What exactly is the practical difference between ‘open apps’ and apps that have not been ‘dragged away’?
Are you saying some of those apps are not open at all, just were used once and are left in a list of apps everyone thinks is a list of open apps? But have to be relaunched when accessed from this list?
Well, if Apple provided some effing instructions with their devices the world might have understood this. But no, Apple tells you nothing and expects it all to be ‘intuitive’ because their designers are such geniuses. Well - surprise, surprise - it is intuitive that this is a list of open apps.
If you have an iPhone you haven’t rebooted in a year, and you have an app you ran a year ago and never did a force quit on & never ran again, it is still in the list of apps. It is highly unlikely to still be in memory, but it is still in the list (it might still be in memory if you have managed to have that phone for a year and never run very many apps and none were memory hungry…or say you got a newer phone and this one sat on a desk attached to a charger for a year unused).
I think that is actually the goal. Whomever designed it decided people want a list of apps that they had been running, and it is an implementation detail if that app will need to relaunch or not, so don’t bother people with it.
It isn’t a bad choice, and back when the first iPhones came out and RAM was extremely tight it was arguably a great choice because that list would have only had one to three apps in it & people generally want a computer to remember more then that for them.
I would personally like the “in memory” apps to be distinguishable. Badges for ones that actually run in the background (like a little phone for VOIP apps, a note for music/podcast/audio apps, a stopwatch for ‘about to be put to sleep any second now’, and merely bold text for ‘still in memory because we haven’t killed it, but it isn’t even running’), however I’m not head of design at Apple. I mean I’m no longer at Apple, and wasn’t in design at all when I was, and this sort of UX is really the kind of thing that only the design team is going to get to do, and only people really high up on that list…
The current head of UX prefers things to be as invisible as possible. Like on th eMac he prefers common controls be invisible unless the mouse is over them (like the remaining time on the current song in iTunes, or if I’m wrong about that exact thing, similar stuff, like on a huge monitor you need to be hiding everything all the time?).
Anyway, that is a whole lot of words to say: yeah, it wasn’t written down anywhere, and your mental model of what that list means while wrong was utterly reasonable. You ain’t dumb.
Of corse nothing really gets written down for computers anymore - I can hardly blame Apple (MS, or anyone else!). Manuals are expensive to write, and basically nobody reads them. It is still a shame though, maybe less then 1% of people would read a manual, but I bet the few that did would get a lot out of it. Plus we would have more variation on the endless stream of articles about “iPhone secret tips” and “Secrets of the Windows masters” if the people who wrote that sort of stuff had any real access to information
It is their effing job!* And people need them. The onboard ‘help’ is non-existent - why not some easily accessible, simple and basic tips/facts about how this device works - I’m not asking for a hundreds pages explanation of every minute aspect of iOS functionality, just some written guide to basic operations. Maybe it exists -I have no idea where I might get such help from my phone itself when I might need it.
(*In the bad old days when I worked in software, documentation and user manuals were a critical part of the process. These days it all has to be intuitive and is therefore either dumbed down or all the best functionality is never used 'cos nobody knows about it.)
I reboot my iPhone daily - if fully power off and power on is what counts as reboot these days. And when I power back up again the list of ‘open apps’ is still there. But presumably they are all images and they are not actually still in memory?
Last time I was in the Apple Store I was swapping a MacBook Pro power cord that had worn out through light usage after I’d given them a call. The genius at the Apple Store tried to backhandedly accuse me of abusing AppleCare.
I told him if it does this in less than three years with my MacBook Pro, which hardly ever leaves the desk, then they have a serious quality problem. (Whoever I talked to over the phone clearly knew it.)
I would love this as well. This is something that iOS is really bad at. Like, cool, App X has access to my mic. That’s not really interesting. What I want to know is if App X has been using my mic, and for how long. You kind of get that with location info but it’s still woefully inadequate.
God damn, I fucking HATE this design pattern so much. The whole idea of magic buttons that only appear when it has focus is one of the worst of the trendy design anti-patterns I’ve seen come into prominence. (That, and hidden scroll bars.) I don’t know who thought “move the mouse to this invisible area and a button will appear” was a good idea but I’d love to punch them a few times.
