18 ms·

Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

631 points by wojtczyk 2y ago

galad87 2y ago
macOS on a low dpi screen is mostly full of those kind of issues. I wouldn't recommend using a low dpi screen.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  The problem appeared in the screenshots that the article shows, I don't think it has anything to do with the screen.
  - galad87 2y ago
    It's a screenshot of macOS running in low-dpi mode.
- wruza 2y ago
  I’ve used fullhd imac/osx for many years until around 2018 and never noticed anything like that. Easier to call it “low dpi issues” now that they destroyed it, I guess ;)
  - kalleboo 2y ago
    2018 was about when they stopped selling the last Mac with a non-Retina display, so that would make sense for when they stopped testing for it.
    - necovek 2y ago
      It's not only about stopping testing: they dropped subpixel rendering altogether. Though this seems more like a hinting issue.
    - chrisjj 2y ago
      You don't stop testing when you stop selling X. You stop testing when you stop supporting X.
  - galad87 2y ago
    6 years is a long time ;)
  - aulin 2y ago
    They removed subpixel hinting after Mojave IIRC. Now it's unusable on anything less than a 27inch 4K display, and it's been like that since years...
- baq 2y ago
  It’s crazy that I had to buy BetterDisplay (great tool btw) just to get fonts from incomprehensible to merely ugly on a 25x16 monitor via a fake 2x scaled one. Windows renders razor sharp even without gfx drivers.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    There’s a great article with explanations on the net. But the gist is that macOS renders like a giant image with no care for pixels and small details. It works fine when using native resolution (low dpi) or have enough pixels for their “retina” approved resolution. Anything else and it looks blurry. Linux and Windows use actual pixels for their rendering, and even with anti-aliasing, it looks sharp. If you’re stuck with macOS, aim for 4k at least.
    - jwells89 2y ago
      Ideally, you want a screen that natively runs at a resolution that’s a perfect 2x multiplier of a mainstream 1x resolution that has the right amount of screen real estate for the screen size. So for example, a 20”-24” screen should be 4K so it can run at 1920x1080 @ 2x. Similarly for 27”, you want 5K which is 2560x1440 @ 2x. This is a really good post describing how it all works: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/
      - skydhash 2y ago
        That’s the article. I got hit with this issue after purchasing a 27” QHD monitor. Native resolution made everything too small, and everything else was blurry. I gave up after trying pretty much everything and bought a 24” 4K monitor for the mac.
- wojtczyk 2y ago
  The issue persisted when I disconnected the external screen, but I probably should have taken additional screenshots from the built-in laptop screen.
heywoods 2y ago
This post is going to lead to a new calculator and a calculator app on the iPad.
- cubefox 2y ago
  Braun may have some ideas: https://ganjieyin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/digitalskeuomorphcalcul.jpg https://ganjieyin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/d...
- dagmx 2y ago
  They already have that in iOS/iPadOS 18 fwiw
- wojtczyk 2y ago
  Right, I think they announced it at WWDC ;) Before I even posted. Living the future.
hakanderyal 2y ago
My bet would be on some compounding error from long usage also. I'm using Apple Notes and it fails in some random ways after keeping it open for 1-2 weeks: When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random stuff, dragging text won't work, I can check/uncheck todo boxes. Goes away when I restart it.
- al_borland 2y ago
  I ran into this in Notes as well. Restating Notes fixed it, but wasn’t my first instinct, as I view copy/paste as a system task and didn’t think it would be impacted within a single app. Seeing that I’m not the only one, I need to remember to restart notes at the first sign of an issue, rather than trying the action over and over trying to figure out what’s going on.
  - necovek 2y ago
    Hopefully, seeing as you are not the only one, you figure out where to file a bug report and then file it too. And then it gets fixes. Ha, I am too used to it being more accessible to file a bug report, having spent most of my career with GNU/Linux (contributing and using since 90s).
    - al_borland 2y ago
      https://www.apple.com/feedback/notes/ https://www.apple.com/feedback/notes/ Or more generically… https://www.apple.com/feedback https://www.apple.com/feedback …if you have bugs to report that aren’t for Notes.
- nomel 2y ago
  Maybe the offsets themselves represent a binary number within that byte that corresponding to the bits within that byte. Maybe if you give it the right sequence, a message will emerge.
- jval43 2y ago
  Notes has been super buggy for a while. The failure modes are so weird I don't even understand how it's possible for a text editor. E.g. text and selections rendered floating between or on top of lines of text. I wonder how they manage to bork it so hard.
ntrcessor 2y ago
If I recall correctly, that is a kerning issue with the font. At the edges of the font is not a solid line, but rather more like every other pixel so that the characters can be closer together. This causes the up/down movement of one character to the next, as they fit together like poorly made puzzle pieces. And just how bad it looks depends on the size of the pixel on the monitor, and how much "bleed" it has with it's neighbors. (I don't recall the tech terms for this.)
- teo_zero 2y ago
  Isn't kerning about left-right and not up-down, though?
  - trilbyglens 2y ago
    Yes
  - jfoutz 2y ago
    I think ascents and descents fall under keming. You don’t want a j to bump into a b on the next line. So you have short letters from time to time. But that might be an archaic usage, or I’m wrong.
    - isametry 2y ago
      You mean another, more compact version of `j` with a shorter descender? Well that’s called an alternate glyph. Kerning is strictly about the relative spacing between two adjacent glyphs. The only case that would ever be vertical is if you’re writing vertical lines (such as in Chinese or Japanese).
      - johnwalkr 2y ago
        Interesting... I'm in Japan and I was about to reply that Chinese and Japanese are almost always fixed-width, but luckily I grabbed a product next to me (laundry detergent) covered in Japanese. I was expecting to see perfect line-up of characters on adjacent lines proving they are fixed-width. They aren't even close, and this is true for both vertical and horizontal text on everything I look at. I opened a few apps like word and confirmed by default everything is fixed-width. So TIL Japanese is fixed width for plebs but any professional copy has way more kerning that I realised.
tanelpoder 2y ago
Haha, off-by-one pixel error! I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH), but I also have a documents folder that I’ve accumulated over decades. I still use various .txt files in the docs folder as my low tech note taking apps. I use the Spotlight or Alfred keyboard shortcuts (that also use spotlight index?) for quickly opening the files when needed - and annoyingly my most important file - notes.txt - regularly disappears from the Spotlight index and suggestions. It’s been like that for at least 5 years, probably closer to 10. I’m not even trying anymore, will just open the file from command line with vi as the fallback step.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  Speaking of bad vision for a moment I thought I read “I still see MsDOS as the best choice” and almost yelled out what patrician taste!
  - tanelpoder 2y ago
    Well, you can run multitasking in TSRs & keyboard interrupt handlers (the original event loop)… implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader…
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader… I'm pretty sure both of those have implementations available for DOS already.
      - tanelpoder 2y ago
        I recalled something from distant past - MSDOS multitasking with DESQView (apparently the same vendor who built QEMM): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
- jval43 2y ago
  Funnily enough a simple fgrep is super fast on SSDs and actually reliable. Even across TBs of data. With Spotlight you can never be sure. And to be fair, the Windows equivalent sucks just as much.
quink 2y ago
Starting to see this with view counts on YouTube in Firefox after some recent UI updates.
- rv3392 2y ago
  Oh that's what that is. I saw this on YouTube in Firefox the other day and thought YouTube was just A/B testing a quirky new way to display view counts.
- rzzzt 2y ago
