I don't think I'm an especially fussy user of software. I just can't help noticing when it keeps doing stuff that it wants to do rather than what I want it to do. I also can't help noticing how so much software manages to utterly fail to adequately do even the simplest tasks that are directly related to the thing they were built for doing. <h>🤦‍♂️ Apple Maps 🤦‍♂️</h> Today, I had Apple Maps open in Schaffhausen. I searched for a route from Winterthur Bahnhof to a restaurant. I left open for later. When I got to Winterthur, I opened Apple Maps again. I could see the route I'd planned, with a Go button. Before I could click the button, though, the app reloaded itself and asked me where I'd like to go. You know where the f*%k I want to go. I just had it on the screen before you needlessly refreshed. Why did it refresh? I'm sure that there's a logic in there that says: if enough time has passed since the query or perhaps your location has changed enough, then just refresh the page. Why? Because there's no refresh button, perhaps. But, it's not smart enough to notice that I was literally at the starting point of the route that it so gracelessly erased. <h>🤦‍♂️ Mobile Browsers 🤦‍♂️</h> This is not uncommon on phones. Browsers generally like to reload themselves all the time, even when there's absolutely no need to. This not only wastes data, but is often frustrating when you have no connection or only a flaky connection. In this case, you literally had the information you wanted on-screen, but then your gloriously intelligent supercomputer of a phone decided to throw this all away and try loading it again, in which case it just tells you, "whoops, sorry, that information's not available." Well, it <i>was</i> available, you exquisite dumbass, but you erased it needlessly. No-one asked you to erase it, and I could have told you that you wouldn't be able to reload it <i>because I can see that you have no data connection.</i> <h>🤦‍♂️ The SBB App 🤦‍♂️</h> The SBB app is quite famous for doing this. Instead of simply showing the route I'd planned, it's refreshing all of the time, even when it could very easily check that it has no data connection. Just. Stop. Doing. Stuff. Just show me the data that was on the screen. I will tell you when I want you to show something else. The SBB app is also quite bad at linking its information. Today, I searched a route and had bought a ticket for it. I didn't know where the route went after that, though. It shows the purchased ticket---or, rather, the QR-code for it---but then the itinerary that you'd purchased it gone. You can click on what looks like the itinerary, but it's just the day-ticket that shows you the zones you'd purchased. Where's the route? It's in the "journeys" tab, which is ordinarily empty, or is filled with an advertisement for the "get-on-get-off" feature that they're pushing so hard. I only checked there on a last-ditch hunch. It's exactly what I was looking for. So, what's the problem? Well, <i>why wasn't there a link from the ticket I'd purchased to the journey for which I'd purchased it?</i> This is not rocket-science. <h>🎖️ Komoot 🎖️</h> One app that does a relatively good job with this is Komoot. That app kept showing me various levels of detail with its offline-map feature no matter how little data I had. It even worked fine <i>before</i> I'd purchased the offline-maps feature, in which case it was able to show me any of the zoom levels I'd loaded before I went off the grid. Very nice, and exactly what I expected. <h>🎖️ Garmin 🎖️</h> While on the subject of sports apps, I am shocked to be able to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see that Garmin's algorithm handled by extra kilometers generously today. What does that mean? Well, I'd signed up for an expedition a while ago, and had only 1km of 162 left to go on it. I walked about 17.5km today, all together. Garmin awarded me the badge for the expedition, then transferred the remaining 16.5km to the next expedition that I signed up for! Nice! That was a pretty pleasant surprise. <h>🤦‍♂️ Apple Reminders & Calendar 🤦‍♂️</h> I'm looking at Apple's reminders right now. If there's a single one, you hover it and it's supposed to show a little button that you can use to select "Complete" or "Snooze". Sometimes it shows up; sometimes it doesn't. If you click anywhere else in the notification, it opens the calendar or reminders app and you've missed your opportunity to complete or snooze it. Too bad for you. If there are multiple messages, then you can't click the button. It doesn't show up on hover. Then, you have to click somewhere in the notification, in which case it doesn't open the calendar or reminder app, but instead unfolds the notifications to show them all individually. What