This mourning (not a typo) I went to dictate a task to my watch for the first time since updating to watchOS 8.1. Turns out, in watchOS 8.1, they hard-coded the input screen to “scribble” each time it opens. Previously it remembered the last input method you used. Now if you want dictation, you have to switch it each time. And per the developer of Drafts, it was intentional.
Grand idea, Apple. Force me to interact with extra UI elements (and await their stupid animations before I can even interact with them) when I’m trying to capture an idea fragment before it evaporates.
Currently filling out Apple’s product feedback thing in the vague hope it actually counts for anything.
I dislike that when in the car I have to tell Siri every time I want to play x music to play it in “Apple Music.” Why can’t I just set Apple Music as the default player for music?
I don’t know that these are “regressions” per se, but I feel like the “smarter” our devices try to get the more annoying they get.
A couple notables include:
My Apple TV, in the middle of a show I was watching, deciding to put a notice on my screen to let me know my PowerBeats Pro headphones are nearby. I couldn’t find a way to dismiss the notification without goofing something else up. I wound up having to go into settings and just completely disable the feature.
Siri’s auto-suggest has decided that its new favorite thing is to try and create Siri reminders based on my reminders that are showing up in Due. Uh, Siri, Due has it covered. Really.
Siri’s lengthy auto-explanation of what’s going on. Text message comes in. Siri reads: “Message from : Okay. Just so you know…” Some of these “just so you know” types of messages seemed like they were read multiple times, but even once is annoying.
Yeah…the whole reason I use my watch is to not have to write. Especially when I’m doing something where it’s outright not a good idea for me to be staring at my watch (like driving). This will be frustrating.
I stopped doing that in preference to Drafts because about 99% of the time when I actually need Siri to take a note, it can’t figure out how to connect to the server. Or it takes it half a minute to figure out that it can’t actually help me. Or it just completely loses the request, without saying anything at all.
Drafts handles everything on device, so it’s at least reliable.
I don’t know if this particular behavior has changed significantly with the current iOS, but I do know I told Siri to “cancel navigation” the other day and it told me to try again later immediately before it kept giving me directions.
That input change is unfortunate for Greg. Hope they’ll reconsider.
Another Watch UI regression has come up a few times here: in Messages, the Dismiss button started hovering over the conversation in such a way that if you mistime your tap, you’ll hit a one-tap reply.
I don’t know if this is a regression or a bug but lately on Apple Watch (4 running the latest OS), as I’m jogging through the neighborhood listening to a podcast I’ll say, “Hey Siri, fast forward four minutes.” Lately “she” sets a timer for four minutes instead of skipping ahead four minutes. I seldom encountered this problem until ~two months ago. Needless to say, it is frustrating to then have to cancel a timer and try again.
This one is from a while back but I’m still annoyed that Things 3 removed the ability to adjust the font size on their macOS app. It ships with a tiny font that’s a big accessibility and usability problem for anyone who has any sort of vision issue. How could Apple have given them a design award for that? Oh - right - Apple has no shortage of apps with the same behavior.
I’m reminded of this whenever I see Things on my spouse’s Mac. She stayed on version 2 of Things. It does support font size adjustment. I should have done the same. I mostly use the iOS app these days but this thread reminds me that I really need to find another solution.
Airpods automatic switching is one of those “smarter” things that’s just annoying. In practice it means that my iPad continually steals the connection from my other devices - even though I rarely use airpods with my iPad. I was much happier after I figured out what was causing this and disabled automatic switching.
Readdle’s ScannerPro was my go-to app for scanning documents on mobile and the. Immediately filing them in the right place.
Even better: it would use a “radar” feature to automatically identify documents in my photos and then import them, including OCRing text. So I could take a photo (much faster) and deal with distortion correction and filing later.
With a recent update, they just removed the radar feature. The initial response from support:
Let me kindly note that at the moment, indeed, there is no Radar feature in the Scanner Pro app.
However, I understand that it would be convenient for you to use it, so I have added your kind request to our Wish List for the developers to look through and keep in mind for future updates.
When I expressed my dismay that the removal was intentional:
I can certainly understand your feelings, and I agree the Radar feature was handy.
The feature was indeed deactivated some time ago for the further improvement. Although at this time there is no ETA on adding it back, I’ll be sure to keep you updated on this.
Wait. No-one has mentioned “smart quotes” yet? The whole planet suffers from those suckers.
But my current peeve is text handling in MS Teams. It used to be passable. Now it’s downright nasty. Stripping leading spaces and de-duplicating spaces when pasting text is a complete nightmare for technical conversations, but it’s not even consistent!
I miss being able to run 32 bit apps in i(Pad)OS. My all time favourite iPad game (Civilization Revolution 1) is 32 bit only and I truly miss being able to play that on my regular iPad.
For macOS/Apple, there are a couple, for Filemaker (I’m a developer) there are tons. It’s a real hate-love situation (which I will not bother you with)!
First, one thing with OmniFocus: When you create a Quick Entry it doesn’t always come on top of everything. That’s quite annoying.
Some of the Apple stupidness:
Apple Watch: Siri doesnt’ always understand when I want to set a timer (how hard can it be, really?)
macOS: When switching applications with Cmd+Tab and then pressing Q (for quitting apps), and move to another app with Tab; If the first app you choosed to quit, now the focused app changes to the next one to the right. This will create some crazy situations where you will quit the wrong app.
macOS: No concistently use of Cmd+F or Cmd+Opt+F. Depending on the app (all Apple ones), sometimes you end up in the search field (up to the right), sometimes you get a “Find” window.
Music: No consistently placement of the search field. In Music it’s to the left, all other apps it up to the righ.
Apple Notes: Siri doesn’t understand when you want to add things to Notes.
Mail: The Filter function loses its setting from time to time.
Messages: The ability to snooze or mark Messages as unread. I mean, wtf!?
A couple of other things I’ve forgotten at the moment.
And finally: Apple Feedback team seems to not listen (or want to understand) to these small, but extremely annoying, things.
The internet has never really recovered since web forums took over from Usenet.
Also, why is it that websites are slower to load and offer less useful information than they did when we only had 56kb telephone lines?
Furthermore: if you’re going to produce software, have the common decency to write a proper manual, not fob users off with a few videos giving half the information at three times the length.
I’m outside, grilling, and commonly say (to my watch) “Hey Siri, start a stopwatch.” I swear 3-4 months ago that’s all I had to do. These days, after that command, Siri opens the stopwatch, and I need to manually start it. Arrgggh.
One thing I find myself missing from time to time is a feature from Safari (was it in Tiger or Panther?) that allowed you to quickly go back to the top level of a website; I don’t quite remember if it even allowed you to jump back to search results from Google?
Found it very useful in case I was following down a rabbit hole ; maybe I should check if there is a Safari extension for that?
For me a really annoying thing right now is that Siri refuses to run my shortcuts when I ask her to do so. It used to work in iOS14 but now she insists on trying to play a song, open a TV show or search an app - probably just a bug?!
You may be referring to going back to the top level after going through links, if so, what I’m about to say is not relevant. But, if you mean to the top of the webpage, you can tap the title bar and you will automatically be taken to the top of the web page you are currently on. As I said, this may not be to what you are referring.
; maybe I should check if there is a Safari extension for that?
- probably just a bug?!