  I don't remember in which browser I saw this, Chrome or Firefox, but when a block of text suddenly becomes a bit more animated (eg. moves around in a div) you could see it change from Windows' native font rendering method to DirectWrite-style fuzzy edges.
userbinator 2y ago
My bet is on a random bitflip more than an actual bug in the code, based on its localised nature and rarity. Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel fonts all the time.
- r-w 2y ago
  A bet on cosmic rays is a rare bet indeed ;)
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Rare but does happen. Not necessarily cosmic rays but things like marginal timing can cause errors like this, especially on GPU buses/VRAM that tend to have less protection. GPGPU and now AI has made accuracy of results more important, but before that, GPUs were regularly ran at the limits and it was assumed that occasional barely-visible artifacts or otherwise computation errors whose results aren't noticeable were acceptable. (Imagine you're playing a 3D game and a few pixels in a frame occasionally have incorrect values, or some shapes are a pixel off --- unless the errors are massive, you're unlikely to notice.)
- matja 2y ago
  If only Apple used ECC RAM, then that would be easy to confirm.
hollerith 2y ago
Maybe the bug is the need for everything to line up perfectly.
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago
  Yᵒu'ʳe ʳiᵍhᵗ, iᵗ's ⁿoᵗ sᵒ bᵃd ᵒnᶜe ʸoᵘ'rᵉ uˢeᵈ tᵒ iᵗ.
dylan-m 2y ago
One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/ https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/. That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing. I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.
- trilbyglens 2y ago
  This is not a software bug, but rather an optical phenomenon called "chromatic aberration". What's happening is that your glasses are bending light at different angles depending on the wavelength, to the red and blue and green are landing at slightly different places on your retina. It's a hard problem to solve optically and requires specially shaped lens. It's a common issue in telescopes, with higher end expensive scopes having these specially shaped lenses to reduce this effect.
  - voctor 2y ago
    From the post: > In conclusion, the off-center “x” is real and probably an artifact of the display or how it is rendered. It is unlikely that it is the result of chromatic aberration.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - meta-level 2y ago
    from the comment: > That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.
Bondi_Blue 2y ago
You can try submitting a bug report with Feedback Assistant.app or apple.com/feedback, but there’s no guarantee they will see it.
- gield 2y ago
  Someone will definitely see it, but maybe not take action on it. Now that it's on HN, it will definitely get more traction.
superjan 2y ago
Possibly they ask the text engine to render halfway two pixel lines. It will round up or down quite randomly when fp errors accumulate.
djbusby 2y ago
Maybe now is a good time to remind everyone: your vision will deteriorate. Keep this in mind when designing. When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable. According to my eye doctor the screen time is causing eyesight issues earlier. We're not designed to stare at a bright light 40cm away all day. May want to look at some eye exercises - or at least something far away.
- mrob 2y ago
  Very few screens are bright enough to compete with the normal brightness of outdoor sunlight. There's no evidence that close focus or looking at bright screens causes eyesight problems. Bright light actually seems to protect against myopia. Here's a good overview: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/
  - immibis 2y ago
    Once I took apart an LCD monitor (with LED backlight) since one of the backlight elements was broken (I got it broken for very little money). I thought I'd see whether the LCD element can be used in front of a window to make a sci-fi type screen. Turns out the backlight is much, much brighter than daylight, and the LCD lets almost no light through. The LCD was too dark to make a cool sci-fi screen, and the backlight sitting separately was blindingly bright.
  - IWeldMelons 2y ago
    From the same article: "In contrast, long-wavelength light is growth-inhibiting and short-wavelength light is growth-promoting in rhesus monkey (57) and tree shrew (58)." Modern monitors have high amount of shortwave spectrum, blue is unusually shortwave.
    - mrob 2y ago
      The "in contrast" is to chickens and guinea pigs, where the opposite occurs. What relevance this has to humans is unclear.
usaphp 2y ago
Reminds me of Microsoft calculator having a one pixel off between buttons: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/the_microsoft_calculator_buttons_being_one_pixel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...
- theGeatZhopa 2y ago
  That's awfull!! I couldn't use it anymore after I've seen it once
  - layer8 2y ago
    Use the old one, it’s better anyway: https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-windows-7-in-windows-10/ https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-window...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wojtczyk 2y ago
  Ouch! I had no idea.
manoweb 2y ago
I’m pretty sure there are Apple employees that read HN. It would have been cool to include a build number of the OS
- akerr 2y ago
  Or, you know, file a Feedback: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/ https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Don’t do that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
raws 2y ago
YouTube viewership numbers ha et a similar issue.
b0ner_t0ner 2y ago
[flagged]
theGeatZhopa 2y ago
It's font hinting and kerning. But whyyy the heck only in the last few chars?
- isametry 2y ago
  Well you’ve just answered your own question: because it’s not just font metrics. There seems to be more to that custom view than a standard line of text; something about that view is not optimized for low-dpi displays.
mgaunard 2y ago
In that picture I'm personally more bothered by the antialiasing than by the misalignment.
- dingaling 2y ago
  I'm disturbed by the ambiguous UI. Is 'Hide Binary" enabled or disabled? If it's enabled, why is it a different colour to the slider that has presumably selected Base-16? Are the binary digits editable? Are "ASCII" and "Unicode" mutually exclusive as you'd expect, in which case why are they both the same colour?
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t There is: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/ https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/ That said, it isn’t very user-friendly, and I find that they don’t seem to pay much attention to it. When they do respond, it tends to be some form of “#wontfix. Please close this.” That looks like a fairly ugly little bug. I suspect they know about it now, thanks to the HN Bug Reporter. It tends to highlight these types of things.
- minkles 2y ago
  Conversely all 4 of the bugs I reported with that were fixed in the next minor release!
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    It may well have to do with the types of bugs I report. Many are Xcode bugs, and Xcode is one of the most productive bug farms on Earth. I also submit feature requests and usability issues. My experience is pure anecdata. I usually end up closing the reports, after a number of months of them being ignored.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    RNG coding? I.e. what bugs replaced them...
  - atribecalledqst 2y ago
    I reported a bug that occurs in a specific configuration of the Music app (trying to use Home Sharing + using bluetooth headphones), never heard anything back. I wonder if it's been fixed in the latest version of the OS, I still haven't upgraded...
- cromka 2y ago
  Every now and then I think about starting a public bug report tracker for Apple bugs since they keep theirs to themselves. The number of maddening but minuscule bugs I run into makes me wish I was using Linux again, where I can fix them myself, or at the very least report them upstream and hope someone else eventually does so. By not having a public record of bugs Apple conveniently hides the sheer number of them and how many people they affect.
jb1991 2y ago
On mobile devices, Apple’s Calculator app has always been one of the most frustrating apps I’ve ever used, and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself. If you press buttons quickly, like you would a normal calculator, many of the key presses simply don’t register at all. I’m not sure if they’re prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality, but it’s incredibly surprising from a company that focuses on user interaction, supposedly.
- bhauer 2y ago
  > prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality This describes iOS in a nutshell.
- artursapek 2y ago
  The lock screen is even worse. I have to slow down to input my passcode or button pushes don’t register.