are you training us for here, Apple? Do you even have a UX engineer working there? <h>🤦‍♂️ UPC Media Box 🤦‍♂️</h> I just turned on my UPC television. I was listening to a radio station on it last night. Did it turn back on to the radio station? Of course not. It defaulted to a arbitrary TV channel. It wasn't even the TV channel I'd been watching before I'd switched to the radio. This is categorically and unequivocally awful. Now, I have to switch back to the radio, which is about seven clicks away. And why does UPC not remember which user was last selected? Every time I turn on the television, I have to select my user again so that the TV guide is a manageable size (favorites are associated with a user). And the movie I was watching in French the other night? The one I have in my list to continue watching later? When I start it back up, the language has been reset to English---because, well, why not? Why would a computer in a box be able to remember a handful of settings along with the movie. At least it managed to remember where it was in the film. Thank God for small favors. In all fairness, the show that the TV is forcing me to watch is Selby vs. Allen in the Snooker World Championships, so I'm not altogether angry about it. <h>🎖️ Apple TV 🎖️</h> In that regard, Apple TV is extremely good at picking up where it left off. If I turn it on in the morning, it picks up exactly where it was in the song that was playing the night before, in seconds. Good boy. <h>🤦‍♂️ Apple Mail 🤦‍♂️</h> On the other hand, my Apple Mail on my laptop shows 3 unread mails in a mailbox that has, very obviously, no unread mails. The badge on the app icon has shown first one, then two, now three, even when there are no unread mails. I see the flagged folder says "4", but, when clicked, it shows only two mails. I've tried a few online guides to remedy this, but nothing seems to help. <h>🤦‍♂️ Apple Photos 🤦‍♂️</h> Then there's Apple Photos, which mostly works pretty well. The Photo Stream feature is a complete crap-shoot, though. Sometimes, it syncs; sometimes, it doesn't. Sometimes the photos show up immediately---and sometimes the photos aren't synced, even after the devices have spent hours in the same network. It's a mystery. There's no refresh button. There's no sync-now button. There are no logs. There's literally nothing you can do to debug the system---other than to really debug the system. As a normal user, you can't reset it or force-refresh it. When you do sync photos directly---over a cable 😱---do you think that Apple Photos notices that you've already synced photos via Photo Stream? Of course it doesn't. It cheerfully offers to copy over all of those duplicate photos for you. If you've synced the photos manually and then Photo Stream does decide to wake up and sync something, do you think it skips the photos that have already been manually synced? Of course it doesn't. It cheerfully fills your album with duplicates. On that subject, it's also terrible that you can't sync photos <i>back to your phone</i> once you've edited them in your Photos desktop app. The only solution is to turn on cloud-syncing for all photos. In my case, that would be over 150GB of photos and videos from over 20 years. The laptop can handle it. Neither the desktop nor my phone have enough space for it. There is no way to sync only a part of the library. I'd have to split it manually into two libraries on the laptop. I'd like to keep a curated album of photos on my phone, but I really can't. I'll have four photos on the phone, then sync them over to the desktop. I pick the nicest one, perhaps crop it a bit, but ... then what? I can't copy it back to the phone to be able to carry around the photo I like. I can't see which photo is nicer on the phone screen. And why would I have to? Because Apple's dozens of thousands of engineers and trillions of dollars can't be bothered to make a simple syncing app actually work for its customers---rather than for them. <h>Conclusion</h> That's just from <i>one day</i>. There are some successes in there, but it's mostly just a sad failure to be useful, a continuous requirement for me to hold the hand of apps that should really be working much better by now. Are there really no product engineers out there who can make products work better? Or is it really the case the capitalism ruins everything? That the desire to maximize profits almost always leads to company's stopping development when their product is just adequate enough to keep their users from going to a competitor? Even if the state of their product is embarrassing on all levels? It's a shame, but that seems to be the best we can hope for: that some lone team will focus on quality, regardless of that obsession's effect on their own bottom line.