Amen to all that, especially the headphone jack. I'd respect the company more for these anti-customer moves if they'd be honest about it or just say nothing.
But the stupid excuses for removing the jack are insulting to consumers and make Apple look like assholes.
I wonder what motivates the on-going degradation of UI that was sorted properly for years. The insertion-point and keyboard failures mentioned here are examples, and then there's the (widely scorned) new notification UI on Mac. Half the time you can't even dismiss a notification because the peek-a-boo X disappears when you roll ONTO the dialog. And the "snooze," etc. options are often missing. And if you have more than one notification, they're shown as a stack and the only dismissal option is "dismiss all." There's no way to just dismiss the top one and see what the next one in the stack is.
Oh yeah, and while we're on this, how about the suddenly asinine Groups functionality in your iOS contacts? You used to go into Groups, pick the type of contacts you wanted to see, then go back to the list. For example, let's say you have a group called Doctors. You'd go in there, press Doctors, and boom you're browsing your doctors.
Now when you go into groups, you have to manually scroll through them and hunt down and un-check whatever group(s) you're currently viewing, and then select the one you want to view. Who the hell manages categories like that? It's especially stupid when you consider that you can put people into more than one group at a time.
That seems to be overstating their "failure" here. It seems that the person they actually interviewed may have been qualified, personable, and so forth. The problem is that a TOTALLY DIFFERENT PERSON showed up to work. How is that a failure in "vetting?"
I haven't been through a cold hire in a while (where I wasn't already known to the company), but I suppose the only solution is to demand photo ID and check online records as well. But I doubt many companies actually do this.
Is this to work around the way Apple has utterly and bafflingly broken the insertion-point handling in iOS?
It worked fine for years, and now suddenly it takes five tries to invoke the "select all", "paste", or whatever menu. And moving the insertion point? Cumbersome shitshow.
The G in "GUI" stands for "graphical." People forget that when they defend shitty, undiscoverable UI. The examples in this article are right on point. Apple (and others) far too often simply punt and give up on doing the necessary design work, burying functionality behind some bullshit like "long presses" or "gestures" or modifier keys or modifier-key-clicking on a text label that isn't even demarcated as a control.
UI design takes time and thought; that's true. But why does a company with Apple's resources not bring the necessary effort to bear on it? It's not as if they can't afford it. Sure, there are time constraints, but if you're going to fold to those and trowel out shitty UI, then don't presume to publish "human interface guidelines" or other such bibles.
And it's high time to stop tolerating smug douchebags who denigrate any complaint about missing functionality and declare, "Well, you simply long-press Option-Shift-Command-Q to bring up the configuration menu."
That's fine if the controls work without significant lag. Last week I drove a minivan whose blower speed was controlled by a multi-purpose knob, and each speed change took several SECONDS to be affected. Pathetic.
That's the rationale, for sure; but for mechanical features physically built into the car that can't be altered by software, there should be physical buttons.
I don't even like electronic climate controls. I drove a minivan last week that had a click-wheel for the blower speed, which inexplicably suffered from a several-second lag. Yes, multiple seconds before the fan speed changed, making the selection of one a ridiculous pain in the ass.
And any UI that makes you poke at a button or twiddle a dial to iterate through a list one item at a time, without showing the whole list at once, is a monumental failure. You see this blunder way too often, when there should simply be a drop-down list for a finite number of options.
No idea. You could type SQL into searches, but then you had to go somewhere (no idea where) and look up the tables or entities to query. I mean... really?
Also ex-Apple here. Radar does suffer (to a lesser extent than Jira) from a profound defect, though: Searches are "exact match" for whatever text you put in the title. To find a bug YOU filed, you have to remember the exact words and sequence you used in the title. Did I say "resize window" or "resize a window?"
I filed a bug against Radar for this behavior, and developers from other teams added comments expressing surprise that the tool was crippled in this manner. I think a year later, someone said, "Yep, our team got bit by this today again. We assumed this was fixed years ago."
This fundamental flaw may explain why some widely-encountered bugs in Apple products don't get fixed, or at least fixed in a timely manner. A dozen Radars could be filed for the same defect, but if they aren't phrased the same way you'll never find all the dupes. So dumb.
Still... I could construct queries based on status and product more easily in Radar than in Jira.
You need SOME kind of tool to provide a repository of issues and assignments, and Jira could probably be fine.
But the simplest things are baffling in Jira. Any issue-tracking system that requires the users to learn some obscure syntax (or even to use SQL to refer to its internal data structures is a failure.