  - afandian 2y ago
    I’m glad someone else noticed this. I never manage to unlock my iPhone first time.
    - artursapek 2y ago
      It’s pretty sad
    - Seb-C 2y ago
      I have a similar problem on my Zenfone, there is a weird delay between key presses, especially when repeating a character twice, so that I often fail my password.
    - nkrisc 2y ago
      I always continue to fail several times because after failing once the last press of my last attempt gets registered as the first press of the next attempt so if I’m going fast my next attempt will fail too, until I stop and enter it like my grandmother would.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
I would say it's a feature: it's supposed to be like a mechanical odometer.
- keyringlight 2y ago
  Even if Apple were adopting skeuomorphism it would take a lot more change in design elements to support the concept that there's a mechanical system driving it, and for a binary display I'd assume a row of lights would be more appropriate to how this would read on appropriate machines
DavidPiper 2y ago
Comically, I didn't even notice those wobbly numbers in the first screenshot, I was too busy noticing: - "Unicode" button label way off center - The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position - The indicators for bits 31 and 63 are not aligned with each other - x and + not being horizontally aligned (I believe this is an icon-font issue, seen on HN before so knew to look for it)
- countmora 2y ago
  > "Unicode" button label way off center Its actually the center of the button, I made a video for context: https://imgur.com/a/1Y9O8dS https://imgur.com/a/1Y9O8dS > The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position Might be due to the image compression, it looks fine on my MB.
  - samatman 2y ago
    > Its actually the center of the button Upvoted for putting in the effort, and because you make a correct point. But the Unicode button is perceptually off center, because ASCII is a smaller word, and there's no visible boundary between the buttons. This comes up a lot in iconography, the classic example is a play triangle (like the media control) in a circle. Placing the triangle in the geometric center won't look centered, it needs to be a tiny bit to the right of that to account for the shape. No separation between the buttons means you can't see the bounds which the words are centered in, so it looks off. The 8 and 10 have the same problem, for the same reason. A visible background-gray line between the buttons would solve this problem, it should be 'squircled' to make it I-shaped and match the outer edges.
  - fizzynut 2y ago
    From zooming into your clip both ASCII and Unicode are wrong: - ASCII is off center ~43/50 pixel margins - Unicode is off center ~20/25 pixel margins - Both have different margin sizes - The button sizes of both are the same. - The Hide button is offset from both 8/10/16 selector and ascii/unicode buttons - Even if everything was correct, because there is no contrast between "Off" and background, it's going to look wrong anyway
wslh 2y ago
Beyond this bug, nowadays accessibility features are one of the most used in my setup, and I think as software engineers age they will become more sophisticated. I remember using fonts of 8pt in an IDE to "squeeze " the potential of the monitor.
trissylegs 2y ago
There's a similar bug in the Windows calculator. One of the buttons is about 1 pixel wider than the rest.
virtualritz 2y ago
And this on a Mac. :D That would have never happened under Jobs's watch.
megablast 2y ago
One that Apple seems to ignore. You click on something. And the micro second before it changes the hi, causing you to click something else.
- unwind 2y ago
  Wut? It changes before the click? That sounds ... magical. And what is "the hi"? Typo of "ui"?
  - cubefox 2y ago
    Google has this problem in its search suggestions. They update with some delay, and humans also have a significant delay in how quickly they can react to a changing stimulus. So I tap on the wrong search suggestion. One problem is that they aren't satisfying monotonicity: the suggestion can change unexpectedly even if further inputs keep exactly matching the old suggestion.
jacobp100 2y ago
If I may pitch my own app, TechniCalc has this same mode, along with a bunch of other stuff the built in app doesn’t support. It works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc
sigio 2y ago
This is to fit in with the windows calculator, which also has off-by-one pixel errors: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/the_microsoft_calculator_buttons_being_one_pixel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...
kibwen 2y ago
How would you even tell in the first place? The contrast on those digits is so low and their font weight is so light as to render them essentially invisible. And as far as bad design goes, why are the bit position indicators on the right (0, 32) center-justified underneath their digits, whereas the ones on the left (31, 63) are left-justified?
rustybolt 2y ago
> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t This is infuriating and the same for all the big companies (at least Google, Microsoft, Apple); you have a serious issue and simply no way to talk to a representative. The best you can do is post something on Hacker News and hope it somehow gets picked up. I worked at a company that paid Microsoft a lot to have a 1-day SLA for support. When I contacted them, I got a reply back weeks later saying "hey sorry I missed your email". About two weeks later (which was the time it took to email back and forth), it was clear that I had to insert another ticket and mark the subject as something else (that was not directly related, but apparently the team responsible for that subject was also working on the functionality I found a bug in. There was no way for me to know this since it was something internal to Microsoft). So, I had to go through the whole procedure again. Once I did that, the reply was "oh yeah, we dropped that functionality but the documentation doesn't mention it. we recommend you use <technology X> for this". Where, of course, technology X did not support the feature I was trying to use.
- wojtczyk 2y ago
  Thanks! It looks like posting on Hacker News works well :) In the meantime a few people pointed out the "Feedback Assistant" for Apple. There's a website and an app that spotlight finds.
spacecadet 2y ago
Casio FX115ES Plus, its only $15. Looks great, feels great, just works.
imchillyb 2y ago
I’ve been using an app called PCalc on Apple’s App Store. The Apple calculator is a frustrating mess to use. PCalc does scientific, engineering, and A to B calculations for most things. I wouldn’t go back to Apple’s calculator app even if Apple gave me a credit for the PCalc app. Nope.
yayitswei 2y ago
Reminded me of this article about how centering things is the hardest problem in computer science (with plenty of examples). https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/ https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
- abhinavk 2y ago
  Did he remove the cursor effect on his website?
  - dpassens 2y ago
    You need to toggle the sun switch top right to moon, if you mean the "dark mode" effect.
    - troupo 2y ago
      There's (or used to be) a multiplayer cursor on the site. You'd see other visitors' cursors moving across the page
- faresahmed 2y ago
  Funnily enough, even the "dark mode toggle" icon in the blog is not aligned correctly with the navbar text. https://imgur.com/a/1xSCMWb https://imgur.com/a/1xSCMWb
cubefox 2y ago
[flagged]
- recursive 2y ago
  But your comment is acceptable?
  - cubefox 2y ago
    I didn't upvote though.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lapcat 2y ago
Apple software quality has gone into the trash the past 10 years. I'm not talking about initial quality but rather about "mature" quality, i.e., the current public versions almost a full year after a major release. I was just talking about this yesterday: somehow TextEdit on Mac has been wrecked. TextEdit, which is essentially a wrapper around NSTextView, was more or less "perfect" 15-20 years ago. Now I experience a bug where the window is blank when I open a document until I click inside a window, and scrolling performance in a long document is atrocious. For example, if I try to scroll backward, from the end of the document, it stutters and can lose my place. This doesn't depend on the document; it happens all the time. I guess that Apple rewrote everything a few years ago with TextKit 2, and it shows, but not in a good way. The impression I get from Apple is that Craig Federighi has given engineers license to keep churning out new features and not worry much about bugs, or design, or the user interface. And if something becomes a massive problem, they just pause on features for a couple of weeks, which is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
