Secret Manager also charges per API request [1]. It isn't expensive, but you should keep it in mind when you architect your infrastructure. (We actually switched from fetching secrets at runtime to injecting them into containers are deploy time, and this was one reason).

[https://aws.amazon.com/secrets- manager/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/secrets-manager/pricing/)

<comment><USER6> This bit us too. We use goodaddy's external secrets [1] to fetch secrets from AWS secrets manager and make them available to the cluster. It polls the secret every n seconds, but with many services consuming secrets, it can scale up pretty quickly and start to build up cost.

[1] [https://github.com/godaddy/kubernetes-external- secrets](https://github.com/godaddy/kubernetes-external-secrets)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Glad to see this service exists. Until now I've been storing secrets in JSON files in Cloud Storage, and using KMS to encrypt the contents.

This is hopefully simpler to use and easier to audit.

<comment><USER2> Enable Cloud Audit Logging for Secret Manager and give us feedback. We know auditing is super important, so it's built in!

<comment><USER8> so far, i've found the audit logging to be pretty great!

i especially like exemptions; the ability to _not_ log for specific service accounts/identities is very handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm hoping this eventually leads to AWS reducing their Secrets Manager pricing.

<comment><USER10> Have you looked at just using AWS parameter store?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What are people's favoured ways of managing secrets these days?

Does this look appealing?

<comment><USER12> Hashicorp vault is basically industry standard I believe. But there are various cloud APIs too, which have varying degrees of integration with kubernetes.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately Vault doesn't have a plugin yet for Docker Swarm still :(

<comment><USER11> Swarm is on its way out. Mirantis bought that part of Docker and they said this:

"The primary orchestrator going forward is Kubernetes. Mirantis is committed to providing an excellent experience to all Docker Enterprise platform customers and currently expects to support Swarm for at least two years, depending on customer input into the roadmap. Mirantis is also evaluating options for making the transition to Kubernetes easier for Swarm users."

[https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-acquires-docker- enter...](https://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-acquires-docker-enterprise- platform-business/)

<comment><USER14> This is sad. Swarm is simple and effective, like Nomad but easier.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. I've been working a lot with Swarm over the past year and while it's not perfect, it has been an overall great experience. I really enjoy the simplicity and tight integration with Docker, and I feel that the ecosystem around Swarm was just starting to mature. Hopefully it remains an option for a while.

Also, I haven't needed to integrate something like Vault because the Swarm secrets feature covers my use case perfectly.

<comment><USER13> I'm also using the secrets feature but it's very brittle. If your swarm gets destroyed or you want to migrate servers, it's a huge pain to get those secrets back up and running. Unless I'm missing a better way to do this, I'd love to know!

I currently have my secrets stored in an encrypted text file in case I need to bring them back up.

<comment><USER15> I do something similar, using Ansible Vault (not to be confused with Hashicorp Vault!) to store the encrypted secrets in my ops directory (separate from the application source code). They're stored as YAML so very easy to upload/regenerate with Ansible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This would be taking on Vaults top-tier enterprise package when looking at the feature list?

[https://www.hashicorp.com/products/vault/pricing/](https://www.hashicorp.com/products/vault/pricing/)

<comment><USER17> Vault does more than store secrets.

For example, with Postgres it can store root creds and issue non-root, time- bound creds for each service. Vault's "backends" allow it to do _a lot_ of things that a secure static credentials manager can't.

Not to say that this isn't good though – any proper secret management system is better than none :D

<comment><USER18> Vault is single system, accessible over the network with root access to all datastores in the company... How is it good for security?

Kerberos solves very same problem of using only short lived tokens on the wire when accessing services, but it fall out of fashion .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We are eagerly awaiting GKE integration.

<comment><USER2> While I cannot comment on specifics, we are going to provide deeper, first- class integrations with other GCP products.

<comment><USER20> Yes, GKE would be great. If we could specify the source of an ENV in a Deployment as a Managed Secret that would be incredible and save us so much hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How do permissions work? Can I only give access to a specific secret to a specific person/group of people? Playing with Secrets Manager it looks like anyone with access to the project can access all secrets.

<comment><USER8> > Can I only give access to a specific secret to a specific person/group of > people?

yes.

> Playing with Secrets Manager it looks like anyone with access to the project > can access all secrets.

just FYI, this is not the case. the "Secret Manager Secret Accessor" role must be applied per-secret for any identity to read the content of that secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How does this differ from the KMS product ?