It’s not only Apple that’s guilt of this – I see this all over the place these days. It sucks.
And they are obsolete the moment they get published. And I fully agree with you – all the big companies are terrible about this. It’s even worse when you try to find some old docs (because you’re working on something that needs some sort of compatibility with an older version) and you have to deal with link rot or the documentation was updated and scrubbed of the old stuff and you need to hope the Wayback Machine has it.
I’ve had three different MacBook pros in the last few decades, each with a different power connector. And each and every one of those cables has broken, with two of them turning a smokey brown/black at the stress relief from heat. And this is with careful use. Apple has a quality control problem when it comes to their power adapter cables and stress relief. And there’s no way the genius bar people don’t know about it unless they are new on the job.
I can’t believe letting an Adobe app run any longer than absolutely necessary would ever make things better than the alternative of deliberately and joyfully killing it with fire.
Yep, those two apps are contenders for trying to do as much in the background as possible that the OS will allow. They also are the biggest violators of Apple’s directive that any app running on iOS needs to be ready to die at any moment. It was originally because battery life was such an issue, so iOS maintained strict control of what could run.
As to why those two work so hard to “play dirty”? The phone owner is is Apple’s customer, but Facebook’s crop to be harvested.
I recently found out the equivalent on the Watch is called the “Dock.” It shows recent apps or ones you marked favorite. It’s similar to the macOS Dock except there’s no indicator showing which apps are open (which changed from a white/blue light to a black dot years ago and I don’t even see the indicator mentioned in their current documentation).
On the phone it’s just a list of the previous apps you’ve used. I’ve noticed when using a third-party podcast app if it is not playing and I switch to and from it the podcast app will have been closed almost immediately even though it shows up in recently used. If battery usage is the concern, I lean on battery activity in settings. It quickly gave me yet another reason to not have the Facebook app installed at all or other drains like having poor cell reception.
I think this has been a long trend everywhere–although, Apple did seem to lead the way for a lot of it. Hardware used to often include some sort of schematics. Professional software would have a physical book of documentation. That seemed to go digital-only around the mid 2000s. I think losing a physical book and move to the web made them less structured and lost them a lot of resources. I think the move to the web relies on great search. A huge frustration working with internal documentation at various jobs is not appreciating that search is how documentation is discovered. A lot of it is spread across different siloed systems (email, wiki, chat, source code) and no time is spent bringing them together. This has happened to consumer goods, too. I picked up a Lego set last week and it included a basic pamphlet that directed you to download the app for assembly instructions. To be fair, I often lose appliance manuals (they’re all saved in a pile inside some drawer) but I aggressively seek out PDFs when I need to reference them.
Apple seems to have pretty good documentation online (not awesome, but not terrible). The problem is you have to know the thing you’re looking for exists, you have an Internet connection (which is a huge issue when troubleshooting), then you have to find it, and lastly, it may not contain the detail you need.
When you are finished, I will be behind you in the queue ready to punch them some more, to give you a break and a rest before you are ready to take over again. They need to be punched until they are ready to sign in blood that they will spend the entire rest of their lives re-engineering the fuckwittery they’ve propagated.
Wow, I didn’t realize springboard persists those across reboot. I guess I too have learned some stuff here tonight!
Well, not really. It is Apple’s “job” to make products people find valuable. (ok, really it is Apple’s job to make a return on investment, but Apple deliberately chooses to interpret this as making products people like to use…they are not always good at that, but it is the goal)
If they need a manual to make that happen, producing a manual is part of that job (and they still do for things like Final Cut, or mostly do for things like the developer docs that come with Xcode, and so on). For many products people won’t read a manual, so that is wasted money that could be spent on something else.
You wold read a manual about how to use the iPhone? Well I believe you. Apple even believes you. They also think you belong to a group that makes up under 1% of the market. So they don’t make a manual for you (or for me, I would read one – provide it isn’t too big). They invest that into the tutorial app and other places.
I don’t think the tutorial app is a good substitute for a manual, but way more people use it and get some value out of it then look at manuals for consumer apps.
