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 nauseating 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.


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

But, of course, she’s already trying to dilute my grouchiness with these exceptional fits of approval I sometimes suffer. So when I had a rare positive design outburst this morning (over Apple Notes actually being good) she got all excited that I could like something, and thought it was proof that I’m capable of a full range of normal human emotions, extending all the way from loathing to provisional acceptance.

She suggested that I do a few positive posts every now and then. I told her I’d already done that before, and that I have a whole category dedicated to positivity, but that I’d try to keep the positive-to-negative content on this blog proportionate to real-world competence-to-incompetence incidence. Which means you can look forward to seeing another positive remark somewhere around 2032 or 2033.

Categories
Grudging non-hatred

Apple Pencil is OK, I guess

I hate to mar the pristine negativity of this blog, but Apple’s second generation Pencil is damn near perfect. I was just noticing how little I notice it, because it always works.

But is it as good as iCloud is bad? No.

Back to the regularly scheduled generalized hate.

Categories
Grudging non-hatred

My MacBuntu

I’ve switched all my writing activities over to a MacBook running Ubuntu.

I can’t say why exactly – maybe it’s just a honeymoon thing? – but I feel much better using this machine.

I think it might be this: I prefer suffering from awful design done by well-meaning coders who can’t design worth a shit, over suffering from awful design done by world-class design talents who use dark patterns to wring desired behaviors and dollars out of me.