throwpoaster 2y ago
Aren't the raised digits an indication of endianness or something? It looks like a transmission bit pattern. Or isn't high low high low double high double low the original Apple disk format? It's something like that. Just guessing -- it doesn't look accidental to me.
ABCD0 2y ago
Juste my vision
fferen 2y ago
On the topic of calculator font bugs, Google's calculator randomly switches between two fonts: https://pasteboard.co/lmbr4iE6BJej.png https://pasteboard.co/lmbr4iE6BJej.png https://pasteboard.co/sU3GA5psIaT0.png https://pasteboard.co/sU3GA5psIaT0.png
- qingcharles 2y ago
  The first one is worse because the 0 looks more like an O. What platform?
  - fferen 2y ago
    Edge on Mac, but IIRC it happens on Windows as well. Just checked in firefox/mac and seems OK.
- diggan 2y ago
  Hard to know if you're referring to Chromebook/Android/Web, but looks like the web one. If that's the calculator from the google.com web-page, that is surely a stylesheet/font that failed to load (sometimes?). Try to look at the browser developer console next time it happens for some request errors.
klausa 2y ago
>Maybe the UI coordinate system is using floats and a rounding error aggregated over many days It's using floats on 32bit (...which means only the watchOS currently, I guess?) and doubles elsewhere. Are there any modern UI frameworks that _don't_ use floats/doubles? I was gonna guess CSS, but even that has supported sub-pixel precisions on HiDPI displays for a while now. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5709698/html-sub-pixel-border/40833470#40833470 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5709698/html-sub-pixel-b...
amai 2y ago
Relevant remark in the comment section of the blog post: "after I took screenshots and restarted the calculator, the misplacements were gone. I am looking out for it to happen again."
Modified3019 2y ago
They clearly need better telemetry in the calculator app.
nickly 2y ago
[flagged]
tlhunter 2y ago
Here's something that really irks me. On macOS I'll use Spotlight (Cmd+Space) to do some quick math. For example, press Cmd+Space, type "1.2+3.4", and it sort of displays 4.6. Now to copy the results you either have to click the copy option in the dropdown, using your mouse (no thanks), or press enter to get the results in Calculator. Assuming you last left the calculator in "Programmer" mode the calculator displays the value "4". Ideally, pressing enter in Spotlight would simply replace the text in the input bar with the result. The equivalent Alt+Space tool in KDE (Plasma Search) performs math this way and it's amazing. I haven't used Quicksilver or Alfred in a decade but I'm sure they do the right thing, too. Otherwise both Spotlight and Plasma Search are both pretty great. Type something like "14oz to lb" and they both display the result (though Plasma Search displays the exact "0.875 pounds" while Spotlight displays the rounded "0.88 pounds"). Overall I'm mostly disappointed with first-party Apple software. Being one of the richest companies in the world I have higher expectations.
- zoover2020 2y ago
  Sounds like Alfred could solve this problem quite easily? I wouldn't give spotlight too much hope from Apple's end. Have seen some very nice Alfred workflows
- NaOH 2y ago
  I run an older version of macOS, but it's historically been the case that Command-C copies the result of a calculation entered in Spotlight. They key is that the Copy command must be performed when the calculation is not selected for the result to be copied to the Clipboard. Put another way, type the math to be performed in Spotlight, then press Command-C and the result has been copied.
rgovostes 2y ago
A friend doing homework for a university assignment, circa Leopard or Snow Leopard, noticed that Calculator produced negative values when raising a negative number to an even power. The bug turned out to be in CFNumber, in Core Foundation. CFNumber does a lot of fiddly stuff at the bit level for performance, and one of their optimizations for exponentiation was incorrect. Somehow it was never found by tests or due to buggy behaviors it created in other apps, but by someone clicking buttons and thinking critically about the output.
- FabHK 2y ago
  In Excel (and some other languages), unary minus has higher precedence than exponentiation, so that -x^2 = (-x)^2 = x^2. That can bite you (for example when calculating the normal probability density function “manually”).
  - secondcoming 2y ago
    Are there languages where this isn’t the case?
    - cjbillington 2y ago
      Python for one, and given that, I'd assume most languages.
    - smabie 2y ago
      almost all of them?
    - grumpyprole 2y ago
      Standard mathematical notation?
      - cubefox 2y ago
        It's arguably ambiguous.
OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
I like Apple's hardware and underlying OS enough to shell out for MacBook Pros but, man, their homebuilt applications are a PITA. The RPN calculator on my high powered new MBP doesn't have a scientific or engineering notation option. Same on my old MBP as well. I guess it is a feature. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank
- Aloisius 2y ago
  Sequoia's calculator has RPN with scientific notation now.
  - OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
    Thanks! Look forward to getting it when it is released.
rgovostes 2y ago
I can usually appreciate Apple's design homages. The original iOS Calculator is inspired by the Braun ET, and it makes some sense to provide a familiar design for basic use. But it inherits baggage from the limitations of the handheld calculators of the 1970s. Why can't I use the - button to write a negative sign? What does "AC" mean? The scientific calculator is an even worse design. There's a ton of invisible state, like the value stored in memory, or whether you're inside parentheses. The user has to hold the whole sequence of operations in their head, without clicking a single wrong button. Want to repeat a calculation with a different operand? Tough. Graphing calculators like the TI-84 that let you see and edit your input are so much more usable. Even better are notebook-style interfaces like Mathematica. It's a shame Apple won't pay homage to those designs.
- FabHK 2y ago
  Coming up in iOS 18.
  - rgovostes 2y ago
    Unless I missed something, they’ve added a handwriting mode, which is cool but not necessarily an improvement over something like Mathematica. I don’t want to have to carry an Apple Pencil with me and write long hand every time I want to solve an equation.
    - rgovostes 2y ago
      I did miss something, you can type in Math Notes in iOS 18. It’s a little glitchy in the betas though.
steve1977 2y ago
Proudly presented to you by the company that took 14 years to port the calculator to the iPad, because “if we do it, it has to be the greatest calculator app“
andrewinardeer 2y ago
Windows 11 lets you conveniently "pin" the calculator in standard mode, keeping it accessible on top of your active window – great for multitasking with calculations. However, switch to a different calculator mode (like scientific), and Windows inexplicably removes the pinning feature. This baffling decision feels so actively user hostile it is deserving of an award for poor design choices.
Aerbil313 2y ago
Once I had downloaded a HN thread for later reading, on my iPhone with Safari's built-in Download Linked File feature. When I opened it and was reading it (HN renders fine with just the HTML), I noticed a single line looking a bit off. Took my glasses off to take a closer look. I don't remember the specifics, but I think the spacing with the line above was slightly less than usual. Took screenshots and it was clearly visible zoomed in. Happened twice that day and never before, never after. I believe I witnessed a cosmic ray induced bit flip.
shmeeed 2y ago
This would never have gone past Jobs.
msephton 2y ago
My initial thoughts were that these issues were showing how things look on a non-retina display, or a display with non-default scaling. That does seem to be the case, but not entirely. I took some screenshots and I do not see the misaligned numbers at retina or non-retina resolutions, but I do see the odd bevelled edges on the 8/10/16 "tabs": https://imgur.com/a/PqqkWai https://imgur.com/a/PqqkWai Apple have pretty much given up on making things look correct on non-retina displays, so many things are positioned at what turn out to be half pixel steps. Depending on whether we're talking fonts or shapes things can jump by a pixel or become blurry. I wrote about this here: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/01/25/running-modern-macos-on-non-retina-displays/ https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/01/25/running-modern-ma...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