<comment><USER23> The short answer is KMS doesn't store secrets.

You can use KMS as _part_ of your own secret manager, but you would have to store the actual secrets somewhere else, like GCS or Datastore. KMS stores encryption keys, and has an API for encrypting/decrypting. For example to retrieve a secret using KMS you would get the encrypted data from where it is stored, like Datastore, and send it to KMS to have KMS decrypt the data. Secret Manager actually stores the secret, so a single API call can retrieve the decrypted value. Secret Manager also has versioning, which is important when rotating secrets. If you were building your own solution around KMS you would need to do versioning in your storage schema, wherever you end up storing the secrets.

<comment><USER24> You can also use AWS Parameter Store with KMS (SecureString type) to store secrets in Parameter Store. Of course this doesn't offer rotation of the secrets although KMS will handle key rotation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The title is missing the "Secret" word which makes a significant difference. "Cloud's Manager" vs "Cloud's Secret Manager". With the current title I was thinking about a generic cloud manager for GCloud

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought it would be a story about the elusive nature of the Google Cloud management people.

<comment><USER27> Me too. Everyone else calls key storage "Secrets Manager" (plural)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone trying to move away from Google, no thanks.</comment>


The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5 - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02385 <comment><USER2> Note that this was written by Aubrey de Grey, who is also notable for having an amazing beard and for trying to stop human aging.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you coding on your android/iOS tablets? - <AUTHOR> I'm wondering how many people are actually working either on an iPad or Android tablet.
Whenever you search for IDE or editors in both play store and app store, the obvious ones don't offer solutions for these platforms and there are very few to choose from. There is a lot of learn to code sources but that's it.
Is there anybody who actually gets real work done or even uses one of the two platforms on a daily basis?
Why wouldn't you not do that even if your favourite editor/IDE supports the platform? <comment><USER2> I know this doesn't "technically" answer your question, but the closest I get to using an iOS device for coding is Duet Display [1]. It turns your iphone/ipad into a 2nd monitor.

It is really cool and works well enough that I use it to roll log files in terminal windows. It is nice to have a 2nd monitor when in a pinch.

[1] - [https://www.duetdisplay.com/](https://www.duetdisplay.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I do it when I am on the go and feel like getting some light work done. Mostly small adjustments which don't require the whole codebase but just single files. For doing more complex work I often feel to restricted: I can't start, for example, Vagrant to test my changes.

I am talking about iOS here, I do not know what the experience is like on Android. By the way, I find Textastic to be a great editor on iOS, it is a universal app, so it runs on iPads as well.</comment>


Ask HN: Diffie Hellman for Email? - <AUTHOR>

Just as with OTR - (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/) for XMPP, would it be possible, or feasable to implement something like that for email, as a server-side addition?
- User firstname.lastname@example.com types and sends email for email@example.com - Mailserver from example.com contacts mailserver at server.com - They do a Diffie Hellman key exchange and MTA at example.com uses that key to encrypt this specific email message - It passes as encrypted plaintext over the internet - The MTA at server.com recieves the encrypted message, decrypts it, and discards the key.
It would have a few of the drawbacks of MTA ssl, because both ends have to support it, but it does provide better protection against private key leakage.
What are your thoughts and opinions on this? <comment><USER2> Basically, Diffie Hellman is a key exchange algorithm, without authentication. So using just this algorithm would not protect from MITM.

But the OTR protocol can be effectively adapted to email. It would need a few emails to establish the original key exchange, but that's not too hard to do. In fact, TextSecure, an Android app (soon on iOS) already does OTR like that for SMS.

The real problem with a system like this is deciding how you would authenticate the person with whom you're communicating. Pre shared key? PGP- signed message?

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different from using SMTP+STARTTLS with a DHE (or other forward- secret) ciphersuite? In currently deployed systems, if you have that enabled, it does exactly as you describe. The transfer over the internet is encrypted, but the receiving MTA decrypts the message and stores it as plaintext.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think the advantage over MTA SSL justifies implementing a new approach. You're trusting the mailserver administrator either way.</comment>


How to Organize Your Workplace Without Getting Caught - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3md3v/how-to-organize-your-workplace-without-getting-caught <comment><USER2> Step 1.

Move to a country where organising is legally protected.</comment>


Demonstration of Bonnier R&D hand held tablet PC concept - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/8217311

<comment><USER2> Very nice. I love the realtime data on the binder while it is sitting on the table.</comment>