macOS’s System Settings app might be a contender for the worst piece of software Apple released this century. Its 2022 redesign was based on wrong assumptions, the execution of that already bad redesign idea has also been subpar, and the situation not only hasn’t gotten any better in recent memory – I can point you to years-old bugs – but now it is spreading like gangrene to other apps.

Among System Settings’ numerous UI crimes stands a simple, but incredibly important one: the app does a bad job at conveying to the users where they are, in a place orientation feels very important. A lot of this is self-inflicted, with bad search and confusing pop-ups partying with truly embarrassing bugs…

Actually, one literally just happened to me. The only thing I did was opening System Settings:

Which section am I in? General, right? That’s the one highlighted? No, turns out that “Software Update Available” added itself post launch and stole the content pane, but didn’t update the nav on the left:

This is embarrassing because it highlights that Settings are built in a shoddy way that allows the content and the left nav to get disconnected. The end result is yet another design problem that makes it hard for me to build in my mind the accurate map of all the settings, and to understand where each one goes and how they all connect. And I have a feeling I’m not the only one.

But this is not actually what I wanted to show you. (I just got distracted by a bug on the way to where I was going.) The problem I wanted to share is more universal and helpful to know about.

Let’s say I search for “hide dock”:

The first result is what I wanted, and clicking on it gets me there:

Type and click! It all seems great on the surface. The topmost option on the right is what I want; I can toggle it and move on with my life.

But I might not realize that the right pane has been scrolled down to that option, and there’s a bunch of stuff above it, too.

This is tricky, because sometimes it’s useful to know what the whole section’s name is. Or, maybe, the option I wanted is influenced by the option just above it, which I might now not even realize exists.

Mostly, auto scroll is disorienting. The shy scrollbars are on by default, so they won’t lend a helping thumb. The light separator line that appears below the header is hard to notice. So is the blurred appearance of the closest scrolled-off thing underneath it. I am certain most people arriving at any scrolling container already pre-scrolled will assume the container is just… shorter.

This is a problem you see on the web, too. There are solutions out there: you can animate-scroll to the right place on entry, or you can leave some space above (a clever trick is to calculate the distance so that one of the options left above is cut in half, conveying more stuff in that direction) – although both of these work better for section headers rather than specific elements like here.

What would probably be best for setting would be to… point to the found thing. And what’s interesting is that Apple already built a fun mechanism for it:

It’s a little goofy, seemingly inspired by those tabs for signing documents…

…but most of its complexity has more to do with two menus next to each other. The pointing does its job well.

And, even if it could use a refresh or some improvements, in a perfectly functioning ecosystem the System Settings team would grab that interface, reuse it, polish it, and give the newer revision back to the Help menu as well. In the process, the user would benefit thrice: first by seeing help improve, second by getting a better orientation mechanism for the settings, and third by experiencing and learning a consistent pattern across many surfaces.

(Lastly, many among you might have already realized this: scrolling as a method was doomed from the beginning. If the found item is closer to the bottom of the container, like below, there is just no way to pull it all the way to the top anyway.)

(I added a new tag, navigation, to collect posts like these. The title of the post is a reference to a logistics term.)

#mac os #navigation #settings #system design

[“The Tsunami Bowl” sounds pretty good to me.]

In order to increase subscriber numbers, The Onion is trying to sponsor a college football bowl game. Why the heck not?

Apparently, a sponsorship can be had for a few hundred thousand dollars. Can we all go splitsies and get our own ridiculous bowl?

Link: https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/the-onion-college-football-bowl-game-sponsor/91432377?

I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube

Genius piece of OSINT by Colsto, who demonstrates how you can take almost imperceptible background noise of planes from a video soundtrack, figure out their Doppler curves, then cross reference them against ADS-B data to find the exact location of the video based on their speed, distance, and gaps between different flights.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: privacy, youtube

[Sports are enjoyable, all on their own.]

Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, gambling has gone disturbingly mainstream. I don’t wager myself, but I don’t have strong feelings on whether the activity should be legal. Still, it’s probably not something we should be encouraging. Sports gambling causes myriad problems¹ with minimal benefits.².

And yet, If you watch any sports at all, it’s become impossible to avoid the constant pushes for gambling. There are relentless advertisements featuring celebrities who really, really don’t need the industry’s dirty money, along with frequent in-game betting content. I just want to watch a baseball game, not hear about how the network’s sponsored parlay bet is going. I don’t know if this is good for business overall, but it’s driving me away.

When ESPN went all-in on sports gambling, veteran journalist Nicole Noren had an even stronger reaction. Ultimately, she resigned in protest. Good for her.

---

Footnotes:

1. Including harm to personal finances and mental health, harassment of athletes, and of course, threats to the integrity of the games themselves. ↩︎

2. “Entertainment”, I suppose, tax revenue, and a slim chance to make money. Don’t worry, the algorithms are working to eliminate that. ↩︎

Link: https://www.cjr.org/the-interview/nicole-noren-espn-producer-quit-protest-sports-betting-gambling-addiction-draftkings-im-not-going-to-have-blood-on-my-hands.php

My obituary for programming

Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code:

Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn't do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not possible.

If you're a programmer who thrives on building working systems and doesn't care too deeply about the problems solved along the way, LLMs are the gift that keeps on giving.

If directly solving those problems was a big part of your enjoyment, the loss is very real.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: programming, careers, ai, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, deep-blue

If the agent isn't using my diagnostics library, I could introspect and update AGENTS.md, but there's still a delta, and it'll drift. Instead, I write a pre-commit hook that checks the git diff for direct calls to observability modules that bypass my diagnostics module. Boom: fail the commit, inject a prompt telling the agent to use the diagnostics library. All of a sudden it's ten out of ten.

— Geoffrey Huntley, nobody should type code by hand anymore. here's what's left.

Tags: coding-agents, generative-ai, git, agentic-engineering, ai, geoffrey-huntley, llms