631 points by wojtczyk 2y ago

galad87 2y ago

macOS on a low dpi screen is mostly full of those kind of issues. I wouldn't recommend using a low dpi screen.

tsimionescu 2y ago
The problem appeared in the screenshots that the article shows, I don't think it has anything to do with the screen.
- galad87 2y ago
  It's a screenshot of macOS running in low-dpi mode.
wruza 2y ago
I’ve used fullhd imac/osx for many years until around 2018 and never noticed anything like that. Easier to call it “low dpi issues” now that they destroyed it, I guess ;)
- kalleboo 2y ago
  2018 was about when they stopped selling the last Mac with a non-Retina display, so that would make sense for when they stopped testing for it.
  - necovek 2y ago
    It's not only about stopping testing: they dropped subpixel rendering altogether. Though this seems more like a hinting issue.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    You don't stop testing when you stop selling X. You stop testing when you stop supporting X.
- galad87 2y ago
  6 years is a long time ;)
- aulin 2y ago
  They removed subpixel hinting after Mojave IIRC. Now it's unusable on anything less than a 27inch 4K display, and it's been like that since years...
baq 2y ago
It’s crazy that I had to buy BetterDisplay (great tool btw) just to get fonts from incomprehensible to merely ugly on a 25x16 monitor via a fake 2x scaled one. Windows renders razor sharp even without gfx drivers.
- skydhash 2y ago
  There’s a great article with explanations on the net. But the gist is that macOS renders like a giant image with no care for pixels and small details. It works fine when using native resolution (low dpi) or have enough pixels for their “retina” approved resolution. Anything else and it looks blurry. Linux and Windows use actual pixels for their rendering, and even with anti-aliasing, it looks sharp. If you’re stuck with macOS, aim for 4k at least.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    Ideally, you want a screen that natively runs at a resolution that’s a perfect 2x multiplier of a mainstream 1x resolution that has the right amount of screen real estate for the screen size. So for example, a 20”-24” screen should be 4K so it can run at 1920x1080 @ 2x. Similarly for 27”, you want 5K which is 2560x1440 @ 2x. This is a really good post describing how it all works: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/
    - skydhash 2y ago
      That’s the article. I got hit with this issue after purchasing a 27” QHD monitor. Native resolution made everything too small, and everything else was blurry. I gave up after trying pretty much everything and bought a 24” 4K monitor for the mac.
wojtczyk 2y ago
The issue persisted when I disconnected the external screen, but I probably should have taken additional screenshots from the built-in laptop screen.

heywoods 2y ago

This post is going to lead to a new calculator and a calculator app on the iPad.

cubefox 2y ago
Braun may have some ideas: https://ganjieyin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/digitalskeuomorphcalcul.jpg https://ganjieyin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/d...
dagmx 2y ago
They already have that in iOS/iPadOS 18 fwiw
wojtczyk 2y ago
Right, I think they announced it at WWDC ;) Before I even posted. Living the future.

hakanderyal 2y ago

My bet would be on some compounding error from long usage also. I'm using Apple Notes and it fails in some random ways after keeping it open for 1-2 weeks: When I try to copy something I select, it copies some random stuff, dragging text won't work, I can check/uncheck todo boxes. Goes away when I restart it.

al_borland 2y ago
I ran into this in Notes as well. Restating Notes fixed it, but wasn’t my first instinct, as I view copy/paste as a system task and didn’t think it would be impacted within a single app. Seeing that I’m not the only one, I need to remember to restart notes at the first sign of an issue, rather than trying the action over and over trying to figure out what’s going on.
- necovek 2y ago
  Hopefully, seeing as you are not the only one, you figure out where to file a bug report and then file it too. And then it gets fixes. Ha, I am too used to it being more accessible to file a bug report, having spent most of my career with GNU/Linux (contributing and using since 90s).
  - al_borland 2y ago
    https://www.apple.com/feedback/notes/ https://www.apple.com/feedback/notes/ Or more generically… https://www.apple.com/feedback https://www.apple.com/feedback …if you have bugs to report that aren’t for Notes.
nomel 2y ago
Maybe the offsets themselves represent a binary number within that byte that corresponding to the bits within that byte. Maybe if you give it the right sequence, a message will emerge.
jval43 2y ago
Notes has been super buggy for a while. The failure modes are so weird I don't even understand how it's possible for a text editor. E.g. text and selections rendered floating between or on top of lines of text. I wonder how they manage to bork it so hard.

ntrcessor 2y ago

If I recall correctly, that is a kerning issue with the font. At the edges of the font is not a solid line, but rather more like every other pixel so that the characters can be closer together. This causes the up/down movement of one character to the next, as they fit together like poorly made puzzle pieces. And just how bad it looks depends on the size of the pixel on the monitor, and how much "bleed" it has with it's neighbors. (I don't recall the tech terms for this.)

teo_zero 2y ago
Isn't kerning about left-right and not up-down, though?
- trilbyglens 2y ago
  Yes
- jfoutz 2y ago
  I think ascents and descents fall under keming. You don’t want a j to bump into a b on the next line. So you have short letters from time to time. But that might be an archaic usage, or I’m wrong.
  - isametry 2y ago
    You mean another, more compact version of `j` with a shorter descender? Well that’s called an alternate glyph. Kerning is strictly about the relative spacing between two adjacent glyphs. The only case that would ever be vertical is if you’re writing vertical lines (such as in Chinese or Japanese).
    - johnwalkr 2y ago
      Interesting... I'm in Japan and I was about to reply that Chinese and Japanese are almost always fixed-width, but luckily I grabbed a product next to me (laundry detergent) covered in Japanese. I was expecting to see perfect line-up of characters on adjacent lines proving they are fixed-width. They aren't even close, and this is true for both vertical and horizontal text on everything I look at. I opened a few apps like word and confirmed by default everything is fixed-width. So TIL Japanese is fixed width for plebs but any professional copy has way more kerning that I realised.

tanelpoder 2y ago

Haha, off-by-one pixel error! I still see MacOS as the best choice for my desktop/laptop uses (browser and SSH), but I also have a documents folder that I’ve accumulated over decades. I still use various .txt files in the docs folder as my low tech note taking apps. I use the Spotlight or Alfred keyboard shortcuts (that also use spotlight index?) for quickly opening the files when needed - and annoyingly my most important file - notes.txt - regularly disappears from the Spotlight index and suggestions. It’s been like that for at least 5 years, probably closer to 10. I’m not even trying anymore, will just open the file from command line with vi as the fallback step.

stonethrowaway 2y ago
Speaking of bad vision for a moment I thought I read “I still see MsDOS as the best choice” and almost yelled out what patrician taste!
- tanelpoder 2y ago
  Well, you can run multitasking in TSRs & keyboard interrupt handlers (the original event loop)… implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader…
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > implementing a window manager and TCP stack is left as an exercise to the reader… I'm pretty sure both of those have implementations available for DOS already.
    - tanelpoder 2y ago
      I recalled something from distant past - MSDOS multitasking with DESQView (apparently the same vendor who built QEMM): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
jval43 2y ago
Funnily enough a simple fgrep is super fast on SSDs and actually reliable. Even across TBs of data. With Spotlight you can never be sure. And to be fair, the Windows equivalent sucks just as much.

quink 2y ago

Starting to see this with view counts on YouTube in Firefox after some recent UI updates.

