On the most recent episode of The Talk Show podcast, this monologue from Jason Snell made me nod my head (the passage starts at 1:35:47):

[… Apple] decides to do a big feature. The circus comes to town, they build the feature, they launch it, they leave town, and that feature sits there.

And the problem is, there’s bugs, things are broken, and in Year Two, you’re like, “You’re going to fix all the things that were broken in the thing you shipped last year, right?” And in the last decade, I would say, a lot of times what happens is they just don’t. And if you’re lucky, they’ll fix it Year Three or Year Four, […] give it a polish.

The thing that troubles me most about Apple software quality in general is the feeling like they don’t have the people to own the thing that they launch. They build the thing that they launch, and then those people go off and do something else, and nobody is maintaining and improving the thing that’s there.

And whether it’s Time Machine, things that are often really system critical but that are super quirky, then they will do a brush up and you’ll be like “yay,” but… there’s still this bug, and then it’s “good luck, wait three more years.”

Or I think the one that we’re all thinking of this year is Screen Time, which they have a big revamp of. […] On one level, it’s great, but on another level, if you’ve talked to anybody who’s tried to use Screen Time, it’s broken. And so what they’re really doing here is trying to fix it, and we’ll see how they do. […]

The new features with problems is not a crime. It happens. The crime is: they never fix the problems.

And that’s the part that I would like to see Apple get better at: if you’re going to launch something, you got to maintain it. Sometimes I feel like Apple is willing to spend the money and time and effort to launch something, but then they’re not really willing to do anything other than walk away.

And I think that’s irresponsible. If you can’t stand by that feature, you shouldn’t launch it.

I think this is spot on, and said really well. Are you honest with yourself about resourcing and focus for right after the launch and then later on? Have you really thought about worst case and best case scenarios vis-à-vis bug reports, latency, user feedback, and craft/​quality however you define it? Have you actually started to make room for those outcomes ahead of time?

For me, an ongoing tension with Apple is Finder, so central to my (and I imagine many people’s?) use of a Mac, but rewritten at some point eons ago in a new framework that caused all sorts of problems, and then pretty much abandoned like a proverbial American city’s downtown. (I gave up listing stuff on this blog because it didn’t feel like fun, but I also see 100% of what Ilya Birman sees in his “Finder” section, many times every day.)

It’s not a story unique to Apple – I’ve seen many a designer and engineer quitting their jobs when an empty promise of a “fast follow” never materialized – but you’d expect them to do better here.

In late 2023, designer Anthony Hobday published a small list of 20 interface quality of life improvements, and recently Hobday and Katie Langerman chatted about it on an episode of their podcast Complementary.

It’s a fun listen (perhaps if you skip a bit of a bummer 9-minute beginning), covering four listed things in more details:

• generous mouse paths (especially in menus)
• coyote time for modifier keys
• optical alignments
• tooltip timing details

There were a few interesting things that caught my attention:

• Figma does have “coyote time” in the very interaction the hosts are talking about, perhaps showcasing that the details of the details can make or break them.
• “Should modifier keys be reversible” and “should modifier keys be consistent with one another” are interesting challenges; some more recent graphic tools have changed the long-standing behaviour here, malking modifier keys more “sticky.”
• Wholeheartedly agree with how frustrating it feels that the menu interactions are not yet baked into browsers as primitives. “The fact that the companies keep having to implement it themselves manually is maddening.” It is.
• Good observation that some people associate animations with “feeling premium” (see also: the quote I put in the title).

This 25-minute segment on MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (video or audio, segment starts at 40:21) is from November 2024, and is a nice counterpart to the post about favourite well-made apps and sites.

The original theme is “what is an app that you use all the time, and like to use, but is actually a bad app?” but it quickly moves to a more general conversation about good and bad mobile apps.

It’s always interesting to me to see what themes emerge and what other people think is important. Here’s the list where I linked to relevant apps as long as I could find them:

Bad apps:

• Google Messages – dinged for unreliable spam and lack of organization/​filtering
• Notion (on mobile) – hard to orient yourself and some direct manipulation is wonky
• many smart home accessory apps – bad and redundant with Google Home, but have to keep for emergencies
• Netgear Orbi (network router) – specific functionality and bad password recovery
• Hatch (white noise machine for babies) – simple things are hard to discover
• Nest app/Nest Yale Smart Lock – bad integration
• Goodreads – stale

Good apps:

• ButterflyMX (smart building lock app) – reliable
• UDisc (score keeper for disc golf) – good functionality, great in a free version
• New York City ferry
• New York City ticket payment – reliable and has many payment options
• Greenwich, CT and San Francisco parking apps – live activities
• The StoryGraph – cool graphs and stats about your book reading patterns

MKBHD’s Waveform podcast (audio or video) sometimes has a fun “Did they even test this?” section. This week, for the first 12 minutes, the team was ranting about various volume controls – a meandering conversation that I also found just very enjoyable.

The cited answer to “why do a lot of car volume controls max out at 38?” is in a 2021 article from Car And Driver:

But then some research revealed that about 20 years ago, Chrysler decided to try to find the perfect volume interval, one that would result in meaningful difference in sound level without going too far. After much experimentation, they decided that 38 discrete volume settings provided the perfect amount of adjustability—not too fine, not too coarse. So the decree went out across the company that all stereos should go to 38.

However, no citation is given, and I couldn’t find any more information about it.

The one thing the group missed in their discussion is “why even show a number”? I think it helps people in remembering their preference, especially if they share a car with someone else. Remembering that “my volume number is 17” can be helpful, even if it feels a bit clunky.

When volume controls were physical, I believe if they didn’t have a number, they at least had a certain amount of notches so you could remember the nearest notch you liked:

Keynote is an app that could use something like that. At this very moment, I am trying to unify the volume of various clips across slides for an upcoming presentation, and having to use environmental cues like “between Edit Movie below and the rewind button above”:

Found listening to this 2-hour episode of The Talk Show podcast with Daniel Jalkut very enjoyable, and more thoughtful than just “bitching about Tahoe.”

One particular thing that stood out to me was a discussion of shame and embarrassment and pride that all come with shipping software. And looking to Apple itself for direction that the company is not really providing, as many of their apps are not using the new Liquid Glass interface – or when they do, they use it in ways that are inconsistent or disappointing.

Some other good themes:

• it’s okay not to change something if the alternative is change for the sake of change, a posture Apple’s hardware team feels more comfortable with than Apple’s software team
• internal Apple politics and the story of the Control Strip
• loved this phrase from Gruber about the macOS’s Tahoe release: “they vandalized it.”

Also, this:

A fair criticism of Apple over the years is that sometimes fixing 50 little misaligned text boxes or divider bars… using your time to do that, is time better spent than adding another user feature.