Categories
Grudging non-hatred

I guess Apple Notes is okay

I really hate to be positive so early on a Monday morning, but Apple’s Notes app is excellent. It does everything you’d want a notes app to do, and does it simply, intuitively and seamlessly across devices.

Perhaps I can compensate for this sun shininess, first, by pointing out that Apple Notes is one of the few remaining things in the Apple ecosystem about which we can still say “it just works,” and, second, by ending on a proper sour note, with a negative comparison of Notes to Evernote, the reigning Enshittifacation World Champion, which, for ten-plus years has refused to finish dying its slow, gruesome death of morbid scope obesity and despicable subscription extortion. The only good legacy of Evernote is Apple’s theft and refinement of the basic Evernote concept in the form of Notes.


Side note: my wife is trying to trick me into making Design Grouch into a Youtube or Instagram channel.

Of course, she’s already trying to dilute my grouchiness concept by encouraging the rare spasms of approval I sometimes suffer. I had a rare positive design outburst this morning (over Apple Notes actually being good) and she got all excited that I could like something, and took it as proof that I’m capable of a full range of normal human emotions, extending all the way from loathing to resigned acceptance.

She’s urging me to do a few positive posts every now and then. I told her I’d already a positive post before, which is plenty, and that I even have a whole category dedicated to positivity. But I must insist that the positive-to-negative content on this blog must remain proportionate to real-world competence-to-incompetence incidence. This means you can look forward to seeing another positive remark somewhere around 2032 or 2033.

Categories
Dumb ideas

“I’m Feeling Unlucky”

A new dumb trend is threatening my patience: the all-inclusive search.

I’m probably just pissed because I’m old.

Years ago, back when my knees and bladder still worked, search was used to find specific things.

If you wanted variability, you included a wildcard, like “*” or “?”. People knew how to use these wildcards to focus searches on what they were looking for, and to filter out everything else.

Nowadays, search is optimized to serve vague informational yearnings of bleary-brained kids, who sit around watching things blow across their screen until something relevant stimulates their index finger to twitch and a click happens.

Any clear-minded soul searching for some specific needle in the infinite fuckshit stack is completely out of luck.

Here’s how it goes. If you enter some specific expression, because you want to search for precisely that verbatim thing, the search algorithm carefully picks the expression apart into isolated terms. Each term is blurred, fuzzed, inflated and broadened to include every possible form and tense of the word, every misspelling and homophone, every synonym, every vague association. The algorithm then searches for any individual instance of any of these maximally broadened terms and returns a galaxy-sized Boolean OR of chaos.

And of course, to keep things as simple as possible there is no way to override this default all-inclusivity. There is no way to narrow the search. Quotes do nothing.

Amazon’s past purchases search is one example of this trend. When I search for the two William James books I bought twenty years ago, I get 59 returns. Apparently, if a book includes the word “William” or the word “James” on any page, it is tossed onto the heap of returns. The two books I am looking for — the only two written by William James — are seven pages in. These are, in fact, the last two items in the return.

GoodNotes is another example. When I search, I am usually looking for a particular passage in a PDF. But my passages are disassembled into individual words, and each word is blurred to indistinction. Goodnotes tells me every single page where some wildly loose interpretation of any one of the words appears. Surprise! It could be anywhere! But at least I can feel secure that what I am looking for is somewhere in the results.

I’m sure that soon every product manager lemming will follow this shiny new best practice directly over the cliff.

They could save a lot of trouble just by providing an unfiltered all-inclusive list. They could even omit the text field and leave the search button. Click it and it searches for “*”. If the priority is avoiding any possible match, just including everything is a foolproof better-safe-than-sorry strategy. Best of all, it is quick and cheap to implement.

As far back as I can remember, Google search has had a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that works exactly this way. Everyone took it as routine Silicon Valley whimsy, but now it is clear: “I’m Feeling Lucky” was the future of search.

Categories
Apple atrocities

Reskeuomorphizing

Back in 2013, Apple threw the usability baby out with the skeuomorphic bathwater.

Now, apparently, Apple has decided to refill the tub with that same hokey bathwater, sans baby.