rv3392 2y ago
Oh that's what that is. I saw this on YouTube in Firefox the other day and thought YouTube was just A/B testing a quirky new way to display view counts.
rzzzt 2y ago
I don't remember in which browser I saw this, Chrome or Firefox, but when a block of text suddenly becomes a bit more animated (eg. moves around in a div) you could see it change from Windows' native font rendering method to DirectWrite-style fuzzy edges.

userbinator 2y ago

My bet is on a random bitflip more than an actual bug in the code, based on its localised nature and rarity. Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel fonts all the time.

r-w 2y ago
A bet on cosmic rays is a rare bet indeed ;)
- userbinator 2y ago
  Rare but does happen. Not necessarily cosmic rays but things like marginal timing can cause errors like this, especially on GPU buses/VRAM that tend to have less protection. GPGPU and now AI has made accuracy of results more important, but before that, GPUs were regularly ran at the limits and it was assumed that occasional barely-visible artifacts or otherwise computation errors whose results aren't noticeable were acceptable. (Imagine you're playing a 3D game and a few pixels in a frame occasionally have incorrect values, or some shapes are a pixel off --- unless the errors are massive, you're unlikely to notice.)
matja 2y ago
If only Apple used ECC RAM, then that would be easy to confirm.

hollerith 2y ago

Maybe the bug is the need for everything to line up perfectly.

fallingsquirrel 2y ago
Yᵒu'ʳe ʳiᵍhᵗ, iᵗ's ⁿoᵗ sᵒ bᵃd ᵒnᶜe ʸoᵘ'rᵉ uˢeᵈ tᵒ iᵗ.

dylan-m 2y ago

One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/ https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/. That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing. I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.

trilbyglens 2y ago
This is not a software bug, but rather an optical phenomenon called "chromatic aberration". What's happening is that your glasses are bending light at different angles depending on the wavelength, to the red and blue and green are landing at slightly different places on your retina. It's a hard problem to solve optically and requires specially shaped lens. It's a common issue in telescopes, with higher end expensive scopes having these specially shaped lenses to reduce this effect.
- voctor 2y ago
  From the post: > In conclusion, the off-center “x” is real and probably an artifact of the display or how it is rendered. It is unlikely that it is the result of chromatic aberration.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- meta-level 2y ago
  from the comment: > That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.

Bondi_Blue 2y ago

You can try submitting a bug report with Feedback Assistant.app or apple.com/feedback, but there’s no guarantee they will see it.

gield 2y ago
Someone will definitely see it, but maybe not take action on it. Now that it's on HN, it will definitely get more traction.

superjan 2y ago

Possibly they ask the text engine to render halfway two pixel lines. It will round up or down quite randomly when fp errors accumulate.

djbusby 2y ago

Maybe now is a good time to remind everyone: your vision will deteriorate. Keep this in mind when designing. When I first came to HN it wasn't an issue. Now I have to use my own app for it so the font (and some other things) are workable. According to my eye doctor the screen time is causing eyesight issues earlier. We're not designed to stare at a bright light 40cm away all day. May want to look at some eye exercises - or at least something far away.

mrob 2y ago
Very few screens are bright enough to compete with the normal brightness of outdoor sunlight. There's no evidence that close focus or looking at bright screens causes eyesight problems. Bright light actually seems to protect against myopia. Here's a good overview: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470669/
- immibis 2y ago
  Once I took apart an LCD monitor (with LED backlight) since one of the backlight elements was broken (I got it broken for very little money). I thought I'd see whether the LCD element can be used in front of a window to make a sci-fi type screen. Turns out the backlight is much, much brighter than daylight, and the LCD lets almost no light through. The LCD was too dark to make a cool sci-fi screen, and the backlight sitting separately was blindingly bright.
- IWeldMelons 2y ago
  From the same article: "In contrast, long-wavelength light is growth-inhibiting and short-wavelength light is growth-promoting in rhesus monkey (57) and tree shrew (58)." Modern monitors have high amount of shortwave spectrum, blue is unusually shortwave.
  - mrob 2y ago
    The "in contrast" is to chickens and guinea pigs, where the opposite occurs. What relevance this has to humans is unclear.

usaphp 2y ago

Reminds me of Microsoft calculator having a one pixel off between buttons: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/the_microsoft_calculator_buttons_being_one_pixel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...

theGeatZhopa 2y ago
That's awfull!! I couldn't use it anymore after I've seen it once
- layer8 2y ago
  Use the old one, it’s better anyway: https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-windows-7-in-windows-10/ https://winaero.com/get-calculator-from-windows-8-and-window...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wojtczyk 2y ago
Ouch! I had no idea.

manoweb 2y ago

I’m pretty sure there are Apple employees that read HN. It would have been cool to include a build number of the OS

akerr 2y ago
Or, you know, file a Feedback: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/ https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Don’t do that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

raws 2y ago

YouTube viewership numbers ha et a similar issue.

b0ner_t0ner 2y ago

[flagged]

theGeatZhopa 2y ago

It's font hinting and kerning. But whyyy the heck only in the last few chars?

isametry 2y ago
Well you’ve just answered your own question: because it’s not just font metrics. There seems to be more to that custom view than a standard line of text; something about that view is not optimized for low-dpi displays.

mgaunard 2y ago

In that picture I'm personally more bothered by the antialiasing than by the misalignment.

dingaling 2y ago
I'm disturbed by the ambiguous UI. Is 'Hide Binary" enabled or disabled? If it's enabled, why is it a different colour to the slider that has presumably selected Base-16? Are the binary digits editable? Are "ASCII" and "Unicode" mutually exclusive as you'd expect, in which case why are they both the same colour?

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t There is: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/ https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/ That said, it isn’t very user-friendly, and I find that they don’t seem to pay much attention to it. When they do respond, it tends to be some form of “#wontfix. Please close this.” That looks like a fairly ugly little bug. I suspect they know about it now, thanks to the HN Bug Reporter. It tends to highlight these types of things.

minkles 2y ago
Conversely all 4 of the bugs I reported with that were fixed in the next minor release!
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  It may well have to do with the types of bugs I report. Many are Xcode bugs, and Xcode is one of the most productive bug farms on Earth. I also submit feature requests and usability issues. My experience is pure anecdata. I usually end up closing the reports, after a number of months of them being ignored.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  RNG coding? I.e. what bugs replaced them...
- atribecalledqst 2y ago
  I reported a bug that occurs in a specific configuration of the Music app (trying to use Home Sharing + using bluetooth headphones), never heard anything back. I wonder if it's been fixed in the latest version of the OS, I still haven't upgraded...
cromka 2y ago
Every now and then I think about starting a public bug report tracker for Apple bugs since they keep theirs to themselves. The number of maddening but minuscule bugs I run into makes me wish I was using Linux again, where I can fix them myself, or at the very least report them upstream and hope someone else eventually does so. By not having a public record of bugs Apple conveniently hides the sheer number of them and how many people they affect.

jb1991 2y ago

On mobile devices, Apple’s Calculator app has always been one of the most frustrating apps I’ve ever used, and I’m surprised it’s a stock app by the company itself. If you press buttons quickly, like you would a normal calculator, many of the key presses simply don’t register at all. I’m not sure if they’re prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality, but it’s incredibly surprising from a company that focuses on user interaction, supposedly.