I’m not entirely convinced this is a bad policy, although I think Apple could get some real milage out of making something maybe less polished then a manual that is more of an “info dump” that 3rd parties could turn into “the missing manual series”, and “top 25 things you didn’t know about your iPhone”. Basically stay out of the business of wrapping it up into a nice document, but be in the business of supplying information that “someone” should tell people about.
Interesting. I have good luck with power cables (watch, now that I have said that I’m going to break like six in the next two days). The last time I went to the genius bar they provided free service to my then seven year old iMac, and I hadn’t even bought AppleCare for it in the first place! (the genius searched around and found that my failed drive belonged to a serial number range that “broke a little more than Apple thought was normal” & he got me free parts and service). I did go in with the question “hey, my iMac disk broke and I’m trying to figure out what it costs to replace v buy a new one”, so he actually most likely cost Apple an iMac sale in the short term, but people tend to remember being treated well, and if I weren’t already predisposed to buy Apple products he would have given a huge boost to my likelihood to replace that iMac with another Mac later.
Hmmmm, thinking about it now, I never had any Mac that used the “right angled” MagSafe. So maybe that is the bad one? If that the one you had that broke?
Yeah. Punching Alan Dye isn’t super high on my list of life goals, I would prefer to talk him into a better design pattern, however I have significant doubt that I could get him to budge. He is a design professional after all, I’m a programmer. Still he is Apple’s current champion of that design pattern.
Actually to be honest I was going to absolutely agree about punching him, but I wrote his name down and then it became a concrete idea of me punching a specific person, and I kind of lost the desire to do it. Like I hate this design pattern, but it isn’t like punching someone who insists on smoking in my car. Gah, life is complicated.
The Genius Bar has been a very mixed bag for me. Sometimes the service is great. On at least two occasions I’ve had various Mac laptops replaced with newer, better ones after multiple logic board failures at no cost to me. Other times they refused to help me (like when my Beats headphones decided to snap in two).
I’ve definitely not had good luck with Apple cables due to their shitty strain relief. Power cables, charging cables, etc – doesn’t matter how much I baby them – after enough use they always bulge, split, break, or otherwise go into a failure mode. I imagine Jobs or Ive demanding designers make the cables this way because of some kind of “but strain relief is just so ugly” justification.
It could just be a punch to the shoulder or something – not even a hard one. Just one to communicate “fuck this design pattern.” I’m definitely not a violent guy but this fills me with rage – it’s just so unnecessary and such a prime example of form over function.
I’ve seemed to have much better luck than many. Usually, people are talking about lightning cables and my suspicion is that they use them while charging–where strain and heat causes it to break. I generally don’t and have only had mild issues with one or two cables over the one or two dozen I’ve had. But I’ve also tended to buy a lot of third party cables due to cost. I noticed a quality change when they started claiming more environmentally conscious materials used in their products and kind of think that’s a bigger contributor. I do see some strain relief (perhaps inadequate) in their lighting, magsafe, and USB-C charging cables. I know the current crop of cables still have those issues. I’m not sure strain relief was always there and I can’t find any info on cable design changes over the years.
There’s a Tutorial app? I have the Tips thing but it is pretty random and if I follow its link to Books to get the iPhone user guide (yeah, ok, there is OR RATHER WAS such a thing) I can download to Books the iOS guide for iOS 14.x.
My iPhone was acquired second hand and will not run anything later than iOS 12.5 (iPhone 6) so that iOS 14 guide will tell me all sorts of stuff about functions I do not have (and probably not about functions the later iOS no longer has).
This is the other thing I loathe about Apple. They seem to think that customers cease to exist if they have back-level hardware or software and refuse to offer (or even leave available online) support items for older stuff. I’ve looked online at Apple and there are old guides to iOS 5, 6 7 but not 12. I could find no iPhone 6 User Guide.
I think this is why people accuse the Internet of making society more violent, because we like to use language more like a standup comedy routine of hyperbole, but surprisingly few actually would act on it. Saying you would like to punch the guy is just an attempt at purple prose for many, a sort of joke about how something annoys you.
