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

- "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)

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.

https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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-ma...

There is: 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.

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.

https://pasteboard.co/lmbr4iE6BJej.png

https://pasteboard.co/sU3GA5psIaT0.png

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?

I remember using fonts of 8pt in an IDE to "squeeze " the potential of the monitor.

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.

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.

https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc

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-b...

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.

"after I took screenshots and restarted the calculator, the misplacements were gone. I am looking out for it to happen again."

Same on my old MBP as well.

I guess it is a feature.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3527779?sortBy=rank

Just guessing -- it doesn't look accidental to me.

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.

That would have never happened under Jobs's watch.

Antialiased text always looks blurry to me after looking at pixel fonts all the time.

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.