bhauer 2y ago
> prioritizing some pretty little visual animation over actual functionality This describes iOS in a nutshell.
artursapek 2y ago
The lock screen is even worse. I have to slow down to input my passcode or button pushes don’t register.
- afandian 2y ago
  I’m glad someone else noticed this. I never manage to unlock my iPhone first time.
  - artursapek 2y ago
    It’s pretty sad
  - Seb-C 2y ago
    I have a similar problem on my Zenfone, there is a weird delay between key presses, especially when repeating a character twice, so that I often fail my password.
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    I always continue to fail several times because after failing once the last press of my last attempt gets registered as the first press of the next attempt so if I’m going fast my next attempt will fail too, until I stop and enter it like my grandmother would.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

I would say it's a feature: it's supposed to be like a mechanical odometer.

keyringlight 2y ago
Even if Apple were adopting skeuomorphism it would take a lot more change in design elements to support the concept that there's a mechanical system driving it, and for a binary display I'd assume a row of lights would be more appropriate to how this would read on appropriate machines

DavidPiper 2y ago

Comically, I didn't even notice those wobbly numbers in the first screenshot, I was too busy noticing: - "Unicode" button label way off center - The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position - The indicators for bits 31 and 63 are not aligned with each other - x and + not being horizontally aligned (I believe this is an icon-font issue, seen on HN before so knew to look for it)

countmora 2y ago
> "Unicode" button label way off center Its actually the center of the button, I made a video for context: https://imgur.com/a/1Y9O8dS https://imgur.com/a/1Y9O8dS > The 8/10/16 selector being off center in its own position Might be due to the image compression, it looks fine on my MB.
- samatman 2y ago
  > Its actually the center of the button Upvoted for putting in the effort, and because you make a correct point. But the Unicode button is perceptually off center, because ASCII is a smaller word, and there's no visible boundary between the buttons. This comes up a lot in iconography, the classic example is a play triangle (like the media control) in a circle. Placing the triangle in the geometric center won't look centered, it needs to be a tiny bit to the right of that to account for the shape. No separation between the buttons means you can't see the bounds which the words are centered in, so it looks off. The 8 and 10 have the same problem, for the same reason. A visible background-gray line between the buttons would solve this problem, it should be 'squircled' to make it I-shaped and match the outer edges.
- fizzynut 2y ago
  From zooming into your clip both ASCII and Unicode are wrong: - ASCII is off center ~43/50 pixel margins - Unicode is off center ~20/25 pixel margins - Both have different margin sizes - The button sizes of both are the same. - The Hide button is offset from both 8/10/16 selector and ascii/unicode buttons - Even if everything was correct, because there is no contrast between "Off" and background, it's going to look wrong anyway

wslh 2y ago

Beyond this bug, nowadays accessibility features are one of the most used in my setup, and I think as software engineers age they will become more sophisticated. I remember using fonts of 8pt in an IDE to "squeeze " the potential of the monitor.

trissylegs 2y ago

There's a similar bug in the Windows calculator. One of the buttons is about 1 pixel wider than the rest.

virtualritz 2y ago

And this on a Mac. :D That would have never happened under Jobs's watch.

megablast 2y ago

One that Apple seems to ignore. You click on something. And the micro second before it changes the hi, causing you to click something else.

unwind 2y ago
Wut? It changes before the click? That sounds ... magical. And what is "the hi"? Typo of "ui"?
- cubefox 2y ago
  Google has this problem in its search suggestions. They update with some delay, and humans also have a significant delay in how quickly they can react to a changing stimulus. So I tap on the wrong search suggestion. One problem is that they aren't satisfying monotonicity: the suggestion can change unexpectedly even if further inputs keep exactly matching the old suggestion.

jacobp100 2y ago

If I may pitch my own app, TechniCalc has this same mode, along with a bunch of other stuff the built in app doesn’t support. It works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc

sigio 2y ago

This is to fit in with the windows calculator, which also has off-by-one pixel errors: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/the_microsoft_calculator_buttons_being_one_pixel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/a5r971/t...

kibwen 2y ago

How would you even tell in the first place? The contrast on those digits is so low and their font weight is so light as to render them essentially invisible. And as far as bad design goes, why are the bit position indicators on the right (0, 32) center-justified underneath their digits, whereas the ones on the left (31, 63) are left-justified?

rustybolt 2y ago

> I would contact Apple, if there was a feedback option, but there isn’t This is infuriating and the same for all the big companies (at least Google, Microsoft, Apple); you have a serious issue and simply no way to talk to a representative. The best you can do is post something on Hacker News and hope it somehow gets picked up. I worked at a company that paid Microsoft a lot to have a 1-day SLA for support. When I contacted them, I got a reply back weeks later saying "hey sorry I missed your email". About two weeks later (which was the time it took to email back and forth), it was clear that I had to insert another ticket and mark the subject as something else (that was not directly related, but apparently the team responsible for that subject was also working on the functionality I found a bug in. There was no way for me to know this since it was something internal to Microsoft). So, I had to go through the whole procedure again. Once I did that, the reply was "oh yeah, we dropped that functionality but the documentation doesn't mention it. we recommend you use <technology X> for this". Where, of course, technology X did not support the feature I was trying to use.

wojtczyk 2y ago
Thanks! It looks like posting on Hacker News works well :) In the meantime a few people pointed out the "Feedback Assistant" for Apple. There's a website and an app that spotlight finds.

spacecadet 2y ago

Casio FX115ES Plus, its only $15. Looks great, feels great, just works.

imchillyb 2y ago

I’ve been using an app called PCalc on Apple’s App Store. The Apple calculator is a frustrating mess to use. PCalc does scientific, engineering, and A to B calculations for most things. I wouldn’t go back to Apple’s calculator app even if Apple gave me a credit for the PCalc app. Nope.

yayitswei 2y ago

Reminded me of this article about how centering things is the hardest problem in computer science (with plenty of examples). https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/ https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/

abhinavk 2y ago
Did he remove the cursor effect on his website?
- dpassens 2y ago
  You need to toggle the sun switch top right to moon, if you mean the "dark mode" effect.
  - troupo 2y ago
    There's (or used to be) a multiplayer cursor on the site. You'd see other visitors' cursors moving across the page
faresahmed 2y ago
Funnily enough, even the "dark mode toggle" icon in the blog is not aligned correctly with the navbar text. https://imgur.com/a/1xSCMWb https://imgur.com/a/1xSCMWb

cubefox 2y ago

[flagged]

recursive 2y ago
But your comment is acceptable?
- cubefox 2y ago
  I didn't upvote though.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lapcat 2y ago

Apple software quality has gone into the trash the past 10 years. I'm not talking about initial quality but rather about "mature" quality, i.e., the current public versions almost a full year after a major release. I was just talking about this yesterday: somehow TextEdit on Mac has been wrecked. TextEdit, which is essentially a wrapper around NSTextView, was more or less "perfect" 15-20 years ago. Now I experience a bug where the window is blank when I open a document until I click inside a window, and scrolling performance in a long document is atrocious. For example, if I try to scroll backward, from the end of the document, it stutters and can lose my place. This doesn't depend on the document; it happens all the time. I guess that Apple rewrote everything a few years ago with TextKit 2, and it shows, but not in a good way. The impression I get from Apple is that Craig Federighi has given engineers license to keep churning out new features and not worry much about bugs, or design, or the user interface. And if something becomes a massive problem, they just pause on features for a couple of weeks, which is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

throwpoaster 2y ago

Aren't the raised digits an indication of endianness or something? It looks like a transmission bit pattern. Or isn't high low high low double high double low the original Apple disk format? It's something like that. Just guessing -- it doesn't look accidental to me.

ABCD0 2y ago

Juste my vision

fferen 2y ago

On the topic of calculator font bugs, Google's calculator randomly switches between two fonts: https://pasteboard.co/lmbr4iE6BJej.png https://pasteboard.co/lmbr4iE6BJej.png https://pasteboard.co/sU3GA5psIaT0.png https://pasteboard.co/sU3GA5psIaT0.png

qingcharles 2y ago
The first one is worse because the 0 looks more like an O. What platform?
- fferen 2y ago
  Edge on Mac, but IIRC it happens on Windows as well. Just checked in firefox/mac and seems OK.
diggan 2y ago
Hard to know if you're referring to Chromebook/Android/Web, but looks like the web one. If that's the calculator from the google.com web-page, that is surely a stylesheet/font that failed to load (sometimes?). Try to look at the browser developer console next time it happens for some request errors.

klausa 2y ago

>Maybe the UI coordinate system is using floats and a rounding error aggregated over many days It's using floats on 32bit (...which means only the watchOS currently, I guess?) and doubles elsewhere. Are there any modern UI frameworks that _don't_ use floats/doubles? I was gonna guess CSS, but even that has supported sub-pixel precisions on HiDPI displays for a while now. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5709698/html-sub-pixel-border/40833470#40833470 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5709698/html-sub-pixel-b...

amai 2y ago

Relevant remark in the comment section of the blog post: "after I took screenshots and restarted the calculator, the misplacements were gone. I am looking out for it to happen again."

Modified3019 2y ago

They clearly need better telemetry in the calculator app.

nickly 2y ago

[flagged]

tlhunter 2y ago

Here's something that really irks me. On macOS I'll use Spotlight (Cmd+Space) to do some quick math. For example, press Cmd+Space, type "1.2+3.4", and it sort of displays 4.6. Now to copy the results you either have to click the copy option in the dropdown, using your mouse (no thanks), or press enter to get the results in Calculator. Assuming you last left the calculator in "Programmer" mode the calculator displays the value "4". Ideally, pressing enter in Spotlight would simply replace the text in the input bar with the result. The equivalent Alt+Space tool in KDE (Plasma Search) performs math this way and it's amazing. I haven't used Quicksilver or Alfred in a decade but I'm sure they do the right thing, too. Otherwise both Spotlight and Plasma Search are both pretty great. Type something like "14oz to lb" and they both display the result (though Plasma Search displays the exact "0.875 pounds" while Spotlight displays the rounded "0.88 pounds"). Overall I'm mostly disappointed with first-party Apple software. Being one of the richest companies in the world I have higher expectations.

zoover2020 2y ago
Sounds like Alfred could solve this problem quite easily? I wouldn't give spotlight too much hope from Apple's end. Have seen some very nice Alfred workflows
NaOH 2y ago
I run an older version of macOS, but it's historically been the case that Command-C copies the result of a calculation entered in Spotlight. They key is that the Copy command must be performed when the calculation is not selected for the result to be copied to the Clipboard. Put another way, type the math to be performed in Spotlight, then press Command-C and the result has been copied.

rgovostes 2y ago

A friend doing homework for a university assignment, circa Leopard or Snow Leopard, noticed that Calculator produced negative values when raising a negative number to an even power. The bug turned out to be in CFNumber, in Core Foundation. CFNumber does a lot of fiddly stuff at the bit level for performance, and one of their optimizations for exponentiation was incorrect. Somehow it was never found by tests or due to buggy behaviors it created in other apps, but by someone clicking buttons and thinking critically about the output.

FabHK 2y ago
In Excel (and some other languages), unary minus has higher precedence than exponentiation, so that -x^2 = (-x)^2 = x^2. That can bite you (for example when calculating the normal probability density function “manually”).
- secondcoming 2y ago
  Are there languages where this isn’t the case?
  - cjbillington 2y ago
    Python for one, and given that, I'd assume most languages.
  - smabie 2y ago
    almost all of them?
  - grumpyprole 2y ago
    Standard mathematical notation?
    - cubefox 2y ago
      It's arguably ambiguous.

OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago

I like Apple's hardware and underlying OS enough to shell out for MacBook Pros but, man, their homebuilt applications are a PITA. The RPN calculator on my high powered new MBP doesn't have a scientific or engineering notation option. Same on my old MBP as well. I guess it is a feature. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank

Aloisius 2y ago
Sequoia's calculator has RPN with scientific notation now.
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  Thanks! Look forward to getting it when it is released.

rgovostes 2y ago

I can usually appreciate Apple's design homages. The original iOS Calculator is inspired by the Braun ET, and it makes some sense to provide a familiar design for basic use. But it inherits baggage from the limitations of the handheld calculators of the 1970s. Why can't I use the - button to write a negative sign? What does "AC" mean? The scientific calculator is an even worse design. There's a ton of invisible state, like the value stored in memory, or whether you're inside parentheses. The user has to hold the whole sequence of operations in their head, without clicking a single wrong button. Want to repeat a calculation with a different operand? Tough. Graphing calculators like the TI-84 that let you see and edit your input are so much more usable. Even better are notebook-style interfaces like Mathematica. It's a shame Apple won't pay homage to those designs.

FabHK 2y ago
Coming up in iOS 18.
- rgovostes 2y ago
  Unless I missed something, they’ve added a handwriting mode, which is cool but not necessarily an improvement over something like Mathematica. I don’t want to have to carry an Apple Pencil with me and write long hand every time I want to solve an equation.
  - rgovostes 2y ago
    I did miss something, you can type in Math Notes in iOS 18. It’s a little glitchy in the betas though.

steve1977 2y ago

Proudly presented to you by the company that took 14 years to port the calculator to the iPad, because “if we do it, it has to be the greatest calculator app“

andrewinardeer 2y ago

Windows 11 lets you conveniently "pin" the calculator in standard mode, keeping it accessible on top of your active window – great for multitasking with calculations. However, switch to a different calculator mode (like scientific), and Windows inexplicably removes the pinning feature. This baffling decision feels so actively user hostile it is deserving of an award for poor design choices.

Aerbil313 2y ago

Once I had downloaded a HN thread for later reading, on my iPhone with Safari's built-in Download Linked File feature. When I opened it and was reading it (HN renders fine with just the HTML), I noticed a single line looking a bit off. Took my glasses off to take a closer look. I don't remember the specifics, but I think the spacing with the line above was slightly less than usual. Took screenshots and it was clearly visible zoomed in. Happened twice that day and never before, never after. I believe I witnessed a cosmic ray induced bit flip.

shmeeed 2y ago

This would never have gone past Jobs.

msephton 2y ago

My initial thoughts were that these issues were showing how things look on a non-retina display, or a display with non-default scaling. That does seem to be the case, but not entirely. I took some screenshots and I do not see the misaligned numbers at retina or non-retina resolutions, but I do see the odd bevelled edges on the 8/10/16 "tabs": https://imgur.com/a/PqqkWai https://imgur.com/a/PqqkWai Apple have pretty much given up on making things look correct on non-retina displays, so many things are positioned at what turn out to be half pixel steps. Depending on whether we're talking fonts or shapes things can jump by a pixel or become blurry. I wrote about this here: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/01/25/running-modern-macos-on-non-retina-displays/ https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/01/25/running-modern-ma...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]